Born to buy: the commercialized child and the new consumer culture

TLDR

Children’s spending power has grown to $30 billion in direct purchases and $600 billion in influence, with advertising spending exceeding $12 billion annually and targeting children across schools, museums, and the internet. The book investigates how advertisers target children by revealing industry research, messaging, and marketing tactics and evaluating their effects. Using first‑hand research within the advertising industry, the authors expose the strategies employed and assess their impact on child consumers.

Abstract

Over the last fifteen years children's spending power has mushroomed to an estimated USD30 billion in direct purchases and another USD600 billion of influence over parental purchases. Advertising and marketing has exploded alongside expenditures and now totals more than USD12 billion a year. Ads targeted at children are virtually everywhere - in schools, museums and on the internet - and strategies for capturing the child wallet have become ever more sophisticated. Marketers are intruding into a child's most private space, organizing stealthy peer-to-peer viral marketing efforts, and using high tech scientific research methodologies. Together, these trends have led to a pervasive commercialisation of childhood in the West. By eighteen months babies can recognize logos, by two they ask for products by brand name. During their nursery school years children will request an average of twenty-five products a day, by the time they enter primary school the average child can identify 200 logos and children between the ages of six and twelve spend more time shopping than reading, attending youth groups, playing outdoors or spending time in household conversation. On the basis of first-hand research inside the advertising industry, BORN TO BUY lays bare the research, messages and marketing strategies being used to target children, and assesses the impact of those efforts.