Advertising

Over the course of the twentieth century, child consumers have played an increasingly important role in the economies of developed nations. Children's consumer clout is especially pronounced in the United States, where, according to early-twenty-first-century estimates, children spend or influence the spending of up to $500 billion annually. Advertisers in turn spend hefty sums to capture the consumer allegiance and nagging power of children. Thanks to the power of television, advertising to children in the twenty-first century has become a ubiquitous practice across the globe. It is, however, by no means a recent phenomenon.

A market for children's goods–books, toys, clothing, and furniture–had existed since at least the eighteenth century, but market awareness of children as consumers first emerged in the United States during the 1870s and 1880s, when national advertisers began supplying retailers with colorful trade cards and advertising jingle books based on parodies of Mother Goose rhymes. Corporations hoped that child shoppers would digest the advertising messages on the backs of trade cards and bring the advertisements to their mothers' attention, but advertisers' primary goal was to stimulate sales at the point of purchase. If a mother had neglected to specify a brand when she sent her child on a shopping errand, an alluring trade card displayed on a store countertop might decide the issue. Children prized trade cards for their luxurious color images–a novelty made possible by advances in chromolithography printing. Collecting the cards in scrapbooks was a favorite childhood pastime, especially among girls. Advertisers encouraged this hobby by producing a set or series of collectible trade cards, and children reveled in the status that an unusual card or fine collection conferred on its owner.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the advertising trade largely dismissed children as members of the buying public, but readily embraced the notion that children constituted the future buyers of tomorrow. Theorists of advertising psychology such as Walter Dill Scott argued that buying was in-fluenced less by rational arguments than by unconscious decision making, including "suggestions" that advertisers implanted in the consumer's mind. The plasticity of young minds, Scott surmised, made children especially valuable targets of advertising. If repeatedly exposed to trademarks and brand names, children could, imperceptibly and unconsciously, acquire brand preferences that would last a lifetime.

Such psychological insights hardly constituted a revolution in children's advertising, but they did suggest, contrary to what some Victorians supposed, that the concept of a sheltered childhood was not inherently at odds with children's exposure to the world of commerce. The whole notion that children possessed a consumer consciousness long before they possessed purchasing power circulated broadly in turn-of-the-century advertising iconography. In magazine advertisements and trade cards read by adults and children alike, admakers depicted children as product endorsers, discriminating shoppers, and voracious consumers. These images traded on new cultural ideals of childhood that prized children as much for their spunk and savvy as their innocence.

These middle-class cultural ideals of the spunky child paved the way for even bolder departures in advertising during the 1920s. By then, advertisers conceived of middle-class children not just as buyers of tomorrow but as buyers of today and selling agents within the home. They recognized children as a more definable and viable group of consumers partly because modern childhood itself had become more organized around peer activities. Compulsory schooling, agesegregated classrooms, and the rise of youth organizations like the Boy Scouts and the Girl all elevated the salience of peer interactions. The fact that the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Camp Fire Girls published their own magazines provided advertisers a ready means of reaching boys and girls with common interests. Indeed, advertisers frequently capitalized on these peer affiliations by suggesting that their products could be used to earn scouting merit badges or enhance camping experiences. Transformations within the middle-class family also contributed to advertisers' enthusiasm for cultivating child consumers. Owing partly to their own middle-class backgrounds, admen and adwomen sensed new opportunities in the democratization of the urban middle-class companionate family, which unlike its Victorian predecessor, granted children greater latitude for self-expression and, in many cases, their own allotment of spending money.

Children's magazine publishers such as St. Nicholas, Boy's Life, and American Boy played an important role in promoting advertising to children as a worthy long-term and short-term investment. American Boy placed numerous ads in advertising trade journals, touting the exuberance of boy consumers and their influence over family purchasing, thanks in part to boys' expertise on new consumer technologies such as cars, radios, cameras, and batteries. AmericanBoy 's promotional efforts paid off handsomely. During the mid-1910s, American Boy began to swell with ads for bicycles, erector sets, rifles, and breakfast cereals. By 1920 annual advertising revenues for the magazine had reached half a million dollars. By the middle of that decade, American Girl and Everygirl's, magazines published respectively by the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls, had also attracted advertisers who sought both to cultivate the loyalty of future housewives and to boost present sales.

In the early twentieth century, advertisers and magazine publishers alike initiated numerous games, contests, and educational ventures to teach children an appreciation of advertising and train them in brand-conscious shopping. Publishers' investment in this project was at least as deep as advertisers' because magazines now depended more on advertising revenues than subscription sales for their survival. To gain credibility as a profitable advertising medium, American Boy and Scholastic, the national weekly for secondary school students, ran a series of columns explaining why their readers should trust in advertisers and the superior economic value of advertised goods over unbranded goods. Juvenile magazine publishers also won advertisers' confidence by sponsoring contests and games that trained children to pay close attention to advertising.

The public schools provided advertisers with another promising venue for raising brand consciousness. Though ostensibly limited by the conventional boundaries of the school curriculum, advertisers spared little effort in getting their messages into the classroom and via the classroom into the home. They offered free booklets, exhibits, charts, and other "enrichment" materials that promised to transform run-of-the-mill lessons into livelier fare. Because restrictive school budgets often curtailed the use of visual aids, teachers and teaching organizations proved remarkably receptive to corporate-sponsored innovations in the curriculum. In the late 1920s, for example, teachers in some 70,000 schools across the country used Cream of Wheat's graded contest devices, prizes, and breakfast charts to encourage regular consumption of hot breakfast cereals. Although editorialists criticized advertisers for diverting "school facilities to its own selfish purposes," schools provided no substantive counterpoint to the claims of modern advertising until the mid-1930s, when the consumer education movement got underway.

Early-twentieth-century juvenile advertisers struggled to strike the right balance in addressing children's desires and parents' concerns. Overt parental appeals that linked children's consumption to nutrition and achievement often appeared in children's advertising. Yet juvenile advertising in the 1920s and 1930s was remarkably bold in its efforts to empower children within a consumer democracy. Advertisements in children's magazines literally instructed children how to lobby their parents for new purchases, supplying them with sales ammunition that appealed to pressing parental concerns. While Canadian broadcast advertising trade guidelines in the 1970s advised advertisers not to "directly urge children to… ask their parents to make inquiries or purchases," early-twentieth-century American advertisers exhibited no such compunctions (quoted in Kline 1993). With boldfaced headlines like "Please–Father–Please," advertisements routinely sanctioned begging and the old childhood standby–buttering up mom and dad.

During the interwar years, advertisers also sought to cultivate children's consumer loyalty and interest by addressing their concerns about popularity and personal appearance. As high school enrollments ballooned and adolescents began spending more time in the company of their peers, adjusting to the norms and expectations of age-based peers became an adolescent preoccupation. Even as they presented purchasable solutions to problems of peer approval and image control, advertisers exacerbated adolescent insecurities by reminding teens of their susceptibility to impersonal judgments. Advertisements for products like Postum cereal and Keds shoes encouraged a greater preoccupation with physical appearance in both boys and girls, but advertisers' messages to girls were especially contradictory. They celebrated the athletic girl as emblematic of the post-Victorian gender freedoms modern girls enjoyed, but they narrowed the scope of feminine aspirations and feminine achievement by making peer acceptance and beauty, rather than athletic performance, the ultimate rewards of bodily discipline. If girls purchased their product, advertisers repeatedly counseled, they were sure to garner more dates–a reassuring promise in the newly emerging public culture of dating, where popularity was measured by the frequency and variety of dates one commanded.

With the advent of children's radio programs in the 1930s, advertisers, no longer limited to the typically urban, middle- and upper-middle-class readers of juvenile magazines, made children's consumer culture a truly national phenomenon. Millions of Depression-era children satisfied yearnings for autonomy and recognition when they joined radio-inspired clubs like Little Orphan Annie's Secret Circle or Post Toasties' Junior Detective Corps and received "free" premiums in exchange for proofs of purchase. Armed with secret passwords, decoding devices, and mysterious languages impervious to adult comprehension, children embraced the privileges of club memberships as a road to empowerment. Membership in such clubs, however, also afforded many children their first lessons in consumer disappointment, when long-awaited premiums failed to live up to advertisers' hype. Children exercised their own limited form of consumer payback in choosing cash contest prizes over dubious premiums and in mocking exaggerated advertising claims. Though some parents complained about broadcasters' advertising excesses, including their practice of inserting ad pitches into story lines, radio paved the way for perhaps even greater advertising intrusions in the television age.

During the postwar years, the spread of affluence and permissive child rearing in the United States gave children greater economic power, while the advent of television gave advertisers new means to reach children en masse. Despite some initial doubts about television's viability as an advertising medium, advertisers enthusiastically took to the airwaves once they became convinced that popular programs like The Howdy Doody Show and The Mickey Mouse Club could deliver a captivated audience. Radio, however, still had the greater impact on the youth market, as baby boomers accounted for eighty percent of rock and roll record sales during the 1950s.

Advertisers' investment in nurturing children's consumer appetites grew along with the expansion of children's own discretionary funds. In 1960, according to a survey by Seventeen magazine, the average teenage girl had a weekly income of $9.53. By 1999, the typical weekly allowance for thirteen-to fifteen-year-olds ranged from $30.50 to $34.25, with girls receiving on average three to four dollars more than boys. Supplementary earnings typically doubled the weekly yield for teenage boys and girls. Though younger children aged ten to twelve received only a modest five to six dollar boost to their weekly income from earnings, allowances on average swelled their weekly take by an additional twenty-one to twenty-two dollars. According to one 1996 estimate, allowances accounted for more than a third of the $89 billion in spending money at children's disposal. Children's collective consumer clout was weighty, indeed.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the barriers between children and the market all but disappeared in the United States. Not only did children's media consumption become more difficult to monitor in families with both parents in the workforce–now the American norm–but parental restraints became more difficult to enforce. Parental acquiescence, of course, also contributed to the commercialization of childhood. Advertisers' work was made easier when many American children enjoyed personal televisions and computers with Internet access in their own private bedrooms. Still, the most vigilant parents could at best exercise limited control over children's exposure to commercial messages. Even in public schools, a morning viewing of the Channel One news service exposed children to a daily dose of commercials along with reports on current events. Indeed, what began as a marriage of convenience between under-funded public schools and advertisers in the 1920s grew into a virtually irresistible collaboration, thanks to the anti-tax movement of the last quarter of the twentieth century and voters' reluctance to approve school bond measures. Cash-strapped public schools welcomed the additional revenues– an exclusive contract with soda companies could net millions, while a restricted arrangement with a computer company could yield a new supply of "free" computers. In return for their largesse, corporations were rewarded with an advertising venue that reached masses of children far more cheaply than television.

Children's advertisers have added some new spices to old recipes for marketing success. The tradition of weaving product endorsements into children's entertainment programming, a technique first perfected on radio, was taken to new lengths with the advent of toy-based television programs like The Smurfs, Strawberry Shortcake, and He-Man in the 1980s–a marketing ploy the toy industry cynically defended by asserting that children needed preformulated story lines to help them play. This strategy also harkened back to the Depression-ridden 1930s, when toymakers revitalized sagging sales by creating licensed character toys that revolved around children's celebrity idols such as Mickey Mouse, Shirley Temple, Buck Rogers, and Superman.

Much like their early twentieth-century predecessors, contemporary marketers judge the effectiveness of children's advertising by the so-called "nag factor"–the aim being to maximize the nag until the parental gatekeeper yields. But where earlier advertisers were more cautious about upsetting the balance of power within the family–winning parental goodwill, after all, was the goal of winning juvenile good-will–late twentieth- and early twenty-first century advertisers have pushed the limits of those boundaries. The promises of self-improvement and edification that appeased previous generations of parents have given way to a children's advertising culture in which hedonism, antiauthoritarianism, and kid power reign supreme. Today's kids, as Ellen Seiter puts it, are "sold separately," with appeals designed more to increase the nag factor than to placate the parental gatekeeper.

To acknowledge contemporary marketers' greater investment in creating a distinct children's fantasy culture, however, is not to romanticize the early twentieth century as some utopian moment in children's consumer culture. Far from it. The Pokemon fad of the 1990s, in fact, can be viewed as a direct descendant of the children's radio clubs of the 1930s. Just as the promise of special premiums from Little Orphan Annie and Jack Armstrong got children to pester their parents for more Cocomalt or Wheaties, the Pokemon craze led children to plead for the precious trading cards that would help them capture all 150 Pokemon characters, the mythical "pocket monster" creatures featured in the popular animated kids' television show and video game. While in each case clever market tie-ins with radio idols or popular television shows provided the building blocks for the craze, the appeal of joining a distinct kids' world fueled the fad. Radio club members decoded secret messages to which only their peers were privy, while Pokemon traders became experts in Pokemon lore, memorizing the names, special fighting skills, and point values of each Pokemon.

In the decades since the 1950s, this privileging of children's culture has contributed to greater age segmentation within the children's market. The often fuzzy distinctions between teenagers and children that typified advertising in the interwar years have evolved into clearly delineated categories ranging from toddlers to kids to 'tweens to teens. Marketers also expend more time and money gathering data about their various child audiences. Information formerly gleaned from contest data, children's advertising testimonials, and a smattering of personal interviews now comes to advertising agencies through the more scientific channels of surveys and focus groups. During the 1990s, advertisers found more deceitful means to acquire information about children's tastes by requiring children to provide critical personal data–including name, sex, age, e-mail address, favorite television show, and favorite musical group–before they could enter certain websites. In response to indignant parents and media watch groups, the Federal Trade Commission made it illegal in 1998 to solicit personal information from preteens online without parental permission. Nevertheless, children's advertisers still hold high hopes that the Internet's virtual mall might become as popular a hangout as the neighborhood shopping mall.

Although politicians and consumer advocacy groups have pressured media companies and advertising firms to exercise more restraint and responsibility in promoting violent products and films to children, these limited external controls have done little to rein in a capitalist culture resistant to infringements on free markets and commercial free speech. Indeed, savvy child consumers themselves have discovered avenues of resistance only within the parameters of consumerism itself. One of these avenues is Zillions, a magazine for kids published by Consumer Reports that teaches children the basics of product testing and comparative shopping. Children have also turned consumerism into a language of protest, marketing their own anticorporate sentiments through self-styled Internet zines (self-published magazines) and fashions. Yet such protests have not prevented advertisers from extending their global message. Thanks to rapid commercialization and China's one-child-only birth control policy, Shanghai's singletons have become sufficiently acculturated to consumer abundance and global tastes that they readily grasped the moral dilemma of Toy Story –a Disney tale, told from the perspective of animated toys, about how easily children lose interest in a favorite old toy when a new one arrives. Consumerism paradoxically allows children more control over fashioning independent identities, but it also increasingly binds them to a global commercial culture.

See also: Consumer Culture; Media, Childhood and the.

bibliography

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Davis, Deborah S., and Julia S. Sensenbrenner. 2000. "Commercializing Childhood: Parental Purchases for Shanghai's Only Child." In The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, ed. Deborah S. Davis, pp. 54-79. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Jacobson, Lisa. Forthcoming. Raising Consumers: Children, Child-rearing, and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Seiter, Ellen. 1993. Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Lisa Jacobson