• by Larry Dobrow , May 6, 2004

The advertising business has long touted the virtues of self-regulation when it comes to marketing to children. Now a mothers' group is planning to call them on their boasts, launching a grassroots campaign designed to spur the industry to do a better job of self-policing.

The group, the Mothers' Council, isn't asking for drastic changes or for the government to step in and play a larger regulatory role. Rather, it is hoping to sit down with advertisers and organizations like the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU), and plot out ways to ensure that the industry's self-regulatory policies are enforced.

"We have no desire to demonize anybody," says Enola Aird, director of the Motherhood Project at the Institute for American Values, which sponsors the Mothers' Council. "All we want to do is engage the ad industry on its own terms."

The campaign stems from a recently completed report, "A Word From the Sponsors: A Mothers' Statement to Advertisers," which the group bills as "an open letter to the advertising and marketing industry." The report chronicles the amount of marketing to which the average child is subjected every year--around 40,000 TV commercials alone--and evaluates whether the ad industry has lived up to its promises vis-à-vis self-regulation.

Not surprisingly, the report's conclusion is that it hasn't. While Aird praises CARU's principles for marketing to 12-and-under children, she says that much of the industry routinely ignores those principles. "It would be quite a different matter if there weren't advertisers and marketers saying 'we want to make [children] lifetime customers from the time they're three or four,'" she explains. "But there are companies like that, and they're wealthier and better resourced than they've ever been. Parents have a hard time keeping up."

What the Mothers' Council would like to see is a cop dedicated to the self-regulation beat, so to speak. To make its case for stricter enforcement of industry guidelines, the organization hopes to set up a series of one-on-one meetings with higher-ups at agencies and companies. The plan: appeal to them on a parent-to-parent basis. The Mothers' Council hopes to get Congress involved--again, not in any regulatory role, but to hold hearings that might spur the industry's self-policing programs. While the group has not yet approached media companies about their enabling of questionable campaigns targeting kids, that could also happen in the not-so-distant future.

Aird acknowledges that the Mothers' Council will likely find it "very, very challenging" to get its message heard, especially amid a flood of similar and/or related ad-reform efforts and in the wake of the Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" ("in a way, that illustrated what we were saying --that we'd lost our bearings as to what is appropriate and what isn't"). Nonetheless, she says that response so far has been encouraging. She'll be meeting with the head of CARU's governing board next week, and the group has already established a grassroots network of mothers across the country committed to the cause.

"It doesn't matter to us that this may seem like a quixotic adventure to some people. We know that this is right," Aird says earnestly.