It’s almost unfair really, teams of marketing experts thinking up how to sell this and that to kids three and four decades younger than them. The word statutory of “statutory rape” comes from the same root as status. Essentially, when one is older, one is more capable—not to mention culpable—of taking advantage of those that are younger. That’s a simple concept, and essentially the same thing is at play when talking about children’s advertising. Children are helpless against the amount of time teams of grownups spend tailoring a product especially for them. There are countless specialists that marketers employ, among them, child psychologists, who know exactly what will make a child nag for an item if she/he sees it in a store, be it features that toys show in stores—I can think of a particular example of a little dog I saw that said, “Take me home and see how much fun we can have”—or on television.
In this post, I’ll be talking a bit more about advertising in general, before moving on to a quick roundup of commercial free entertainment we can use to keep our children away from advertisements.
This isn’t to say that ads are bad. I mean, they are bad, but they’re also useful to get people to keep spending money on the same product over and over. Take Coke for example. People spend a ton of money on Coke ($31 billion, $6.82 billion profit in 2009), but Coke isn’t changing. I mean, remember New Coke in 1985? That was a disaster because Coke has to stay the same to keep loyal customers. However, staying the same is a bit dangerous, since it means that Coke runs the risk of losing some of these billions of dollars to new products, Soda Stream, for example. This is where advertising comes in. Advertising can actually reinvent products to make them seem different even when they’re not. Some people say that New Coke was actually a calculated and complicated way of reinventing the same old thing in a different guise. The results of New Coke: Coca-Cola Classic. The same thing as something different.
So imagine what this does to children. The same plastic masks and costumes, blankets, action figures, all being branded Dora the Explorer and then Toy Story and then Iron Man and so on into adulthood where adults just might have the ability to understand what is happening, all of the rhetorical appeals involved, but even we can be fooled from time to time into choosing products simply because they’re advertised in a certain fashion. Think of all of those happy people sipping Coca-Cola Classic after New Coke was eliminated.
Though we can be fooled, I like to believe many of us do a bit of research to avoid getting swindled. However, kids don’t know anything about this. They don’t know what’s going on most of the time. I tutor freshmen and sophomores in college and most of them don’t know what’s going on, so a child deciphering between fact and fiction and separating a product from an idea is simply impossible.
So what does all of this m(ad) ranting have to do with the selfish father?
Well, because of his selfishness, the selfish father will subject his family, and his children to more advertising than need be. He will watch more television because if the television is on he can tell everyone to be quiet so he can have time to himself even when he is around his family. He will also attempt to have his children sit in front of the television rather than monopolize his time, which he values like currency.
Since the selfish father will subject his family to more television advertisements than anything else because of his selfishness, I think that finding alternatives to cable television is a good way for the selfish father to get more involved with his family.
So, when the family must watch television, what is out there that is still good quality, but is commercial free?
Netflix, Apple TV, Google TV, and Amazon Video on Demand
All of these alternatives are ways to avoid advertising’s largest venue—radio and print only reach children a fraction of the time as television ads—and I feel strongly that paying an astronomical monthly payment for things you don’t even watch is a waste of the family’s money and something people do just because they don’t know about other options. All of these options will limit the family’s television intake, can ultimately be cheaper than cable, and get the family more involved in what they watch since they must choose what to watch rather than have it wash over them. It also will eliminate all the dead time when there is “nothing to do” so the television comes on.
Remember, television isn’t the best choice, if the family is going to get together for the evening, they might as well be reading. Maybe even reading aloud to one another or splitting up and reciting the different parts to a nice play like Peter Pan or Our Town. However, when the television comes on, make sure that, first, everyone wants to watch the program, that it has educational value, and that there are no advertisements getting your children accustomed to buying ideas rather than products. Nobody needs to be told what to buy, they can decide for themselves.
Thanks everyone for reading. Now, join me for a great cause this Friday when I’ll be posting on behalf of Blog Action Day 2010. After that, I’ll continue my discussion of television alternatives later on this month, and then, by request, give another list of things that selfish fathers can do around the house to make it seem like they’re not just thinking about themselves all the time.