Via:  AzSustainability.com

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I suppose the average person would think me a bit odd. Or even extreme, as a parent. You see, I don’t allow T.V. during the week. On weekends, we might, just might watch a DVD if the weather is lousy, or we’ve had an exhausting weekend not spent watching T.V. the rest of the time.

I also try to choose DVDs that are old enough that the frenzy of licensed products has abated enough to be able to get through a visit to the store without a hundred repetitions of “No, we don’t need that.” Or, “Sure, it’s a character you know. But the cereal is crap. We can get a coloring book instead.” It’s enough to make you hate television. It really is.
If you haven’t paid much attention to the marketing onslaught aimed at your kids, well, The Kaiser Family Foundation report, “Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States,” has some pretty frightening statistics that might change your mind. The Small Screen with the Big Impact:

• Based on a national average viewing time of four hours per day for a child, over a year’s time he is exposed to nearly 30,000 commercials.
• That statistic is based on the maximum regulated amount of commercials that can be shown during an hour of programming. Not all networks adhere to this maximum. In 2004, children’s network Nickelodean violated this regulation 591 times. They were fined $1 million, far less than the amount netted from the additional commercials.
• Much of the television programming and commercials are aimed at younger children who are unable to differentiate the marketing messages from the program content. Given that most of these ads are fun, fast-paced and use licensed or branded characters, the similarity between the two makes this differentiation even harder to distinguish.
• Nearly one-third of children under the age of six have a television in their bedroom.
• Two-thirds of children aged eight and older have a television in their bedrooms.
• Between the ages of two and four, on average, children view approximately two hours of television per day. This increases throughout childhood and peaks at adolescence. Tweens and teens begin to replace television use with internet use, or will multi-task, watching television while online.
• Sixty percent of all the meals families eat together (and those are not many) are eaten with the television on.
• Of all the commercials that children are exposed to, nearly half are for food items such as sweetened cereals, candy, soda, and fast food. Which means 15,000 messages per year, on average.

Environmentally Friendly Biofuel?

A Swedish bus company is marketing it’s use of environmentally friendly biofuels by depicting humans drinking from petrol pumps.

Needless to say the Swedish Poison Information Center is up in arms over the Flygbussarna Airport Coach company’s advertisements.

The company operates shuttle busses to seven airports throughout Sweden, and has increased it use of rapeseed bio-diesel in its fleet. The company plans to use only biofuels within three years, and is using the campaign of posters and ads on its website insinuating the fuel is safe enough to drink.

Swedish officials say the fear is that children who see the ad may just want to try it out, stick a fuel nozzle into their mouths and have a sip. The results, according to the Poison Information Center, could be catastrophic.

The bus company, meanwhile, is quoted as saying, “children see a lot of violence on TV they never go and shot people afterwards.”

Good advertising strategy, or a dangerous one? What do you think?

Source of Image and content. The Local

Steve Lambert/Anti-Advertising Agency
c/o Eyebeam OpenLab
540 W.21st ST.
New York, NY 10011

You will receive a package full of “you don’t need it” stickers to plaster on ads in your community.

Via: fashionindie

MC is well-suited for this project, she spent 20 years in corporate marketing, working for Fortune 500 companies as well as start-ups. She’s taught marketing and public relations at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hong Kong in China.

Here’s our interview:

Visit Ecopreneurist.

40,000 television commercials a year. That’s what the average American child sees. That’s around 100 ads for every 4 hours of television.

What’s that, you say? No TV in your house? Oh, but your kids will still see plenty of ads. There’s online adver-gaming. There are ads on school buses. Ads in the classroom. There’s product placement in movies. Not to mention billboards, posters, textbook covers, …it’s all fair game.

Week 3 of the Healthy Children, Healthy Planet series, the 7-part parenting discussion course from the Northwest Earth Institute, was all about ads. Namely, the pervasiveness of ads in our children’s lives, and whether it is even possible to create ad-free spaces in their lives.

What’s clear is that advertising is different in both quantity and quality than it’s ever been before. The amount of money spent on marketing to children — $2 billion annually — is close to 10 times greater than it was even in 1990. And the nature of it has changed, too — mostly, because there’s no place safe from it. Not schools. Not movies. Not even your daughter’s sleepover party.

Why does it matter if your kid gets bombarded with ads? It matters, because research shows that ads make your child unhealthy. They also make your child unhappy. And they weaken families by creating a wedge between parents and children (let’s pause to reflect on the fact that advertisers claim that it’s parental responsibility to protect their children from, say, junk food, the most heavily advertised product, even while advertisers try at every turn to undermine parental authority. Oh, don’t get me started).

What can a parent do about it, though? Some say we should ban advertising to children altogether, as has been done in Sweden. But short of that, there’s no single, simple solution.

Turn off the TV. Sure, that’s a good start. But it’s only a start. Limit computer time. Get involved with your schools so you know what’s being advertised there, and by whom. Teach your children about what ads are, how they work, what strategies advertisers use, and how the ads make your children feel. Others have tried that strategy, and found it worked. And there’s another thing we can do: spend a little more time with the kids, away from the media — out of doors, or reading together, maybe — helping them discover the stuff that matters.

The conversation brought me back to one I’d had that morning, as I was driving my daughter to school. She’d asked about these “parent meetings” I’d been attending. She’d wanted to know what we talked about.

“Well, today we’re talking about advertisements.”

“What’s the matter with advertisements?”

“Well…” I paused. “Remember last summer?” I asked. “When you caught that frog, the one you named Tony?” I wasn’t sure if she’d remembered, but I remembered it well. We’d spent a week at a cottage by a lake, and she’d spent hours digging around in the reeds, looking for snakes and water bugs. One afternoon, she caught a frog, and was absolutely thrilled. She named him Tony, and she whispered to him, and studied him closely, wonder in her eyes.

Then, when it was time, she let him go, watching him hop toward the water.

Sitting in the car now, she exclaimed “Tony! He was the best frog ever!”

“Right. He was. And the problem with ads is that they make you think that products like Barbie dolls are really important. But they’re not. They just take you away from the really fun things…things like catching Tony.”

She smiled, and I could tell she was thinking about that week, the one with fresh lake water, and canoes, and tiny fish that nibbled her toes if she stood still, and lakeside blueberries fresh from the bush….and in the midst of all, a beautiful bright green frog named Tony.

“I get it, Mom.” For that moment, at least, she did.

We’ve got plenty more talking to do as time goes on. But at least the conversation’s started.

Related posts:
Healthy Children, Healthy Planet Week One

Consumerism vs. Family Ritual: Healthy Children, Healthy Planet 2

Burt’s Bees will debut a breakthrough advertising campaign, “Natural Vs.” in early February 2008. Created to address confusion among consumers over what constitutes a truly natural product, …each (ad will) depict the difference between benefits of natural ingredients in Burt’s Bees products vs. the surprising — even shocking — ingredients found in non-natural personal care products.

The two ads are specific in naming ingredients found in competitive products. The lip balm ad defines petroleum, found in many lip care products, as a “nonrenewable hydrocarbon made from crude oil… sometimes used to stop corrosion on car batteries.”

Wow!

“All we want is to focus on educating the consumer,” said Mike Indursky, the firm’s chief marketing and strategic officer. “We have no intention at all to impugn the integrity of any other brand. All the ingredients named in the ads are [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] approved, but they shouldn’t be in products that call themselves natural.”

This has of course created a buzz across the web and beyond. The Greenwash Brigade at American Public Media says:

Good for Burt’s Bees who has decided to “show one ingredient vs. another ingredient,” rather than attacking other brands… personal care products are the least regulated FDA products on the market.

However those in the industry question this new approach. Retailwire wonders:

It’s not unusual for one brand to claim superiority over another using comparative advertising. In the case of the new ad campaign from Burt’s Bees, however, there is a twist in that the brand points out the differences in the ingredients of competing products without mentioning them by name. Is Burt’s Bees on the right track with its new ad campaign? Is drawing attention to specific “natural” ingredients wise?

What impact will this have on advertising and marketing by eco-entrepreneurs? Will you change your strategy? Will this help or hurt your efforts to promote your brand?

What do you think?

Related posts: Who Owns Your Favorite Organic Brand? 

They're calling on all ad agencies to create an original 30-second spot with a green, or environmentally friendly focus. The point of the contest is to familiarize the agency teams with the user-generated content idea for advertising. Brands like Doritos (aired during the Super Bowl) and Dove (aired during the Oscars) have already experimented with the user-generated ads and have garnered a lot of press because of it.