• by September 18, 2000

By Anya Khait

Last Monday, The Federal Trade Commission released a report that found that the movies, music, and video industries aggressively market adult-rated materials to underage children. The FTC found that 80% of R-rated movies, 70% of “mature” video games and all 55 music recordings with labels for “Explicit” content were openly marketing to children under the age of 17. For Madison Avenue, this was not news, and as federal regulators decided to take a closer look at the amount of sex and violence beamed into living rooms by TV networks, the advertising industry gathered at the Golden Marble Awards to choose the best advertising campaign targeting children.

Naturally, a group of protestors gathered across the street.

Carrying signs like “Stop Selling Violence To Kids,” “I'm Not A Target Market: I'm A Child,” “Schools Must Be Commercial Free Zones,” and “Our Children Are Not For Sale,” a group of healthcare professionals, educators, child advocates, and parents led by the Judge Baker Children’s Center held a press conference on 42nd Street in New York, designed to alert the public to the dangers of marketing to children.

According to the demonstrators, the Golden Marble “celebrates advertising without questioning the ethics of marketing to children and rewards advertisers for effective campaigns, regardless of how the products they sell impact the well-being of children.”

Past Golden Marble winners included campaigns for violent toys, fast food, and caffeinated soft drinks high in sugar. “The intensification of marketing is harming children and families,” said Susan Linn, Associate Director at the Media Center of Judge Baker Children's Center and Instructor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School at the scantily attented press conference. “We are protesting the Golden Marble Awards because we think that it is wrong to reward creativity when its in the service of manipulating children. Children are not a consumer group,” she added. Linn said that violence isn't the only thing that is harming children – “marketing junk food to children when the American Academy of Pediatrics says that childhood obesity is a major public health problem and 1 in every four children is overweight or obese,” she said. The demonstrators’ recommendations for positive change for the industry included a call for the White House to convene a conference on corporate marketing and its effects on children and to have the National Institutes of Health fund research on the psychological and health consequences of intensive marketing to children.

As well as a ban on advertising products to children known to be harmful to them, protestors asked for federally regulated marketing of all toy-based media programs, uniform age-based ratings, across movies, TV programs, and video and computer games and toys marketed with them, as well as market research conducted on children to be held to the same standards of human subjects as academic research.