Message from WHO meeting on marketing to children

[Gary Ruskin]

Commercial Alert			April 17, 2002

Dear friends,
Today I gave a presentation to the World Health Organization’s (WHO)
conference on “Marketing: Health and Youth” in Italy. There are
representatives here from the advertising industry, academia and
non-governmental organizations from around the world.  

The goal of the conference is to help WHO develop policies on
marketing of health to children, and protecting children from
advertising of unhealthy products.  It’s unclear right now what the
WHO will do.

Below is the presentation I gave to the conference today.

Gary


Presentation of 
Gary Ruskin, Executive Director of Commercial Alert
to the World Health Organization 
Conference on Health Marketing and Youth
Treviso, Italy, April, 17, 2002

My name is Gary Ruskin.  I am the executive director of Commercial
Alert, which is a non-profit organization based in the United States.
Our mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper
sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children or subverting the
higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and
democracy.

The World Health Organization has invited us to discuss an old
subject: commercial influences on children and teenagers.  

Corporations have captured children’s attention and imagination for
many decades.  Take Ralph Nader, for example. He and I founded
Commercial Alert together.  Back in 1939, when Ralph was four years
old, his parents took him to the world=s fair in New York City. 
There he saw the General Motors exhibit on the so-called “cars of the
future.”  Little Ralph was amazed.  After viewing the exhibit, he was
so excited that he yelled out to his parents “look, GM, GM, GM.” So
GM was able to captivate even little Ralph Nader at age four -- over
sixty years ago.  

I’m going to do two things in this talk today.  First, I will briefly
describe what has changed about marketing to youth since little Ralph
went to the General Motors exhibit more than sixty years ago.  Then
I’ll make an argument for why governments and multinational
institutions like the World Health Organization must protect children
from the harms of commercial marketing.

I’ll go through this in greater detail later, but the core of the
argument is that corporate marketing harms or kills countless
millions of youth across the planet.  It has grown too potent, too
sophisticated, too intrusive, too omnipresent, too dangerous, and too
far out of the control of parents & relatives.  It is the proper role
of government to restore to parents, relatives & those who love
children control over the commercial influences that shape their
lives.

In what follows, I’m mostly going to discuss commercial influences on
children in the United States.  That’s for two reasons.  First, I’m
an American, and it’s what I know best.  But more importantly,
because there is more marketing to children in the U.S. than in many
other places, and because of the spreading of marketing to children
throughout the globe, American children are a vision of the future, a
vision of what may happen to children in other countries, in years to
come.
 
 
Across the planet, marketing to youth is growing more and more
intensive, because it can be hugely profitable.   Advertisers are
increasingly aggressive in their efforts to place ads everywhere that
children & adolescents are.  They engulf children with ads. Here’s
how one market researcher explained what they do: "Imagine a child
sitting in the middle of a large circle of train tracks.  Tracks,
like the tentacles of an octopus, radiate to the child from the
outside circle of tracks. The child can be reached from every angle.
This is how the [corporate] marketing world is connected to the
child's world."

Advertisers spend countless billions of dollars each year assaulting
children with their messages from every angle they can use.  They
deploy ads on television, through product placement on tv and in
movies and on videos and in video games, on the Internet, via email,
via direct mail, on billboards, on clothing, via buzz marketing, on
the radio, through point-of-purchase ads, in magazines, in movie
theaters, via so-called “place-based” ads, via licensing of popular
characters in children’s television and movies, on the packages of
many products, among many other ways.

Especially notable in recent years is the growing use of school for
marketing purposes.  In the United States, we have compulsory
education laws that force children to attend school.  Advertisers
such as Primedia’s Channel One, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have conscripted
these laws and the schools to market junk food, fast food, and
high-calorie soda pop to students.  Incredibly, Primedia’s Channel
One has harnessed the compulsory school laws to force eight million
children to watch two minutes of ads each school day, including ads
for junk food, soda pop and violent movies.

Advertisers use many techniques to sell to youth.  Mostly these
involve manipulating their needs during the stages of their growth
into adulthood.  Some of the more common needs that advertisers take
advantage of to sell products include youth needs for peer
acceptance, love, safety, desire to feel powerful or independent,
aspirations to be and to act older than they actually are, and the
need to have an identity.  Much of the child-targeted advertising is
painstakingly researched and prepared, at times by some of the most
talented and creative minds on the planet.  Ad agencies retain people
with doctorates in marketing, psychology and even child psychology
for the purposes of marketing to youth.

Advertisers are so successful at marketing to youth that they
sometimes discuss it in terms of the battle over what they chillingly
call “mind share.”  Some advertisers even openly discuss Aowning@
children’s minds.  For example, Mike Searles, then-president of
Kids-R-Us, a major children's clothing store, explained "[I]f you own
this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come.
Companies are saying, ‘Hey, I want to own the kid younger and
younger.'"

In sum, corporations and their advertising agencies have succeeded in
setting up their own authority structures to deliver commercial
messages almost everywhere that children go.  Among other things,
this is a massive social engineering project that shifts authority
over youth away from parents, relatives and communities and transfers
it to large corporations and their advertising agencies.  As such, it
undermines some traditional views of parenting and the proper role of
parents and relatives as the chief guardians and authorities over
their children.
 
We wouldn’t be here discussing marketing to children today if most
commercial messages were healthy. They aren=t.  Corporations
aggressively market to children a great variety of products,
including tobacco, alcohol, junk food, fast food, pornography,
gambling and violent entertainment.  So doing, they have created,
through great effort and expense, a toxic commercial culture that is
purposefully damaging to children.  It is perhaps the first time in
human history that adults have turned on their children and created a
culture which harms not nurtures them.

Large multinational corporations and their advertising agencies
produce and promote this culture. This corporate-made culture has
taken root most strongly in the United States and parts of Europe,
and is quickly spreading elsewhere.  It has shoved aside local
cultures, local values, and old ways of teaching health to youth.

Not surprisingly, in the United States we see alarming and often
rising levels of what should be called “diseases of affluence” or
“corporate-related illness” among youth, such as  alcohol-related
morbidity and mortality, tobacco-related morbidity and mortality,
childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes, violence and violent crime, and
gambling addiction.

Here’s a sketch of the problem in the United States.  Each day, about
3,000 American children will start to smoke, and about a third of
them will have their lives cut short due to tobacco-related illness. 
Thirteen percent of children aged 6 to 11 years and 14% of
adolescents aged 12 to 19 years were overweight in 1999. This
prevalence has nearly tripled for adolescents in the past 2 decades,
according to the U.S. Surgeon General. Type 2 diabetes -- which used
to be an adult disease -- is increasingly diagnosed in children as
young as 10. Alcohol is a contributing factor in the four leading
causes of death among persons ages 10 to 24: (1) motor-vehicle
crashes, (2) unintentional injuries, (3) homicide, and (4) suicide. 
And a recent study by Jeffrey Johnson of Columbia University found
that adolescents who watched one or more hours of TV per day were
four times more prone to subsequent violent acts, including violent
crime, than those who watched less than one hour of TV per day.

In the United States, some youth are more heavily targeted with
advertising than others.  For example, there is more marketing to
minority youth.  The pages of Advertising Age are stuffed with
articles about how advertisers specially target African-American and
Latino youth, many of whom are reside in low income communities. 
And, again not surprisingly, in general the health status of children
in impoverished minority communities is much worse than in affluent
white communities.

Now I’ve talked a little about the health effects of marketing to
children.  Perhaps equally serious is the effects of advertising on
children’s values, especially the promotion of materialism.  In the
United States, since 1966 researchers at University of California at
Los Angeles have been polling incoming first-year university students
in the United States on a broad range of issues. They have found a
large drop in the percent who valued developing a "meaningful
philosophy of life" as a goal, while there have been increases in the
percentage of those students who say that "to be very well off
financially" is an essential goal.

 
Of course, these are complex phenomena that cannot be ascribed to any
single cause, whether it is the commercial culture, or anything else. 

But the corporate-related sickness among many of America=s children
presents us with a vision of the future of children around the world
as it could be -- unless we loosen the grip that advertisers have on
the minds of our youth, and stop the dismantling of local cultures,
values and traditions.

Unless we stop it, multinational corporations and the advertising
industry will keep turning more and more of the world’s youth into a
bunch of smoking, drinking, gambling, materialistic, obese, diabetic,
violence-loving addicts. 

Globalization will likely bring about these “diseases of affluence”
or “corporate-related illness” among more and more children and
adolescents throughout the planet.  In part, that is because
international trade agreements such as the NAFTA and GATT subordinate
worthy concerns such as child health to the demands of trade. 

As if that’s not bad enough, four other trends suggest that these
child health problems will worsen: 1) the growth of corporate power
in general and of corporate control over entire countries and their
governments as well as multinational institutions such as the World
Trade Organization.  2) The unceasing development and deployment of
increasingly psychologically sophisticated -- and therefore more
potent -- commercial messages directed at children.  3) The ability
of corporations to penetrate into nearly every nook and cranny of
children’s lives, and,  4) The collapse of the notion that children
are somehow sacred, should not be for sale, nor subject to
commercialization and commodification.  

Enough of the bad news.  Now I want to sketch out some of the
solutions to the harms caused by marketing to children.

With all this marketing artillery targeting children from so many
directions, parents simply cannot keep all of these influences away
from their kids, even if they tried to do so full-time. They just
can’t shut it out.  

You can think of advertising to youth as a kind of pollution.  Of
course, parents should do what they can to shield their children and
teenagers from this commercial pollution.  So that means, of course,
that children should watch as little television as possible.  But
turning off the television, and other parental interventions cannot
possibly solve the problem of marketing to children, if only because
parents can only cut off some of the flow of some of the toxic
commercial influences on their children.

 
So that's where the legitimate role of government and multinational
institutions like the World Health Organization come in: to stop the
commercial pollution, and to restore to parents, relatives and
communities some control over the commercial influences over their
children’s lives. 

Some in this audience advocate for the politically and commercially
convenient solution of having governments pay advertising agencies to
develop counter-advertising.  The counter-ads would be placed on
television to market the notion of health to our young people.  I
think we should be wary about this approach for two reasons.  First,
most advertising is a form of propaganda.  That is to say, it is a
type of magic.  Ultimately, if we are concerned that advertising
magic holds too great a sway over youth, then we should teach
children how to reason and analyze and see through the tricks in
advertising, rather than merely to counter-propagandize about health.
Developing the capacity to reason is the best way to disarm the power
of unhealthy commercial influences over youth.  Investing in
education is much more effective and productive over the long-term
than spending millions for a politically convenient and commercially
profitable effort at propagandizing at them even more.

There is a second reason, too, to be wary of counter-advertising: it
does not begin to eliminate the cause of the problem.  The problem is
corporations and their conduct.  We must deal with the problem of
marketing to youth directly at its source.  Anything less is
cowardice.  It is merely treating symptoms rather than the cause.  It
would be shameful to be so cowardly when the stakes are so high.

We have to quit blaming parents for failing to keep the toxic
commercial culture out of their kids lives.  This is blaming the
victim.  Every parent on the planet could doubtless could do better
at shielding their own kids, but at base it is not their fault. 
Instead, we must build cultures that nourish children, not harm them.
That will necessarily involve at least four things: (1) placing
limits on corporate marketing to youth, (2) empowering parents and
relatives with respect to corporations, (3) holding corporations
accountable for the damage they do to youth, both in legislatures and
courts of law, and (4) carving out the marketing and sale of harmful
products to children from international trade agreements, and
establishing the supremacy of child health concerns over mercantile
imperatives in these trade agreements.

This won’t be easy.  We ask our friends at the World Health
Organization to be mindful that as we strive to eradicate the
diseases of poverty, not to shy away from these difficult political
and public health battles necessary to safeguard children from the
rise of the diseases of affluence, or corporate-related disease,
among children and adolescents.

We also must answer the question: who should have the power to decide
what is healthy for youth.  Should self-interested corporations
decide, or should it be those around youth that love them: parents,
family, neighbors and communities.  I think most would agree that
parents and relatives should decide, not distant, profit-hungry
corporations.

 
There has been some good news recently at the international level on
this front.  The World Health Organization has shown excellent
leadership in developing the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
This is a very important, ground-breaking effort to shield children
from the effects of commercial marketing.

But it must only be the beginning. 

Because the problem of marketing to children is so large, there is an
important role for everyone in this room in reducing the damage of
commercial influences on youth.  Many different kinds of
organizations, from small non-governmental organizations to the World
Health Organization, have something to contribute to this.

Because the problem is so large, we need to work together to protect
children from harmful commercial influences, and hold corporations
accountable for the damage they do to children and teenagers.
Personally, I look forward to working with all of you to accomplish
this.

At Commercial Alert, we have plenty of hope about the prospects for
working together to protect children from the harms of commercial
advertising.  There’s good reason for this: in the United States, we
have built very broad coalitions B from conservatives to centrists to
progressives -- in support of protecting children from commercial
exploitation.  We have been very successful so far, and others in
this room have had successes too.  We hope to cross these and many
other boundaries, of race, class, region and nationality, to work
with you to make sure that our youth are not for sale, nor merely
pawns in some grandiose corporate marketing plan.

Again, I am hopeful, because I believe that in spite of the
tremendous power of corporations, and the advertising industry, and
the toxic commercial culture they have built, that in the long run,
together we will find the political will to defend the children.  And
we must.

Thank you.

---presentation ends here----

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***************************
Gary Ruskin | gary@commercialalert.org 
Commercial Alert | http://www.commercialalert.org/
Congressional Accountability Project | http://www.congressproject.org/
phone: 503.235.8012 | fax: 503.235.5073

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