Sesame Street

The Sesame Street characters are on a mission to get children to eat healthy by allowing fruit and vegetable producers to use its characters on their packaging and marketing materials. The campaign intends to tackle childhood obesity by using the same marketing tactics employed by the junk food industry. While increasing children's understandings of good eating habits are important, the question being raised is whether it is ever okay to target children in a marketing campaign. 

I personally have mixed feelings with regards to marketing anything to children. It has been known that children a unable to tell the difference and distinguish between marketing and entertainment. Therefore, marketing to children crosses an ethical line. However, it can be argued that in the 21st century where children live in a marketing environment, using Sesame Street to market healthy food is better than exposing them to bad marketing. 

While this campaign has good intentions, it also reinforces the idea that children are only suppose to eat foods that come with cartoons or toys. This may help young children have a balanced diet, but it does not assure parents and the society that children will continue eating healthy food when they grow up and no longer like these cartoon characters. Therefore, I feel that marketing good products to children is a good step forward from marketing bad products. But in order to for the children retain the values that are being taught, they need to be educated, and marketing is not education.  

Taking Selfie To A Whole Other Level

If you have yet seen it or even heard about it, Selfie is the new ABC tv show that aired this Fall. The show is about a woman, who is incredibly famous in all of her social networks and understands exactly how the virtual world works; she only has one issue: she has no idea how to communicate in the real world with real actual people. The entire purpose of this show is to advertise the usage of ALL social media networks, while showing how these networks can potentially ruin your life.

Because this upcoming week we will discussing about social media networks I found that this show brought a very interesting perspective to social networks---are we already forgetting how to communicate with actual humans? Is this the reality for the upcoming generation that were born into this high-tech era? Should we begin to start thinking of ways to reintruduce human interaction? 

What do you think? 

All Grown Up?

       McDonald's is one of the main product companies that aim kids as its main audience for consumption. It does not put so many advertisements for all of its products, but specifically the Happy Meal. This advertisement emphasizes Happy Meals are only for children. The advertisement demonstrates certain instances, such as a boy drawing a mustache with a marker, wanting to drink his dad's coffee, and attempting to use his dad's tools, in order to look grown up like his parents. Although he seems dissatisfied at the fact that they keep on stopping him from doing all that, when he goes to McDonald's with his mother, he wants a Happy Meal. It is attracting the audience of children that they should all go to McDonald's and ask for a Happy Meal since it provides a privilege for kids like them. With this type of advertisement for kids, they will feel attracted towards it and constantly ask their parents for a Happy Meal and wanting to go to McDonald's, not knowing the unhealthiness of the food at the place.

Character Soup

Over parents weekend I was in Target with my mother browsing around the food section when we saw Campbell's soup cans with the Disney princesses on them. I made the comment to my mom that my sister and I would have killed for these when were little. She agreed. I thought nothing of it until we watched that video about the amount of advertising little kids are exposed to. I thought about as a little girl I couldn't care less about what type of soup my mom bought for us, unless it had Cinderella on it. And if the can had Cinderella on it I absolutely needed it.

Childhood marketing having wiggled its way into the food industry shows that marketers will go to any extent to sell their product, because no child is in charge of what they eat, they eat whatever their parents buy for them. But still marketing for children is in the food industry, only because marketers know they can get the kids to get their parents to buy the products. It is not the end of the world that soup cans have characters wrapped around them, but it does show how much marketing their is to kids, and how it is in every aspect of their lives.

Bigger or smaller? Faster or slower? More or less? Is it really not complicated?

As we are in the topic of environmental issues and marketing to children, I want to share with you a series of AT&T advertisements last year: “It’s not complicated.” This series depicted a casual conversation among Beck Bennett, an actor and comedian, and four random kids. Children answered simple questions about which is better: Bigger or smaller? Faster or slower? More or less? In order to tout the size and speed of the network. Please watch AT&T’s following video in this topic: “It’s not complicated – Tree House”.

Firstly, how AT&T got kids to make advertisements captured my attention. Its marketers are cunning to present their stories through a delightful small chat with kids. Under the impression of kids’ innocence, people are likely to watch without guards. Underlying messages, therefore, will be delivered more easily: If kids can think of that, why can’t we? Advertisers score by using children’s innocence as a tool to charm and persuade consumers.

Secondly, not only the strategies AT&T uses but also the kids’ answers in this video concern me. They prefer a bigger tree house to a smaller one because of a disco or a flat-screen TV. They are all about materials and consumption. Kids don’t want more space to play anymore. They want a huge space to contain stuffs! They don’t want to invent games any longer. They want to do “arranged” things! I wonder what factors lead contemporary children to think about materials so early in life… Is one of the reasons their parents’ tendency to accumulate stuffs and to rate living standards based on stuffs they own?

This series of advertisements strike me strongly how earlier and earlier children are exposed and negatively affected by advertising nowadays.

The Target Audience of the Xbox

The Xbox always seems to be on the list of top gifts during the holidays, maybe because they keep updating it and coming out with more games, or maybe because it has such a wide target audience. In the Target Ad below you see two fairly young children playing with Xbox controllers along side an ad for the latest Xbox. These children are so incredibly young! When I grew up if I wanted to play I went outside and grabbed a ball, but now technology companies like Microsoft are starting to tell people that it's okay for young children to own an Xbox and that they would have so much fun if they did. 

While there are a few games released that are geared towards children and often involve puzzle games or educational games, most of the games available and the ones that are most popular are incredibly violent war, cosplay, or action games. These games can appeal to an audience in the age of anywhere between 13 to 50s, generally to men that do not have family obligations.  

But Microsoft isn't just selling their Xbox to young children or men; they also specifically create ads that portray a family environment and everyone of all ages and gender in that family enjoying their Xbox. Should the Xbox be marketed to kids of any age or should they keep the limit to around the age range that is considered acceptable to play most of their more popular, and violent games (around 13 years old)?

Reflecting your Hipster Persona at Night

BetaBrand is a company that launched this year out of the San Francisco area. They have created 'hipster' clothing and accessories that allow customers to look good but still remain safe while they're biking to and from work through the sewn in reflective pieces in the apparel.  The key selling point is that the reflectors are discretely sewn into the fabric and material of the items so nobody can tell until they drive up near you and notice their lights lighting up your plaid button-up or rocker t-shirt.

I remember hearing about them a while back when the company only had two versions of the plaid button-up that they were selling through a website and app called Fancy. The price then? About $140 pre-tax. The price now? Still insane; $118. The company has branched out from their plaid button-ups to include hoodies, t-shirts, shoes, denim, suits, socks, and even has a female market where they sell dresses and bags.

Granted the idea of not having to wear a reflective vest, that are often associated with construction workers or the retired men and women who spend their free time volunteering as school cross guards, is a great change in the fashion functionality world, but is it really worth the cost? Going onto the website the first thing you'll see is a pop-up window with the clever saying, "Better than fresh camel milk," to try and lure you into joining their mailing list and following their social media networks. You'll see funny cartoon art, displayed items with attractive and cool looking people, and, of course, the company name, "BetaBrand" on every page, because it is just so much better than any competitors out there. Does BetaBrand do a good job at making you want to buy? It surely has that affect on me, and I don't even own a bike.