Juliet Schor: Self
Quotes
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Juliet Schor : I interviewed a number of people who sat and watched children take baths and showers, watched how they interact with shampoo and soap and health and beauty products as that category is called, in order to go back and write a report for their clients on what to do with the packaging. It's creepy. It's just absolutely creepy the way children are being dissected and put under the microscope by marketers.
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Juliet Schor : They do blink tests on kids, for example. They develop ads, and then see how frequently a kid blinks or turns their eyes away. And when they see the kid blinking more, they change the ad to make it more mesmerizing. There's stuff they just can't take their eyes off, and it's not an accident. They've gone over and over and over with extensive high-tech kinds of testing devices to find the precise configuration of characters, colors, music, words and so forth that kids can't resist.
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Juliet Schor : Companies have moved away from exaggerating the product characteristics to a whole new form of advertising, which is symbolic advertising. The product is pushed not on the basis of what it can do, or how it tastes, but of its social meaning. So kids are taught to want candy, or sugared cereals, or soda because it's cool. It will define them as an individual. What you buy is who you are.
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Juliet Schor : One thing that happened when the movie studios tightened up on letting kids into R movies was that the sexual content, drug content, alcohol, tobacco, profanity, adult content migrated into the PG-13 movies. So they're a lot more like what R movies used to be.
Nancy Carlsson-Paige : And a Hollywood movie that's rated for older viewers, PG-13 or R, has a whole line of toys and products marketed to children 3, 4, and 5 years old.
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Juliet Schor : [about banning youth marketing] There's no way we can really make childhood healthy in this country without a government effort. We've done it in other areas. We do it in the area of child safety. We have laws about putting helmets on kids, seat belt laws, tobacco marketing to kids. But somehow we think it's okay to make children fair game for marketers who just want to profit from them, irrespective of the impacts on their health and well-being.
