Monday, March 10th, 2008...10:46 am
Teach, Your Children Well…
How to Inoculate Your Children Against Advertising - Get Rich Slowly
This is a great guest post over at GRS by Lisa Tiffin. I grew up in the “golden age” of advertising for kids - where they were able to make toys look like they did all these amazing things and only had to run .002 seconds of fine print. I can remember being lulled into wanting some of these things - thank goodness my parents thought like Lisa did and refused to purchase such items.
Now that I’m older (and a tiny bit wiser), I look around at the kids of today and wonder how they deal with the constant barrage of advertising - backed by billion dollar budgets and copious amounts of psychological research designed to wring every last eyeball out of their campaigns. I thought Lisa’s techniques were a good way to get the kids thinking critically and maybe plant the seed inside them so that they can become smart consumers in the future. I don’t have kids, but if/when I do, I’ll definitely have to take a few pages from Ms. Tiffin’s playbook.
1 Comment
March 10th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Found you via Lisa’s site! Shaping Youth deals w/media & marketing’s impact on kids and we specialize in this kind of ‘inoculation’ of media literacy, taking it a step further into ‘counter-marketing.’
It’s kind of wild, since many of us are trained in advertising/branding and know all the ‘gimmicks’ it’s our way of having a new org around to ‘fight fire with fire!’ —(I, for example, wrote the VisaBuxx ‘prepaid card for teens branding initially, an education-based way to teach kids about money, which I later see was barely ‘marketed’ so I feel a bit ‘duped’ into producing creative that’s most likely more for PR purposes; so I shifted to the nonprofit sector to start finding ways to embed media literacy INTO the pop culture zeitgeist itself…(much like that new virtual world/financial literacy site) —
Anyway, we’re hoping to create open source/digital downloads (hands-on entertainment games) accessible to all parents/youth groups/slumber parties you name it…to “inoculate” big time. For more go to our category on counter-marketing on the sidebar, (also ‘consumerism’ has considerable overlap) Meanwhile, if you have any good ‘pro-social financial models’ where we can get a solid bank/sponsor of sorts to underwrite our work so it’s avail for free to all, lemme know!
Best, Amy Jussel
Founder/Exec. Director
http://www.ShapingYouth.org
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