Cyber seducers? - advertising on the Internet

Reason, August-Sept, 1996 by Julie DeFalco

The latest on-line outrage

If you thought the croaking Budweiser frogs were a bad influence on children, and Joe the smoking camel was even worse, prepare yourself for...Tony the Tiger? In cyberspace, no less.

The World Wide Web has been an enormous boon for scaremongers, offering a continual array of frightening firsts that allegedly create unprecedented threats to our safety - and especially our children's safety. A report released this spring fingers yet another Internet threat: big, hairy spiders of advertising lurk on the World Wide Web, threatening all the Miss (and Master) Muffets out there. The report, from the Center for Media Education, accuses Internet sites sponsored by various manufacturers of kid-oriented products such as breakfast cereal and toys of being not just new places to advertise goods but "highly manipulative forms of advertising, often disguised as information or entertainment, [which] could intrude into every corner of the lives of children."

The CME is a Washington-based group "founded in 1991 to promote the democratic potential of the electronic media." Its report, titled "Web of Deception," is a petition to the Federal Trade Commission. Since the Internet is still in its development stage, the CME wants the FTC to take advantage of this "window of opportunity to develop safeguards to protect children."

The CME is offering "guiding principles for regulation" to ensure that "a complete ban on children's advertising in cyberspace is not necessary." But its alternative doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for advertisers. Among other things, the CME suggests that "advertising should not be disguised as content" on companies' Web sites; no promotion or advertising should be allowed on children's content areas, or "play pages"; and there should be no links between these play pages and company pages, although "discrete underwriting should be allowed." No direct interaction between product spokescharacters (such as Kellogg's Tony the Tiger) and kids should be permitted, and marketers would not be permitted to tailor ads to - or "microtarget" - individual children.

Complaints about the dangers of advertising to children might seem familiar. The CME is the designated successor to Action for Children's Television, a group of crusaders experienced in decrying the evils of advertising. ACT was well known in the '70s and '80s for lobbying against ads for pretty much everything targeted at children, including children's vitamins and games of chance in specially marked packages of sugary cereal. But ACT's greatest glory was its near success in banning ads on children's television.

In 1978, the FTC proposed an ACT-promoted ban on children's ads because, the agency said, kids are "too young to understand the selling purpose" of ads during Saturday morning cartoons. ACT leader Peggy Charren was jubilant. "Never before has there been a better opportunity to help change a system that permits children to be manipulated for private gain," she said. Charren was glowingly portrayed as a David facing many Goliaths; a laudatory Washington Post article noted that she had come under "incredible buffering by the broadcasting, sugar, and food lobbies."

Although the effort ultimately failed, ACT received some fabulous consolation prizes. Now broadcasters are not allowed to advertise toys during shows which feature those toys (like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers), and they must clearly separate commercials from the program (for example, by singing, "After these messages, we'll be right back").

Today, the technology is different, but the hype is the same: Advertisers are bewitching our children. Parents are helpless. Only government can save our children.

The most revealing thing about the new CME report is not what it contains but what it omits. It has plenty of lurid descriptions of "manipulative," "exploitative," and "seductive" advertising, but the report produces no evidence of damage. It merely asserts that "a number of marketing and advertising practices...are potentially harmful to children" (emphasis added).

Moreover, the report is vague on the details of just how these "new forms of manipulation and exploitation" are really new. The CME asserts that Internet advertising is unique, but this is only true in the sense that radio ads once differed from print ads, and color TV ads differed from those shown in black and white. Web sites are simply a new generation of advertising, and contrary to the CME's fears, they are actually less intrusive than are television and print ads.

Some children's activity pages do have links to advertising sites, but they are labeled and easy to avoid. For example, one play page is sponsored by Microsoft. A bar at the top of the page says so. When you click on it, you go to Microsoft's children's page. If you don't like it, you click back to the original page. This exercise is only a problem if you are worried that Microsoft might "have activities designed to keep children engaged for extended periods of time," that is, that Microsoft might entertain your kids. At any rate, in many cases a child would have to type in the Web address of a particular company's Web site to even get to the "incessant hucksterism" that the CME laments.