• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 672 0

such as the National Safe Kids Campaign, whose objective is to educate parents about the true leading causes of death and disability among children, find they cannot compete in this media environment. How do you interest TV producers in stories about preventable accidents? Thousands of young lives could be saved each year, and hundreds of thousands of emergency room visits averted, if parents and elected officials paid more attention to simple safety measures in homes and public spaces. Yet when Safe Kids Campaign conducts its own surveys of parents’ concerns the results confirm what other researchers find: kidnapping remains at the top of the list.36

Responsibility for perpetuating the confusion rests not only with journalists, celebrity advocates, and politicians but also with marketers who have devised a whole range of strategies for profiting from missing children. Among the more creative companies is Advo Inc., which mails out an estimated 57 million postcards each week to American households. Each card features on one side the smiling face, birth date, eye color, hair color, and other vital information for a missing child, and on the reverse side an advertisement for a local business. The question “Have you seen me?” printed above the child’s picture has multiple meanings: it asks if we’ve seen the child and, at time same time, if we’ve seen the advertisement and the product or service it advertises. As Marilyn Ivy, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, notes in an essay about this marketing device, “That a child is missing—not at home—also brings up fears that perhaps we as residents at home are missing something, too.”37

To produce results any advertisement must do two things: It has to grab the audience’s attention, and it has to persuade the audience that they have a problem whose solution is the item being advertised. Advo’s mailers cleverly and quickly accomplish both tasks. The photo of the missing child immediately elicits feelings of guilt, fear, and fascination, which compel a person to look at the card rather than toss it into the wastebasket along with the rest of the day’s junk mail. And the mailer creates a problem-solution situation for the reader at a subconscious level. “Since we probably can’t find the missing child,” Ivy observes, “the packet of ads is there to tell us what else we might be missing and where to find it: Domino’s Pizza, Sterling Optical, Tireman, Hydroflo, Twining’s Upholstery and Carpet Cleaning, Jiffy Lube.”38

Other entrepreneurs of the 1990s have marketed products that respond more directly to fears about missing kids. Ident-A-Kid, a Florida firm, sold more than 3 million child-identification cards a year at $5 each through a nationwide network of salespeople who visit schools. Saf-T-Child, a Texas company, marketed a more elaborate package for $25 that included two ID cards and an instructional cassette for parents about how to prevent child nabbing. Then there’s the Blockbuster Video chain, which lures movie-renting parents into its stores by offering free videotaping of children—the tapes to be used by police should the kids ever go missing.39

By far the most ambitious and well-financed effort to capitalize on parents’ fears of losing their children came from the Ideon Group, whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange. The nation’s leading provider of registration services for credit cards, Ideon marketed an analogous service for children. In full-page advertisements that ran in major newspapers and newsmagazines throughout the country in 1995 the company professed: “If Your Child Were Missing You’d Think About It Every Minute. Same With Us.” For $50 a year Ideon’s “Family Protection Network” service would register a child’s picture and other identifying information in a national data bank. For $250 a year the company would provide investigative services as well. “We have a network of over 1,000 highly qualified, licensed, independent agents, including former agents from the FBI, CIA, and Departments of Treasury and Justice,” the ads proclaimed.40

Through