Don’t blame advertising for your kids

All over the world, advertising stands accused of turning children into moneygrubbing, materialistic little monsters. Scores of pressure groups, do-gooders and myriad moral custodians of our society all point with conviction at ads for iPods, cellphones, designer jeans, Big Macs and Nike running shoes and scream: Guilty, off with their heads!

And canny politicians, quick to spot opportunities for vote-catching by the bushel, can’t wait to roll out the chopping block and wield the axe by passing legislation limiting, restricting or banning advertising altogether. Sweden, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Quebec, among many others, have outlawed advertising to kids.

Those health warnings on cigarette packets that smokers worldwide seem to ignore completely are now going up on liquor bottles, packets of sweets and fast food menus. Australia, New Zealand, the USA, France and Brazil want to ban fast food ads altogether, and in more countries that I am able to mention no sports star, celebrity or cartoon character is allowed to endorse anything advertised to children. And from what I can gather, the world’s fastest growing nanny-state, South Africa, would just like to ban the whole advertising shebang.

Wow! After 40 years of market research showing me how incredibly difficult it is to get kids or even grown-ups to actually take any notice of an ad, let alone react to it, I now find all those pressure groups and politicians telling me that advertising is the mother of all powerful persuaders. None of them seem to have ever bothered with an even rudimentary study of the complexities of advertising. But, by heaven, they’re all experts.

What worries me about putting all this blame on ads generally and TV advertising in particular, is that when I was a teenager in the 1950s we also drove our parents dilly, almost preferring suicide to not being able to be seen wearing the latest stovepipe trousers, blue suede shoes and flaunting the latest Elvis record within nano-seconds of it coming off the presses. We were just as materialistic in those days as our kids are today. The only difference is that in the 1950s there was no advertising for stove-pipe pants, blue suede shoes or the latest Elvis record. There was no TV and only one commercial radio station that only advertised things like soap powder and toothpaste to adults. It wasn’t advertising, you see, but pure peer pressure. I have yet to see an ad for crystal meth, known in South Africa as Tik, the drug that is destroying so many young lives in this country.

And in their frenzy to pillory advertising, all those pressure groups and politicians seem to ignore the fact that peer pressure has far more influence on children than parents, priests, Hollywood and advertising put together.

What seems to be happening is that modern parents are trying as much as they can to abdicate their responsibility to nurture and protect the morality and health of their children. Because it gets in the way of doing much more exciting and fun things. Not to mention careers and sport. And with advertising being such a politically correct and rewarding thing to complain about, well, if one can get government to take responsibility for protecting kids from materialism, junk food, and the odd smoke behind the school bog  why not?

But something that has had a noticeable impact on children is television. In essence it has reduced the overall average attention span of children from an hour to roughly 45 minutes in the past seven years.

So, what has caused this erosion in attention spans, now noted by psychologists, teachers and occupational therapists alike? According to some psychologists the youth of today have become fragmented in the sense that their attention is drawn by myriad demands on their sensory systems. One of the fundamental reasons for this phenomenon is the infused television culture and more specifically the television remote control device. The latter enables children to change channels every few seconds and surf indiscriminately until something holds their attention. In other words, they are not forced to attend or focus on any one specific activity at a time. That which does not engage them immediately is simply zapped.

They are, according to a panel of psychologists, known to multi-task proficiently while watching television, many times doing their homework while still attending to their favourite programmes, and sometimes even engaging in other technologically engrossing activities such as playing computer games.

However, no longitudinal information-processing studies have been conducted to date to confirm whether all the information entering the brain while multi-tasking is actually processed efficiently and stored in long-term memory for later retrieval. In other words, are these kids actually exhibiting the enhanced ability to memorise and ultimately utilise the information that they are ostensibly absorbing?

Frankly, I reckon there is nothing to beat good old parental common sense when it comes to bringing up kids.