In the interests of research, I would have liked to download a copy of the Marketing to Tweens 2003 report, but I didn¹t have $1,295 handy, so I didn't. Marketing to Tweens 2003 promises to tell marketers all they need to know about children aged 9-14, writes Breda O'Brien
The company that produces this report, Children's Marketing Services Worldwide, is just one organisation cashing in on the market's hunger for information about children. The youth market is worth billions of dollars in the United States and is growing everywhere in the western world.
Companies not only want to get their hands on children's disposable income, they also want to capitalise on children's ability to pester parents, and children's substantial influence on how the family budget is spent.
Children's Marketing Services informs us that tweens are important "present and future consumers. Tweens are in the age of transition from children to teenagers. Although they look to teens as role models, they are still kids and will tend to act immature (sic).
The tweens of today copy all of the trends and fads as teenagers do and do not view themselves as being kids. Tweens have a foot in each door (sic) they are rushing to be teenagers, but are still kids."
Three hundred tweens were interviewed to uncover everything from their favourite celebrities to their favourite snacks to how they pay for goods they purchase on the web.
All I could afford to access were the chapter headings, and one in particular, "Why Tweens don't feel good about themselves", brought me skidding to a halt. Aside from the normal developmental challenges children face, not feeling good about themselves might have something to do with the fact it is vital to the market that tweens feel a sense of dissatisfaction with what they have and who they are. Exploiting that sense of lack sets cash registers ringing.
Michael Brody, who chairs the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's television and media committee, believes: "Just like paedophiles, marketers have become child experts".
His analogy is offensive both to marketers and those who have been victims of paedophiles, but it is indisputable that an army of psychologists and other behavioural scientists are staking out our kids.
Take "cool-hunting". Market researchers are no longer satisfied with focus groups or staged interviews. Many now use ethnographic immersion, a term coined by cultural anthropologists. It means going out on to the streets to meet and study the cool kids, the trend-setters, to steal what they are doing and market it back to other kids.
The trendsetters become disgusted when the mass market copies them and so search for different ways to express themselves as individuals, and the hunt begins again.
If you have ever felt that childhood is getting shorter and shorter, now you know why. The more independence and autonomy young consumers have, the more easily companies can access their money. Advertisers and marketers are exerting greater and greater influence over what our children eat. Their diets contain increasing amounts of fast food and sugary drinks and cereals.
The Green Party carried out a survey in September on RTÉ's Den 2 advertisements. They discovered that 80 per cent of the food advertisements were for foods high in sugar and/or fat, such as crisps, sweetened cereals and drinks, biscuits and fast food. The UK Food Commission defines as junk food anything that contains more than 10g of sugar per 100g. Some of the advertised cereals have four times that amount, so we are sending our kids off to school fuelled by junk food.
It's not just food advertising that targets children. There is a toy which allows children to make their own McDonald's Happy Meal, using Play-Doh and plastic moulds for each component. A coupon for the real thing is included with the set. The toymaker Mattel sells a Barbie doll who works at the McDonald's Playset drive-through.
How ironic that Barbie, who is both impossibly slim and vacuous, can now steer your child in play to everything that will help them on the road to obesity.
Advertisers also influence how our children dress, often with little regard to what is appropriate for their age. On a recent Channel Four programme, journalist Miranda Sawyer professed herself scandalised at the revealing and sexually precocious clothes nine-year-olds are wearing. Obviously she had not heard of the tweens concept, because she had no problem with teenagers wearing such clothes (nor, incidentally with 12-year-olds having sex if they are "ready for it".) But if such clothes are all right for teens, tweens will not be far behind.
Want to be really depressed? If I had had another $1,295, I could also have downloaded a report entitled Marketing to Pre-schoolers. The blurb for that report earnestly assures us: "Pre-schoolers, ages 3-5, are the hot and growing market."
I know. My little two-year-old squeals with delight every time he sees what he calls "Nemo juice" in the supermarket. It is a sugary drink that currently has a tie-in with the Disney movie, Finding Nemo. My four-year-old daughter, who is not yet reading, expertly identified a Vodafone logo on a bus ceiling the other day.
On second thoughts, don't get depressed, but instead strike a small blow. The Broadcasting Commission of Ireland is currently seeking answers from the public to specific questions in order to draw up a Children's Advertising Code. The questions are available online at www.bci.ie or you can telephone them at 01-6441200.
The BCI's consultation document doesn't even hint at this option, but my preferred stance would be to ban all advertisements aimed at under-12s, or as a compromise, under-eights. The BCI only regulates Irish broadcasters, but it would be a start. Personally, I would love to see a ban on market research involving children, especially the under-10s, but that is outside the scope of the BCI.
The closing date for submissions to the BCI is December 21st. This is unfortunate given how busy we all are at Christmas. However, perhaps the avalanche of children's advertising, with its subtext that any kid who does not get the appropriate brands for Christmas will be both isolated and scarred for life, might motivate us to get writing in order to influence positive change.