Page 140 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade7_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 2.8
continued
Chunk 2
5 At stake: $1.12 trillion. That’s the amount that kids influenced last year in
overall family spending, says James McNeal, a kid marketing consultant and author of “Kids as Consumers: A Handbook of Marketing to Children.” “Up to age 16, kids are determining most expenditures in the household,” he says. “This is very attractive to marketers.”
6 It used to be so simple. A well-placed TV spot on a Saturday-morning cartoon show or a kid-friendly image on a cereal box was all it took. No longer. The world of marketing to kids has grown extremely complex and tech-heavy. Marketers that seek new ways to target kids are aware of new calls for federal action — including voluntary marketing guidelines that would affect food marketers. Kids, who are spending less time watching TV and more time on computers or smartphones, are becoming targets online.
7 “Marketers are getting more and more devious,” says Susan Linn, director
of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a watchdog group. With the growing use of smartphones and social media, she says, “They have new avenues for targeting children that parents might miss.”
8 Even ad-savvy parents are sometimes unaware how marketers are reaching out to their children, getting around ad blockers While on the Webkinz site, Sweet recently clicked once a day for seven days on an ad for a film trailer that was posted for Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer. She says that she wasn’t really interested in the movie. But each day that she clicked it and answered three questions, she earned a virtual lime-green dresser and bulletin board for the rooms she created online for her Webkinz.
9 “I’ve got five dressers and seven bulletin boards,” says the girl. “I don’t have enough rooms to fit them all in.”
Chunk 3
10 This kind of marketing to kids drives Isabella’s mother crazy. “They’re doing
this right under the noses of parents,” says Elizabeth Sweet, a doctoral student at University of California-Davis doing her dissertation on the marketing of kids’ toys. Even so, she says, she had no idea about the video ads on Webkinz until her daughter told her.
11 “This whole planting of movie videos in the online game experience is new to me,” Sweet says. “What bothers me most is that when she first signed up for the site, I thought it was OK.”
12 Sweet has an ad-blocker app on her browser. These movie ads are woven into the site content in such a way that her daughter sees — and responds to them — anyway, she says.
13 “We occasionally introduce limited-time promotions so that our Webkinz World members can enjoy fun, unique activities and events,” says Susan McVeigh, a Ganz spokeswoman, in an e-mail.
14 But Elizabeth Sweet isn’t the only parent who’s unhappy with how and what Webkinz markets to kids.
Word CoNNeCTIoNs
Etymology
A guideline is a general
rule or principle used to set standards or determine a course of action. It comes from guide, “to lead the way,” plus line in the sense “a mark made by a pen or pencil” and was originally used in a literal sense to mean a line drawn on a surface to guide cutting or writing.
My Notes
Unit 2 • What Influences My Choices? 113
expenditures: spending, expenses
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.