“Consuming Kids:The Commercialization of Children” is a thought provoking documentary about children’s relationship and interactions with advertising, brands, and the media as a whole. It is a subject that I have never really learned about and found extremely fascinating, yet alarming, because the day and age we live in today is one where kids are constantly consuming media. The main points are that children are being directly marketed to, kids marketers have created cradle to grave branding growing up faster, and kids are growing up faster.
For a really long time marketers considered their target audience for children’s items to be adults. Although children would be the end consumer, they were not the ones reading the paper, or listening to the radio to notice these advertisements; the parents were the ones that decided what they bought for their children, because, obviously, children can’t go to the store themselves and buy their own things. However, around the 1990s there was a shift, a shift that shaped the future of marketing and, therefore, how children consume the media. Marketers started advertising directly to children. For example, Trix cereal commercials. Those commercials are clearly being targeted to children, in every single one the rabbit even says “Trix are for kids”. Trix had always been for kids but what the difference was was that Trix’s target audience was now children not adults. Meaning, Trix commercials aired on channels that had children’s movies and shows-channels that, perhaps parents would glance at every now and then, but primarily children watched. Trix is just an example, but every single company that is kid orientated does this. Although parents are still the ones who ultimately make the decision on what to buy their children, now they have their children asking for specific things. Whether or not the parents buy what their children want, this is something new that has resulted from marketing to children, and according to the documentary kids influence is around seven hundred billion dollars-so there definitely are parents who listen to what their children want them to buy.
Marketing directly to children has created cradle to grave branding. Every product for children has some form of branding these days. Sippy Cups have Disney characters on them, Pull Ups have Winnie the Pooh. Toothpastes, pencils, lunch boxes, folders, socks, shoes, band-aids, plates-they are all branded. In fact it is hard to find things that have no brand at all these days. What this does is it creates extremely brand loyal children, who are still loyal to a specific brand throughout their adult life. If a child is bought a ton of Spider-Man things as an infant, Spider-Man sippy cup, underwear, shoes, and folders, it is likely that they grew up with their favorite superhero being Spider-Man. An example from the documentary featured a little girl who loved Spongebob. When asked what was the best mac and cheese her answer was the Spongebob shaped kraft macaroni and cheese. What is significant about that is that the little girl had never even tried it before, she simply was loyal enough to the brand of Spongebob that she assumed, because the macaroni was shaped like Spongebob, that not only would she love it but it would be the best.
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary and shared things that I found fascinating with my friends. I think that it is important and something that needs to be corrected. Children should not be consuming as much media as they do, and yet, I feel like it will only get worse as media continue to evolve. CLICK HERE to watch