Selling America's Kids:
Commercial Pressures on Kids of the 90's

CONTENTS Intro Summary In-School Promotions Celebrity Endorsements Kids' Clubs Product Placements and Advertorials Licensing and Cross-selling Recommendations

Both product placements in movies and advertorials in magazines create brand awareness and communicate promotional messages. Both are less-than-forthright ways of selling to adults. Yet these techniques also pervade the media kids enjoy with their guard down. Products sold in this fashion include tobacco and alcohol.

Product placement picked up momentum when Reese's Pieces were portrayed as the favorite food of America's beloved alien, E.T. Fees charged by movie producers for placing brand-name products in movies range from $10,000 to $1,000,000. For example, Disney's Buena Vista Distributing offered to place brand-name products in Mr. Destiny for $20,000 to $60,000, depending on how the product was to be shown -- $60,000 if the star actually uses the product, less if it's just shown.

In some cases, movie studios and producers accept merchandise or promotional support in exchange for placing a product. Burger King, shown in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, promoted that movie before it was released. Coca-Cola, the on-screen sponsor of Tom Cruise's race car in Days of Thunder, planned a multi-million dollar promotion built around the movie.

Product Placement In Movies

Pepsi-Cola frequently places its products in movies. Its products have appeared in Ferris Buellers Day Off, Stand and Deliver, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Lean on Me, Cocoon: The Return, Flashdance, Back to the Future II and Big, among others. Some additional product placements in or planned for upcoming movies include:

• Domino's Pizza in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Nintendo Video Games and Mattel Inc.'s Power Glove in The Wizard.
• Chevrolet, Hardee's, Coca-Cola and Exxon in Days of Thunder.
• Burger King and Coors Beer in Gremlins.
• McDonald's and Coca-Cola in Mac and Me.
• Toyota, Miller, Nike, AT&T, USA Today, and Pizza Hut in Back to the Future II.
• Ray Bans and Seagrams Champagne in Top Gun.
• Sanyo, Wheaties and Nike in Rocky III.
• Miller products&emdash;High Life, Lite and Genuine Draft&emdash;in Caddyshack II.

Cigarette and Alcohol Placement

The National Coalition on TV Violence, an Illinois-based organization, monitored 150 films in 1989 and found tobacco use in 83 percent of them; alcohol consumption in 93 percent. The following list identifies a number of movies that have brand-specific cigarette smoking:

• Marlboro in Crocodile Dundee
• Century in Legal Eagles
• Chesterfield in Heaven Help Us
• Lucky Strike, Kent in Beverly Hills Cop
• Camel in Desperately Seeking Susan
• Marlboro in Children of a Lesser God
• Marlboro in Tin Men
• Marlboro in White Knights
• Benson and Hedges in Agnes of God
• Pall Mall in Heavenly Kid
• Marlboro in Superman II
• Marlboro in Baby
• Carlton in Splash
• Lucky Strike, Camel in Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• Marlboro in Crimes of the Heart
• Marlboro in Risky Business
• Salem in Batteries not Included

In 1989, Ohio Congressman Tom Luken introduced a bill to ban cigarette companies from paying to have their brands in films. Luken claimed that Philip Morris and the Liggett Group paid $350,000 to place Lark cigarettes in the James Bond film License to Kill and $42,500 to have Marlboro appear in Superman II; that Liggett paid $30,000 for its Eve cigarette to appear in the movie Supergirl.

Product Placement in Print and Games

Hobbico paid thousands of dollars in licensing fees for its remote control car, Kyosho, to appear in the story line of Archie comic books. The Wall Street Journal quoted a Hobbico director of corporate merchandising as saying he hoped that young entry-level buyers would "graduate into the more complicated products." In other ventures, 25 advertisers paid $30,000 each to appear as part of the board game "It's Only Money," introduced by ESM Marketing Group. Pepsi's logo appears in the Nintendo Video Game, "Magic Johnson's Fast Break."

The opportunity to reach children with print ads has increased over the last decade. There are now some 160 children's magazines, up from 85 in 1986. An increasing number of magazines aimed at children and teens carry advertising. For example, Children's Television Workshop's 3-2-1-Contact now carries ads, as does the year-old Sports Illustrated for Kids

. But many of these ads are not playing it straight with kids. Recent examples of ads that try to look like editorial matter in kids' magazines include:

• An Instant Quaker Oatmeal ad that looks like a full-page Popeye comic appeared in Kid City (ages 6 to 10), 3-2-1-Contact (ages 8 to 14), Alf and Barbie. Called upon to demonstrate courage, Popeye proclaims, "CAN THE SPINACH! I want me Instant Quaker Oatmeal."
  
• A Hershey's ad that looks like a maze puzzle appeared in Sports Illustrated for Kids (ages 8 to 13), 3-2-1-Contact, and Kid City. At the top of the maze is a collection of Hershey products&emdash;syrups, mixes, chocolate milk. Scattered on either side of the maze are more chocolate products, along with signs that note "chocolate peak" and "chocolate falls." The copy asks kids to "...count the number of spoons, straws, Hershey's syrup cans, bottles, Hershey's chocolate milk mix cans and Hershey's milk cartons."
  
• A Crest toothpaste ad that looks like an activity appeared in Sports Illustrated for Kids, 3-2-1-Contact, and Barbie. A brightly colored TV is filled with electronic squiggles and surrounded by lightning bolts. The copy invites kids to "... fold these pages at the arrows. And the sparkles in this tube will be clear." When you fold the pages, you find a picture of Crest Toothpaste.
  
• A Colgate Junior ad that looks like a board game appeared in 3-2-1-Contact and Kid City. The game asks true or false questions about dental health and Colgate Junior toothpaste, including: "Colgate Junior foams a lot more than adult toothpaste. T or F?"
  
• Foot Locker ads that look like sports quizzes appeared in Sports Illustrated for Kids. In addition to asking trivia questions, the ads also advertise "the hottest styles from Nike, Reebok, British Knights and L.A. Gear." Another Foot Locker ad looks like a puzzle with hidden objects.
  
• An Epilady Mini-Razor ad that looks like an advice column called "Ask Loren" appeared in Seventeen magazine. It promises "Your Personal Answers to Questions About Make-up and Fashion." Among questions about swimsuit selection and hairstyles, there's one touting the Epilady Mini. Seventeen also carried a 20-page advertising section for Maybelline that imitated a fashion and beauty magazine, complete with its own cover and table of contents.
  
• Several magazines associated with kids' clubs or toys are loaded with advertorials. Nintendo Power magazine has been described as a full-length advertorial, with promotions for all of Nintendo's products.

Media critic Mark Crispin Miller expressed concern about the saturation of our environment with hidden advertising. These product plugs, writes Miller, "work as subliminal inducements because their context is ostensibly a movie, not an ad, so that each of them comes sidling toward us dressed up as non-advertising." Particularly in the case of children, such hidden advertising has great potential to mislead and deceive.

Advertising invites skepticism. When others urge us to do what they want, one is alerted to the possibility that their wishes may not be in our best interest. But product placements and advertorials disarm children and keep their defenses down. Use of such techniques to advertise to kids demonstrates a failure of marketers to play fair, and a failure of self-monitoring by the media as a way of protecting kids from undue pressures to buy. As such, it invites regulation.