The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [118]
Worst of all, advertisers have identified children as the final frontier in target audiences. Advertisers have not only succeeded at getting kids to influence their parents’ purchasing, but also at influencing kids’ own not insignificant spending. Of course they are simultaneously creating the next generation of brand-loyal customers. Tragically, many cash-strapped boards of education are inviting advertisers right into the schools. So now we have corporate logos on sports uniforms, educational posters, and book covers. The math curriculum comes complete with product placement (12 M&M’s + 24 M&M’s = how many M&M’s?); there are brand names on cafeteria menus. Channel One, which at its high point in 2002 was viewed daily by 10 million teens (ages eleven to eighteen) in 320,000 classrooms70 provides programs with “educational content,” news, and commercials. To its captive audience of kids in classrooms (and on school buses via similar BusRadio programs), Channel One ads promoted violent and/or sexually provocative movies and TV shows, online social networking sites, the U.S. Army/Navy/Marine Corps, and, before opponents prevailed in 2007, junk food.71
I had read about the relentless advertising to children, but I didn’t really get how well coordinated it was until I had my own daughter. Advertisers defend their actions by claiming it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their kids from excessive marketing. But, in my experience, despite my best efforts, it’s been impossible to keep ads from influencing her. I find that the hardest advertising to resist is the kind that appears in different settings, across a variety of platforms. Dora the Explorer, whom my daughter actually resembled when she was younger, was my biggest nemesis. Dora popped up everywhere—on TV, toothbrushes, shampoo, backpacks, electronic games, pencil sets, underwear, bikes, sweatshirts, birthday party goodie bags, pillowcases, beach pails, ice cream, and even breakfast cereal. I noticed that my daughter, who was about three years old at the time, would respond to Dora as if she were seeing a friend. “There’s Dora!” she would squeal in the toothpaste aisle of the supermarket (which is not usually a place that generates excitement among preschoolers). Buying that toothpaste became like bringing a friend home. And who doesn’t want another friend?
Free to Be You and Me
The success of fashion (that most visible form of perceived obsolescence) and brand marketing (how companies and their advertisers sell us on the lifestyle image of a product as opposed to its inherent qualities) are related to some pretty fundamental ideas we hold about ourselves as citizens of the U.S. of A. We pride ourselves on being individuals: rugged individuals, pioneers, the first man on the moon; quirky individuals, someone with a strong individual style or mark. We also cherish the idea of our boundless freedom. Our country was built on ideas of liberty from persecution and the freedom to be individuals. And last but certainly not least, there’s the sacred American Dream, the self-made man, the rags-to-riches success story. We love the idea that our wide-open, bountiful country allows the least among us to achieve tremendous status, if we just work enough for it.
Or shop enough for it. The engineers of consumerism have played into these values that we hold dear in a big way. They took these sources of national pride and twisted them into reasons to buy Stuff. And then at some point it was like the transitive property kicked in: all we have to do now in order to achieve or display our individuality, or to express our freedom, or to go from the pauper to the prince, is shop. How on earth did they accomplish that, and what does that mean for us as people, exactly?
Today the pressure to buy more, newer, fancier Stuff has everything to do with the pressure to express our identity and status. In The Bridge at the End of the