* "Dave Hill on the massive marketing and advertising machine aimed at our children." This article is not without interest; after all the $100 global annual per capita marketing spend is accurately described as the "largest psychological experiment in history" by NC and the effect this has on the least capable and most suggestable portion of the sample is something worth looking at. However, the level of criticism remains always, subtley, limited within certain borders. Conclusions are not reallly drawn, no proposals are actually asserted and causation is frequently denied;

"Awareness of global emblems is already strongly implanted in the very young. Last year the International Journal of Advertising and Marketing to Children reported that 31% of three-year-olds remember having seen the Coca-Cola logo, 69% McDonald's and 66% that for Kinder confectionery. Meanwhile, according to teachers surveyed for a Basic Skills Agency report, about half of four- and five-year-olds entering school for the first time cannot recognise their own names - or speak in a way understandable to others or count up to five. Could these things be connected? Could it be that their induction into consumer society is making our children fat, dull, prematurely obsessed with shopping and sex and that the situation is getting ever worse?"


[....]

"Where advertising is concerned, that picture is subtle, and not only with regard to diet. Three years ago Dr Karen Pine of the University of Hertfordshire found that children under seven who watched the most commercial television also requested the greatest number of gifts in their letters to Father Christmas. She also compared the sample's wish-lists with those of children from Sweden, where no advertising to children is permitted. The Swedish children asked for a lot less. Sounds conclusive. But Dr Pine stresses that "direction of causality" is not proved by her results. "It could be that children who want more things expose themselves to more advertising rather than the other way round. It's the same problem as with trying to find links between violent behaviour and watching violence on television. It is a methodological minefield."

[so kids can't recognise their own names but can recognise multiple brand names, apparently causelessly, and in societies where consumptive propaganda is more carefully proscribed, consumption is coincidentally more conspicuous too... "We don't know whether there's any connection between not having advertising and not wanting things and having advertising and wanting things" perhaps these ruthlessly efficient corporate empires regard trendy advertising execs as worthy of charitable donations of vast fees, without any need for there to be anything other than a rather vague, intangible posibility that they might at least be humbly able to maintain their market share, heaven forbid attract new consumers to market!]

"Others agree. Dr Dale Southerton of Manchester University, who specialises in the study of consumer culture, cautions that there is more to its dynamic than simply commercial interests "targeting" children in order to generate "false" or harmful needs. Parents tend, for example, to direct their children towards products that reflect their own values. Talk of "pester power" fails to recognise that parents' anxieties about their children "fitting in" can be at least as acute as the children's. "It's a kind of irony," says Southerton, "that although parents fear children's consumption they embrace it too."

[Maybe, just maybe, advertising is poisoning all of our minds...]