How ads get kids to say, I want it!

For Whiton Paine, a psychologist with Kid2Kid in Philadelphia, the criteria for advertising to young kids goes something like this: "Telling [children] of the existence of a product and accurately describing that product is under most circumstances probably ethical," he says. "Convincing them that they have to have the toy if they are going to be successful with their friends, or that they must immediately rush to their parents and start begging for the toy, or misrepresenting the toy - [then] you are no longer ethical."

While psychologists highlight the problems they've observed with the glut of advertising - from increased materialism to obesity - those at ad agencies maintain that they alone are not to blame.

"I don't feel we're manipulating kids," says Ms. Lalley. She says they don't get kids to do anything they already wouldn't want to do. "This society is a consumer society," she says. "Advertising and marketing and making brand decisions are part of life."

"To say that marketers are doing this is to say that society and parents are not taking responsibility for their own consumerism," adds Debbie Solomon of J. Walter Thompson, another Chicago ad agency.

Long before today's boom in walk-in closets, advertisers have been figuring out how to use emotions to influence buyers. Though adults have grown wise to the ways of marketers through the decades, there was an attempt to restrict television ads aimed at children under 13 in the late 1970s, after studies showed they couldn't tell the difference between TV programs and commercials.

Companies hire psychologists to do a range of things, from leading focus groups to playing with a toy with children. "A psychologist could say that kids who are three and four don't understand double-entendres. With two-year-olds, animal figures with curvy lines are better because they associate curvy lines with the good guy and straight lines with the bad guy," says Mr. Kanner.

This summer, the American Psychological Association named a task force to look into the ethics of members helping firms that target children, after some members filed a formal complaint. In a letter, they said such consulting violates their mission to "work to mitigate the causes of human suffering."

"How is it ethical to share your psychological knowledge with people who will use it to get children to nag their parents - to create ads so that children will believe that owning something will make them happy?" asks Susan Linn, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Paine, who says he has advised clients in the past against taking approaches that employ sex and violence, disagrees. "Psychologists exist not simply to help people, but they also exist to help organizations use psychological knowledge in ethical and appropriate ways."

He says psychologists never have the last word when it comes to what is ultimately marketed to kids, and companies already know how to get kids' attention. "There is absolutely no way you're going to stop people from reaching out to kids, so we're right back to the issue of 'OK, if it's going to occur, how can it be done more ethically and do less damage?' "

Even ad writers like Crosby say they can't control the effects on their own children. "I'm in the industry and I'm ashamed of what the industry is doing."

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society

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