Consuming Kids

“The Commodification of Childhood: Tales from the Advertising Front Lines” by Juliet B. Schor, in www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehog.html (Summer 2003), Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, P.O. Box 400816, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. 22904–4816.

You’ve heard of focus groups, you’ve filled out surveys, you’ve been called by someone wondering what TV shows you watch. But chances are you’ve not heard of the GIA. The Girl’s Intelligence Agency and other firms like it are a subtle and powerful new force in advertising aimed at understanding the likes and dislikes of kids—in the GIA’s case, girls as young as six years old.

Marketing products to kids is nothing new: In the 1980s, Levi-Strauss even hired a 10-year-old to tell the company what he liked and didn’t like about its jeans. What’s different is the financial power kids now wield: In 2002, children between the ages of four and 12 spent as much as $30 billion. So kids have become an increasingly enticing quarry for advertisers, who have responded with methods that strike Schor, a Boston College sociologist and author of The Overworked American (1992), as a threat to both parents and children.

The GIA approach seems innocuous enough. With its trademark “slumber party in a box,” the agency asks one of 40,000 “agents,” recruited from kids who’ve registered on its website, to invite some friends over for a “party.” There the girls are offered a sample product—anything from a new toy to a TV show—while researchers study their reactions.

That’s where the new techniques become insidious, Schor argues. Though a “party” might be used to gather information, it can also be the launching stage for a “viral” marketing campaign: Kids recommend the featured products to their friends, who recommend them to their friends, and so on. Since each “agent” reaches an average of 512 other girls, the “research” has the potential to generate significant sales. Parents, the traditional “gatekeepers” for their children, are out of the picture.

Schor believes that these new methods are turning children into marketing instruments and showing them that “friends are a lucrative resource that they can exploit to gain products or money.” She’s not impressed by marketers’ argument that kids are such savvy consumers that they don’t need their parents’ help. Speaking directly to kids, they say, empowers children. Schor thinks it teaches them the worst possible lessons about the “value” of friendship.