Over the past few months we have had the opportunity to work with a really great company called “Micro-Kites”. They make exactly what you’d think… tiny kites. Working with a toy company got me thinking about my own experiences as a kid, and the way the advertising back then has shaped my adult mind. Sure the tools are different these days, but the adverting we employ will undoubtedly affect the way kids think about their world. Here are just a couple of ways that I believe I am different because of advertising.
Picture this, you’re 8 years old, it’s Saturday morning, and it’s early. Like 7:00 early. Dad or Mom or the pair has been busy all week long. This is their first chance to sleep in and face the day with a mind that isn’t drenched in exhaustion. You have, at this early age, interacted with the television enough to know its intricacies. You know which way to point the bunny ears to get a clear enough picture to make out Papa Smurf’s distinguishing beard. You definitely know where the “on” button is and how to get to the right channels to be sufficiently cartooned.
As a kid you don’t know this, but the TV has made an unspoken pact with your parents. Translated into words, it goes something like this: “Look, I’ll watch your kids for a few hours on Saturday. I’ll give them morally neutral programming that doesn’t breach anyone’s belief systems and you will sleep like a champ. In exchange, during this time when I have their whole-hearted and earnest attention, I will use this trust to sell them whatever I think may interest them. “
These hours of solace for your parents changed your view of the world. For one thing, the once undistinguishable cereal boxes became appealing for the goodies you knew lay inside. As a cartooned kid, I knew those box contents like the back of my TV dial. Every week, that cereal-eating frog or milk-drinking rabbit helped me experience these things before I had ever come in physical contact with them. This presented a secondary effect of the “Saturday Morning TV Pact” for parents that sounds something like: “I hope the weekly shopping is being done on Saturday, because you will need that extra sleep to fend off the consumption monster that lives inside of your kid now.”
Another side effect of this secret pact is that over time, it created super-savvy, tried-and-tested, ad-filter-wielding adult consumers. Allow me to explain by way of example:
When I was 8 years old, I saw a commercial on TV that swallowed my brain for months on end. In hindsight, it is embarrassing. I cannot tell you why it grabbed me in such an all-encompassing way, but it seriously did. There was this board game called “Gotcha”.
The ad showed these kids sitting in a circle around what I saw as a real-life ball and chain. The kids pushed down a timer that was stationed in the center of the ball. As the timer counted down to their imminent demise, it would mutter “gonnagetcha gonnagetcha gonnagetcha”. These kids where throwing dice hoping to roll some magic combination of numbers that would appease the beast and allow the handcuff to release them from their certain life-sentence. The commercial climaxes when the muttering ends abruptly, “gonnagetcha gonnagetcha GOTCHA”.
The game players who gain their freedom scream with excitement and relief, but not that one kid whose wrist was still in the clutches of this godforsaken ball and chain. The commercial doesn’t show this, but my 8-year-old logic assumed that the cops came to get this kid and throw him in prison for all of eternity. In my mind this game had all the tension and release of an empty-chambered round of Russian Roulette.
Cut to my birthday a couple of months later. I grabbed a gift and cavemanned the wrapping paper to reveal the crown jewel of my birthday gifts: Gotcha. But something was wrong. The box was tiny. When I actually got inside the packaging I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was no medieval answer to crime and punishment. It wasn't even the size of the novel "Crime and Punishment". This was just some cabbage-patch-kid-head-sized plastic blue ball. The chain was simply 2 plastic yellow links attached to a red handcuff that would have made even the most incapable version of Houdini laugh. The timer in the middle did not say “gonnagecha gonnagecha gonnagecha” much less the most exciting “GOTCHA”.
I would’ve settled for no “gonnagechas”--but not even a single “gotcha” –was unacceptable. When I aired my grievances to my parents after playing one half of one game, they didn’t see the problem. What a let down.
For me, this devastating revelation was just one of many that would occur in my experiences as a consumer. Every game I got that had no payoff, every food I tasted that sucked, and every crappy version of the toy that was pictured on the outside of the cereal box were teaching me something.
30 years later, my adult mind has done the math and knows the difference between fact and fiction. I am now capable of knowing the purpose of ads. I can discern the difference between my parents telling me one thing, and the TV showing me something else. In my grown up mind I am skeptical. I am the 1985 defensive line of the Chicago Bears. My ad filter is impenetrable.
I believe that our current generation of kids will develop an ad forcefield that is way more advanced than my crude ad filter. I predict that they will be able to zap ads out of the sky with a single thought by 2042. Sure, they have TiVo power to zip past TV commercials, but they still have the Internet to contend with.
In the current moment though, they are still testing and learning. This 8-10 year window is a precious thing. I have the opportunity to excite rather than disappoint and to build belief rather than skepticism. My Gotcha moment repeatedly reminds me that selling to kids is not something to be taken lightly.
Todd Cooper is a Project Manager at elevator and an all-around champion of the people.
