April 18th, 2000
Let's Keep Advertising -- and Market Research -- Out of the Classroom
By Gary Ruskin
Commercial Alert
Corporate marketers have kids in their cross-hairs. “Virtually every consumer-goods industry, from airlines to zinnia-seed sellers, targets kids,” says child marketing expert James U. McNeal.
Increasingly, these marketers see children as an economic resource to be exploited, much like iron ore or raw timber. “If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come,” explains Mike Searles, ex-president of Kids-R-Us, a major children’s clothing store. “Companies are saying, ‘Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger.’”
In the battle for what ad agencies call “mind share,” marketers want to deploy ads where kids will see them. Because children are required by law to attend school, marketers want their ads to appear in schools, too.
The corporate conscription of the compulsory education laws is now commonplace. Take Channel One, for example, a marketing company that shows a 12-minute “lite news” program with two minutes of ads to about 8 million children each school day. It brags to advertisers about how it harnesses the coercive power of the state to compel schoolchildren to watch ads.
Joel Babbit, former president of Channel One, said the program provides a means of “forcing kids to watch two minutes of commercials.”
The atmosphere in school is splendid for selling, Babbit says. “The advertiser gets a group of kids who cannot go to the bathroom, who cannot change the station, who cannot listen to their mother yell in the background, who cannot be playing Nintendo, who cannot have their headsets on.”
The same is true for the ZapMe! Corp., which puts computers in schools as educational tools but which also function as sophisticated advertising delivery, market research, and surveillance machines.
A Wit Capital financial analysis of the ZapMe! Corp. notes that ZapMe! helps marketers “looking to capture the ‘eyeballs’ and ‘e-wallets’ of a captive and attractive demographic"–that is, schoolchildren.
These ads in the classroom consume perhaps the most precious resource of the school day–time. In schools that show Channel One, students spend the equivalent of one full week each school year watching it, including nearly one class day watching ads.
A 1998 study by Max Sawicky and Alex Molnar, The Hidden Costs of Channel One, concluded that Channel One’s cost to taxpayers in lost class time is $1.8 billion per year.
There’s something seriously out of whack here. Taxpayers pay to construct public classrooms. They pay to maintain them and provide staff. Yet now companies like Channel One and ZapMe! have figured out how to use those taxpayer-funded classrooms as amphitheaters for their ad campaigns aimed at innocent and impressionable kids.
These companies promote products to which many parents object. Take violent entertainment, for example. Channel One advertises violent movies such as “Supernova,” “The Mummy,” and “The World is Not Enough.”
Many parents (and teachers) are rightly worried about school violence. They certainly don’t want schools to promote entertainment that glamorizes violence and gore.
Another example is junk food. Childhood obesity is a major public health problem. An article in the Oct. 27, 1999, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association states, “The United States has experienced alarming increases in obesity among children and adolescents.”
An accompanying editorial notes the role of the “marketing of snack foods” in the obesity epidemic.
Yet guess who’s marketing those junk foods? The public schools.
Channel One promotes a parade of junk food and fast food to impressionable children. Coke and Pepsi, which have a major presence in many schools, are laden with sugar, excess calories, caffeine, and other additives that can contribute to obesity, tooth decay, and many other health problems. Is this why taxpayers support public schools–to promote unhealthy eating habits that lead to diseases like these?
On top of all this is the question of values. There is growing concern about the moral atmosphere of the classroom.
Channel One imposes a moral atmosphere of materialism. It promotes the message that buying is good and will make you happy and that consumption and self-gratification are the goals and ends of life.
Advertisers also degrade the moral authority of schools and teachers. Schools that show corporate ads implicitly endorse the products advertised–including violent or sexualized entertainment and junk food.
In effect, school boards let advertisers rent the moral authority of the school for the purpose of selling. So doing, they cheapen the school and undercut the painstaking efforts of teachers and administrators who strive to keep up a high standard of integrity.
Perhaps worst of all, the marketing invasion of the classroom opens children to the prying eyes of self-interested adults. It totally violates the trust of parents when they send their kids off to school each day.
The ZapMe! Corp actually conducts electronic surveillance of children in school. It monitors the activities of the children on the Web for commercial purposes.
According to The Associated Press, ZapMe! breaks the data down “by age, sex, and zip code. It delivers this information to advertisers and marketers, who use it to target students in school with laser-like precision.” And ZapMe! allows its advertisers to collect the personal information of schoolchildren, including their names, addresses, and telephone numbers.
Compulsory education laws are for teaching. We ought not let corporations use them to force a captive audience of schoolchildren to watch ads or to secretly extract market research from them.
It is not the function of the public schools to deliver impressionable children to those who would use them for economic gain. Some things just shouldn’t be for sale. Children are one of them.
Gary Ruskin is director of Commercial Alert, Washington D.C.