Marketing & Consumerism - Special Issues for Young Children
Parents of young children have an important role to play in protecting their kids from invasive marketing and in educating them about advertising from an early age.
Viral marketing alert
Ads like the one above have been appearing in public transit systems in Ottawa, Toronto and other Ontario cities over the last month, supposedly promoting a drug called “Obay” which prevents teenagers from having their own thoughts, hopes and dreams. It's a classic example of viral marketing: an ad campaign that doesn't actually name the product or service being promoted, but rather tries to get people talking about it in the hopes that when the product is finally unveiled the effect will be greater than a traditional ad campaign could have managed.
Covering controversy
The hottest media story in the past week has been the instantly infamous New Yorker cover portraying Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as terrorists. Though the Obama campaign has been measured in its response, media outlets – and particularly bloggers – have been vocal in their disapproval. Some have suggested that the cover crosses the line from satire into hate speech, while others accuse TheNew Yorker of giving ‘aid and comfort to the enemy' by visually depicting the smears and misconceptions that have been aimed at the candidate.
Children and advertising
Kids are a highly desirable market for advertising: they control almost 150 billion dollars of spending in the U.S. alone and have a lifetime of spending ahead of them.
How Marketers Target Kids
Advertising: It’s everywhere. No, it’s not your imagination. The amount of advertising and marketing we are exposed to daily has exploded: on average, we see more than four thousand ads each day.[1] At the gas pumps, in the movie theatre, in a washroom stall, on stickers on fruit, during sporting events and plastered all over social media—advertising is pretty much impossible to avoid.
Marketing and Consumerism - Special Issues for Tweens and Teens
One of the most important recent developments in advertising to kids has been the defining of a "tween" market (ages 8 to 12).
2SLGBTQ+ Representation in Advertising
As in other media, 2SLGBTQ+ people have gained a greater and more widely visible presence within the advertising world, with ad agencies courting the “Pink Dollar.” This is not surprising, considering that the 2SLGBTQ+ audience is estimated to be worth around $917 million in buying power.[1]
Working for a living
One of the most unusual things about Internet-based businesses is that few of them try very hard to make money. Of course, with a very few exceptions (such as Wikipedia) making money is certainly in the business plan, or there wouldn't be all that venture capital floating around, but in general the approach has been to come up with a good product or service first, and only look for ways to make it profitable after it's acquired a steady clientele. Hugely important and successful ventures like Google, YouTube and Facebook all started out operating at a significant loss. This pattern continues today: it's already hard to imagine the Internet without Twitter, but so far that service isn't earning its makers much money (though you can be sure they're looking for ways to do that.)
$uper Bowl
The Super Bowl has long been seen as the “tent pole” of American consumer culture: an annual game that routinely pulls in viewers at a scale otherwise achieved only by one-off events like series finales and celebrity car chases. It actually drives sales of TVs: the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association reports that 2.5 million people plan to buy a new TV for the express purpose of watching the game, part of an overall $8.7 billion in Super Bowl-related consumer spending.