"At the rate that technology is advancing, people will be implanting chips in our children to advertise directly into their brains and tell them what kind of products to buy," Hillary Clinton said at a Kaiser Family Foundation conference.
She said the fastest growing advertising market is the 6- and under set, and
that children's health is already being hurt by products like Camel's
candy-flavored cigarettes and junk food sold with tips for video games - used
to sell more junk food.
"People are spending billions and billions of dollars enticing children basically to be obsessed with food," she said. "These foods are almost universally unhealthy." Clinton has offered legislation to study the effects of the "advertising-saturated, media-intense" world on kids.
I am not a Hillary lover. But she is fundamentally right about the harm advertising is doing to our nation’s children and making us a nation of fat people.
Of course, legions of marketers would violently disagree with me.
Why do many in marketing have a knee-jerk reaction to claims that advertising can be harmful to children and other members of society?
Look at the issue this way.
People who own guns and hunt are anti-gun control. They defend their position by citing the Constitution and claiming that guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
People who like pot are anti-pot control, and see government desire to keep its use illegal an unwarranted reach into people’s personal lives – especially when alcohol, which causes greater harm, continues to be legal.
Companies that depend on low income employees don’t like to see the minimum wage raised, and claim that to raise it from levels set a decade ago will greatly harm the economy..
People who have a vested interest in something tend to be against any restriction on their enjoyment of that something and often invoke the general welfare as a basis for their thinking.
Indeed, it has been said that the public man is equal to his private motives, transferred to the public arena and rationalized in the name of the public welfare.
Hardly
anyone wants to be grossly fat. Obesity is not simply a matter of failed
character.
Obesity has many causes. Some arise from metabolic disorders. Others emanate
from the brain. Some people have weaker impulse resistance than others simply
as a matter of genetic inheritance. Other people by virtue of behavioral
conditioning have come to depend on food the way alcoholics depend on booze
(remember, many alcoholics have a genetic foundation for their addiction.) I’m
not proposing that people addicted to food or alcohol bear no responsibility
for their addictions, but I think marketers should ponder their own role in
weakening people’s resistance to habits that promote unhealthiness.
It's a self-serving cop-out for any marketer to absolve the marketing profession of any role in the obesity pandemic. Perhaps were a marketer who absolves marketing of any responsibility for the national obesity problem a physician instead of a marketer, he or she might be more inclined to see the matter differently.
I am embarrassed by much of what goes on in my profession. We marketers should seriously contemplate the meaning of the finding in a recent poll that placed marketers just above used car salespeople in terms of trust. And why should we be highly trusted? We “target” with not a tinge of guilt children (as well as others) to sell products that are unhealthy. We renounce any claim of responsibility by saying what children consume is up to their parents.
Hillary is right.
As an observer of the workplace, obeisty has a mutifaceted impact on issues such as employee performance, health and insurance, customer relations, attendance , and safety. Perhaps you have already explored this topic. If not, I'd be glad to contribute or will address this on my blog.
Regards,
Bob Handwerk
RLH & ASSOCIATES, LLC.
Posted by: bob handwerk | July 31, 2006 at 08:05 AM
David, they are not only FAT but also friendless. You see that most children (worldwide) by now are eating too much and spend all the time watching TVs or playing electronic games, 'even out of Internet'. They have very little time for outdoor activities, or to do home works.
In such cases, how they can proceed with their studies and gain experiences as how to build new contacts or to 'cope' with different life aspects in the future?
If the marketers have succeeded to implant chips in our children's brain, what is the problem with teachers? Don't they can use the same techniques to perform their job perfectly?
Posted by: Abdol Rahim Mirza | August 06, 2006 at 11:26 AM