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Russian TV – Multi-billion dollar marketing focus on kids
(RT) – Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children’s advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world.
While this documentary may be new, the concept itself is hardly secret.
Modern capitalism is in itself predicated largely upon non-producing consumers of which children (ie those under 18) are one, a large prison population being another.
Quite simply put, there are two older (societal) models of children. One is the agricultural model (still in place in say Amish communities) wherein children are in the “workplace” long before age 18 and are therefore “producing”. Even in 2009 this is why we have exemptions from child labor laws when it comes to farm work.
The second model is the one we find (today) so abhorrent, which is that of children working in coal mines and the like – call it the Dickens model if you like. As horrible as it was, children were however in the workplace as equally as adults were.
However when you take most children out of either the mines, the factories or the farm fields, what do you have? You have a consuming but not producing segment of society. If anyone has an adult relative or friend in prison, you’ll know where this leads – to a very lucrative (from a profit standpoint) market.
It seems counter-intuitive that those without the means of earning an income (prisoners, children, etc) are such a lucrative market but when you begin to think about it, it starts making more sense.
Please don’t misconstrue this as my somehow SUPPORTING either the exploitation (for profit) of these segments of society OR some kind of desire on my part to return children to factory work or some such.
Pax
Hi there! I’m so behind on e-mail. 🙁
Thanks so much for sharing. We watched this last night. The level of “research” employed to make a buck off our children is immoral and downright creepy.
I have long thought that the amount of advertising in our schools, for example, was tantamount to pimping our children. Really. We don’t feel it necessary to pay for our children’s education, so we invite corporations to do so, and have the nerve to wonder why so many are mindless consumers.