Public Opinion Series

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, 2002

Today children are being targeted by phone companies, oil companies, and automobile companies, as well as clothing stores and restaurant chains. The explosion in children’s advertising occurred during the 1980s. Many working parents, feeling guilty about spending less time with their kids, started spending more money on them. One marketing expert has called the 1980s “the decade of the child consumer.” Many studies have found that young children often could not tell the difference between television programming and television advertising.

A person’s “brand loyalty” may begin as early as the age of two. Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name. A 1991 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly all of America’s six-year-olds could identify Joe Camel, who was just as familiar to them as Mickey Mouse. Another study found that one-third of the cigarettes illegally sold to minors were Camels.

Market researchers not only conduct surveys of children in shopping malls, they also organize focus groups for kids as young as two or three. They analyze children’s artwork, hire children to run focus groups, stage slumber parties and then question children into the night. They send cultural anthropologists into homes, stores, fast food restaurants, and other places where kids like to gather, quietly, and surreptitiously observing the behavior of prospective customers. They study the fantasy lives of young children, and then apply the findings in advertisements and product designs.

The typical American child now spends about twenty-one hours a week watching television – roughly one and a half months of TV every year. That does not include the time children spend in front of a screen watching videos, playing video games, or using the computer. Outside of school, the typical American child spends more time watching television than doing any other activity except sleeping. During the course of a year, he or she watches more than thirty thousand TV commercials. Even the nation’s youngest children are watching a great deal of television. About one-quarter of American children between the ages of two and five have a TV in their room.

As in the United States, the fast food companies have targeted their foreign advertising and promotion at a group of consumers with the fewest attachments to tradition: young children. “Kids are the same regarding the issues that affect the all-important stages of their development,” a top executive at the Gepetto Group told the audience at a recent KidPower conference, “and they apply to any kid in Berlin, Beijing, or Brooklyn.” The KidPower conference, attended by marketing executives from Burger King and Nickelodeon, among others, was held at Disneyland outside of Paris. In Australia, where the number of fast food restaurants roughly doubled during the 1990s, a survey found that half of the nation’s nine- and ten-year-olds thought that Ronald McDonald knew what kids should eat. At a primary school in Beijing, all of the children recognized an image of Ronald McDonald. The children said they liked “Uncle McDonald” because he was “funny, gentle, kind, and he understood children’s hearts.” Coca-Cola is now the favorite drink among Chinese children, and McDonald’s serves their favorite food.

Marketing in Schools

Not satisfied with marketing children through playgrounds, toys, cartoons, movies, videos, and amusement parks, through contests, sweepstakes, games and clubs, via television, radio, magazines, and the Internet, fast food chains are now gaining access to the last advertising-free outposts of American life. In 1993 District 11 in Colorado Springs started a nationwide trend, becoming the first public school district in the United States to place ads for Burger King in its hallways and on the sides of its school buses. Like other school systems in Colorado, District 11 faced revenue shortfalls, thanks to growing enrollments and voter hostility to tax increases for education.

To proponents of advertising in the schools argue that it is necessary to prevent further cutbacks; opponents contend that schoolchildren are becoming a captive audience for marketers, compelled by law to attend school and then forced to look at ads as a means of paying for their own education. The fast food chains run ads on Channel One, the commercial television network whose programming is now shown in classrooms, almost every school day, to eight million of the nation’s middle, junior, and high school students – a teen audience fifty times larger than that of MTV.

The school marketing efforts of the large soda companies have not gone entirely unopposed. Administrators in San Francisco and Seattle have refused to allow any.