BND 2000

THE ACTION
Local Site: TBA

One giant TYNKYN walking around handing out nifty pamphlets

Three well dressed roving surveyors asking questions and then handing
out BND envelopes (pamphlet, gift-free voucher, articles)
 

THE ARTICLES

           WHAT DO KIDS REALLY WANT?

           Attacking the "Best" in Kiddie Ads
           Jennifer Bleyer, Alternet.org
           September 14, 2000
           -------------------------------------------------------------------
           September 14 -- A spread in Advertising Age, the industry's primary trade magazine, shows a
           grainy picture of an inquisitive preteen girl. "Who Am I?" the copy asks, suggesting the girl's
           existential coming-of-age dilemma. But the next page tells us exactly who she is: "I am the Internet
           generation. I am spending billions each year. I am building brands right now." Then the kicker:
           "And I am here for you."

           Indeed, the prospect of millions of kids handing over a chunk of the $400 billion they represent in
           annual sales has corporations salivating to the tune of $12 billion a year in advertising and
           marketing. Over three hundred industry professionals showed up in New York this week to
           discuss the finer points of roping in this highly lucrative market at the "Advertising and Promoting to
           Kids" conference, an annual event sponsored by Toronto-based KidScreen.

           The two-day conference had participants from heavy-hitter advertising firms like Ogilvy & Mather
           and Leo Burnett listening with perked ears to seminars like "Ethnic Marketing: It's Not So Niche!",
           "Marketing in the Classroom" and the astonishingly blunt "Guerrilla Marketing: How to Get Street
           Cred."

           The conference culminated on Thursday with the Golden Marble awards, which recognized the
           best in advertising to kids -- "best" meaning ads that best "educate, inform and entertain" according
           to official conference jargon, but in reality seemed to be those that best yield the coveted "pester
           power" which keeps kids nagging and parents buying. Big winners at the Golden Marble Awards
           included Leo Burnett, which won two golds and four certificates of merit for spots on Kellogg's,
           McDonald's and Nintendo, and other firms for their campaigns for Gatorade and Kids Foot
           Locker.

           But outside the ceremony, vocal protesters were demonstrating against the non-stop propoganda
           machine that was appluading itself inside. A coalition of health care professionals, educators, media
           activists, children's advocates and parents who hailed from as far away as California, Alabama,
           Chicago and Boston had come together as the newly formed Save Children from Advertising and
           Marketing (SCAM) Project. SCAM believes that the average American child's media diet of forty
           hours a week, including 30,000 television ads a year, spells dangerous brainwashing for the kids --
           and red-handed guilt for the advertisers.

           "It was for many years a tacit understanding that children ought not to be bombarded with
           commercial messages," said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media ecology at New York
           University and outspoken media critic. "There were certainly a number of television shows geared
           toward children but they weren't about selling products. In today's climate of rampant deregulation
           and hypercommercialization, the fact is that these companies and advertisers are engaged in a huge
           propaganda exercise whose sole purpose is to raise corporate margins. Anyone who's really
           concerned about what they call family values really ought to be directing attention to this trend."

           The demonstrators expressed particular alarm over the early age at which advertisers now target
           kids, mentioning industry reports that proclaim children as young as 18 months psychologically
           available for marketing.

           "For little kids, the world is what they see, and they can't distinguish between an ad, a TV show
           and reality" said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor of education at Lesley College and mother of
           screen actor Matt Damon. Carlsson-Paige cited research showning that until the age of seven,
           children cannot differentiate between commercials and shows. "All they see is something colorful to
           watch, so they're desensitized to ads before they even learn to put them into context. That's what
           we need to get people dialoguing about."

           Another issue which got its due amount of flack from the SCAMers was the explosive trend of
           advertising in schools. This most recent foray into childrens' consciousness has plastered virtually
           every waking moment of their lives with ads, as marketers push products on the sides of school
           busses and in locker corridors, arrange profitable contracts between schools and soft drinks
           companies, and put free Channel One televisions in classrooms in exchange for compulsory
           commercial broadcasting. Alvin F. Poussaint, an organizer of the demonstration and professor of
           psychiatry at Harvard Medical School called these tactics "nothing less than an invasion of the
           hearts and minds of our children, convincing them that who they are is what they buy."

           Coming only a few days after the Federal Trade Commission issued its report concluding that the
           entertainment industry intentionally markets violence to children, demonstrators said that the report
           only revealed the tip of an iceberg. Although the contribution of violent media to violent behavior
           has been confirmed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, it is not alone as a social ill with
           commercial origins. Childhood obesity has been linked to excessive television viewing, for instance,
           and eating disorders in girls have been correlated with exposure to fashion magazines and
           unrealistic beauty standards in the media.

           The demonstrators set forth recommendations for protecting children from the ravenous chops of
           marketers, including a White House conference on the effects of corporate marketing on children,
           a system of uniform age-based ratings across all movies, television shows, video and computer
           games, and careful federal regulation of all marketing to children. Crispin Miller took it even further,
           suggesting that we need a 'hands-off' policy like Sweden, which bars all advertising to children.

           "They recognize that children are too young, too impressionable and have far better things with
           which to occupy their minds than advertising," he said. "It's a shameful enterprise, and certainly
           nothing to give awards over."

           For further information, visit:
           Kids and Commercialism - Center for a New American Dream
           http://www.newdream.org/campaign/kids/index.html
 
 

WHAT'S WITH ALL THOSE BRANDS?

INTERVIEW: ACTIVIST NAOMI KLEIN ON HER BOOK "NO LOGO"

"What Nike has been so successful at is turning its brand into a celebrity, into a pop culture icon. It has very little to do with the product itself. It exists almost in the same stratosphere as the athletes that sponsor its product..."
-- Naomi Klein

TORONTO - Branding is taking up more and more of our public space. Logos are on billboards, televisions and computers. Even our bodies have become the backdrop for corporate advertising. Naomi Klein sees a backlash brewing to all this branding and she's written about it in her new book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.

The Interview:

Brent Bambury: This is the week that the Youth News Network starts beaming its program into Canadian classrooms. It's a television program that will be aimed at kids, but one that will have advertisements in it. What's wrong with that?

Naomi Klein: Well, a big part of what's wrong is that the schools that sign the deals don't have any choice but to air the programs. Even if the individual teachers decide they don't feel the program has an educational value, they have to air it.

Brent: You see this as one of the last spaces in our society, in our culture, that's not branded, that doesn't have a billboard waiting to be covered up by the next logo.

Naomi: I think as soon as the schools are branded, and in many ways it's already happening... So many schools already have exclusive deals with Pepsi and fast-food joints in the cafeteria and textbooks with brand product
placement in them. In a sense it contributes to this idea there's no space left.

That's a powerful idea. I think, particularly, for young people. It contributes to this feeling of global claustrophobia, to a feeling that there's no escape. I see that as leading to a growing militancy. We saw glimpses of that in Seattle where there was direct hand-to-hand combat with these corporate brands and bricks flying through windows. I think it has to do with this feeling of there being no choice, no space left. Schools are in a sense the last bastion. Once that's gone, there'll be no space left.
 
Brent: The corporations know what they're getting. They know they're getting advertising time with a captive audience. They know what they're doing when they brand our culture, whereas we're not aware of the fact that these corporations have a lot of influence in our life.

You talk about Nike in this book. Nike is a shoe company that is determined to unseat pro sports, the Olympic and even star athletes, to become the very definition of sports itself. Did they succeed in doing that? Is Nike bigger than the Olympics? Is Nike bigger than sports and amateur sports?

Naomi: Well, in many ways it is. What Nike has been so successful at is turning its brand into a celebrity, into a pop culture icon. It has very little to do with the product itself. It exists almost in the same stratosphere as the athletes that sponsor its product, as the teams, and it has to do with this idea of branding which someone like the CEO of Nike decided in the mid-80s, he said, "we don't want to be a shoe company anymore. We want to be a sports company. We want to get in the game."

That sounds like marketing babble. In fact, it means, in a sense, rather than sort of hitching a ride on sports and our traditional understanding of marketing and sponsorship, he's actually in competition with sports. They're in the same game now.

Brent: But there also is a synergy here between many, many people that make products. You know, Nike leads to Michael Jordan, which leads to the movie Slam Dunk, which leads to Warner Brothers. And any number of tie-in products from fast-food organizations and that kind of thing. But really what you're looking at when you talked about claustrophobia earlier, you're looking at a culture that is supplanting whatever culture we used to have and is also making it very difficult to escape.

Naomi: A lot of us are cynical about professional sports. When it's applied to music it becomes more troubling, and when it's applied to schools, I think it's most distressing. I believe that same process we see with Nike unseating pro sports we're seeing in the schools. It's not just about getting your ad in schools. It's actually more and more about sort of turning brands into the subject of education.

Nike has even developed, a course curriculum called Air Two -- I forget. They build a shoe in class, and they learn about recycling and all of this.

Brent: But it's actually commercial.

Naomi: Exactly.

Brent: I want to talk about the people that are doing something. You mention the WTO protest. That shows there are people saying, "Wait a minute, now, in a global world we want a say. We know we're being shut out." Adbusters, culture-jammers, who you profile in the book, can they stand up to a huge global or multinational corporation and make them back down?

Naomi: Well, I think that change is already happening. It's happening in less direct ways. Nike is still, obviously, in business, still a popular company. But its stock prices have suffered, its sales have suffered. More importantly it's actively changed some of its policies to respond to the criticism of its labour practices.

Brent: How do you bring the global economy down to the level of the neighbourhood you live in? How does this affect the way you deal with Starbucks? Do you say we don't shop at Starbucks because--

Naomi: Particularly when I talk to young people, there is this mounting frustration. If you tell students something
negative about Nike, then they're, like, "okay, well, I'll go buy Adidas." The truth is it's impossible to really change the world by our consumption habits. I actually think it's really an ineffective way to change the world.

Brent: You have to act globally. You don't act locally, then?

Naomi: You can do both. The more important thing -- it's become a cliche. We've all heard the statistics that
corporations are becoming as powerful as governments. What's happening now that is so crucial is we're saying,
okay, if you are as powerful as governments, then we'll treat you the way we treat our governments. We're going to demand accountability, we're going to demand transparency. It's not so much about whether we're buying your products, but whether your policies are going to be subject to the will of the citizens.

Brent: Now, it would be easy to say -- I can imagine a corporation saying, we don't care. But you have somebody from the John Hancock company in your book saying it can take 100 years to build up a good brand and 30 days to knock it down. That's powerful.

Naomi: Very powerful. In many ways branding is the Achilles' heel of the corporate world. The more these companies shift to being all about brand meaning and brand image, the more vulnerable they are to attacks on
the image.

Brent: Looking forward to this year's advertising at the Super Bowl?

Naomi: Absolutely.

Brent: Interesting book. Thank you for talking to us.

Naomi: Thanks very much, Brent.
 

THE SURVEY

Hi. I'm doing a study on shopping habits. Would you answers 3 short questions for me?

1. DO YOU PLAN ON BUYING SOMETHING TODAY?

IF YES:

2. WHICH STORES DO YOU PLAN TO VISIT?

3. WHAT DO YOU THINK INFLUENCES YOUR SHOPPING HABITS MOST?
(ELABORATION: FLASHY ADS? POPULAR BRANDS?  OR WHAT SOMETHING COSTS?)
 

IF NO:

2. ANY REASON WHY NOT?

3. WHEN YOU DO BUY SOMETHING, WHAT DO YOU THINK INFLUENCES YOUR SHOPPING HABITS MOST?
(ELABORATION: FLASHY ADS? POPULAR BRANDS?  OR WHAT SOMETHING COSTS?)

Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. (SLIP THEM THE ENVELOPE.)

CREDENTIALS: SOCIOLOGY STUDENT, FIU.
 

VISUALS: box and charmer are iffy at best.