Quotes on Advertising and Kids

Source: Blue Line Media

My kids are on Spring Break, and we took a short trip. While filling our gas tank, speakers attached to the pump squawked out ads, urging us to buy everything from Reese's peanut butter cups to a home security system. Forget blaring commercials from overhead station speakers; these were direct messages from individual pumps.  It's just another place advertise, a way to infiltrate every task that we do in America.

For fun, I did a quick search for ads at gas stations, and found that some pumps even have video screens so that customers can pump gas and watch ads at the same time. Have you seen any? Here is a statement from the web site of Blue Line Media, a company that sells gas station advertising:

Advertising at a gas station is a great way to reach drivers in a captive setting. Drivers are standing around for an average of five to 10 minutes pumping gas -- during which they can view gas stations ads, such as ads on top of the gas pump.

Like drivers at the pump, children can be captive audiences in their everyday settings. And on that note, this post will follow yesterday's theme of meaningful quotes, this time regarding children, advertising and commercialism.

What I would love is to have any boy in the world who thinks of pirates to think of…Disney pirates.
- Robert Iger, president, The Walt Disney Company

It isn't enough to just advertise on television... You've got to reach kids throughout their day - in school, as they're shopping at the mall... or at the movies. You've got to become part of the fabric of their lives.

- Corporate marketer Sharon Beder, as quoted in the book "Global Spin."

If you own this child at an early age... you can own this child for years to come.

- Mike Searles, Kids 'R' Us president

We need desperately, I feel, a noncommercial alternative to what commercialism is trying to do to us. I'm not for censorship, but I'm certainly for self-censorship when it comes to producing or purveying products to America's children. I think that for people who make anything for children, their first thought should be: Would I want my child to see, hear or touch this? And if the answer is no, just don't make it.

- "Mister" Fred Rogers 

Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV. Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption.”
― Norman Mailer

“Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?”
― Sidney Poitier, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography 

Source: Media Literacy and GoodReads