Toy Story

by David Cohen

Advertisers like to take advantage of children's natural credulity. In a world full of dazzling advertisements, how do children react to them? Have they learned how to weigh up advertising before they succumb to its promises?

"Why's that man got his hand up a sock? Don't they know how to do it properly? That's not going to get me to buy it, is it?" carped one seven-year-old about the glove puppets used in Burger King's The Lost World television advertisement.

Call it cynicism. Call it sophistication. Nowadays it's not unusual to find children as young as four making judgments like these, claims Nicky Buss of the advertising agency Ammirati Puris Lintas in London. By then children are "brand literate" and they can see through "marketing hyperbole".

Or can they? Is advertising geared at children even ethical? Since the 1970s, the battle between the forces for and against child advertising has hinged on whether or not kids understand the motive behind advertising. The debate is far from over, but new studies suggest that Buss is onto something. Either children are getting wise to the advertising game, and at an earlier age than in the 1970s and 1980s, or in the past psychologists underestimated their young subjects' ability to work out other people's motivation.

It doesn't take a genius to work out why advertisers are trying harder to market directly to children. British children aged four to fourteen spend an average of ￡2.49 each week. This makes the pocket money market worth more than ￡1.5 billion a year, according to a recent report from management consultancy Datamonitor. In the US the pocket money market is worth a massive $64 billion a year.

Selling to children has become big business, and advertisers want to make it as scientific as possible. Winthrop Publications in London has just launched the International Journal of Advertising and Marketing to Children. One article reports that 60 per cent of children aged two to eleven know by the end of October what they want for Christmas, and that for girls under seven the biggest deciding factor is what they see on television.

Conferences and consultancies abound. Pay ￡2000 and you can attend Kid Power 99 at any one of a string of European venues. The meetings offer workshops on "what works with kids and why", "peer group marketing" and how to "think like a kid". Consultancy firms will tell you how to build "a wall of communication" to influence "your core consumer lifestyle" from the moment said consumer is two years old.

    Meanwhile the London-based Children's Research Unit (CRU), a for-profit organisation, surveys the tastes of 7 000 children, three times a year in their schools, via the Internet. Children are notoriously fickle, and advertisers have a hard job keeping up with their capricious tastes, explains Glen Smith, the unit's director and a psychologist who also edits the International Journal of Advertising and Marketing to Children. For a fee, market researchers can buy " hot topix" in the survey, he says.

There are, of course, regulations in most countries specifically to protect the child consumer. In the UK, "advertising must not take advantage of children's natural credulity and loyalty and must not arouse unreasonable expectations of toys and games by special effects", says Helena Hunt of the Independent Television Commission (ITC). "Children must also not feel under pressure to buy." And the ITC Code works, according to the Advertising Association's James Aitchison. "Less than 1 per cent of complaints received by the Advertising Association in 1998 related to ads for toys or games," he says.

    But what counts as taking advantage of a child's natural credulity? And isn't that an impossible standard to meet, if a child does not even grasp the notion that ads are trying to sell something? If on the other hand, children are aware of the purpose of ads, those aimed at children are no more sinister than those aimed at adults.

The backdrop to today's research on kids and advertising is the cognitive theory put forward over 70 years ago by the famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, children go through four stages of cognitive development — a model that, with relatively modest tweaking, still dominates child psychology today. Between two and seven years old, children are in the "pre-operational" stage. Completely egocentric, they are at the mercy of their immediate perceptions. They lack what psychologists call a "theory of mind": they don't understand that the world looks different from another person's perspective, or that other people can have motives and desires that differ or even clash with their own. They certainly couldn't be expected to realise that an advertisement was a manifestation of those different motives. After seven, children enter the "concrete operational" stage: they become less egocentric, are capable of more structured thinking, and understand that the world is not always as it seems to their immediate perceptions.

    Had Piaget ever considered children and advertising (and it's likely he would have thought it beneath him, being more concerned with such heady questions as how children solve syllogisms), he would have argued that they had no clue as to the motives behind the media until well into the concrete operational stage.

The first studies on children's understanding of advertising seemed to fit Piaget's model. One 25-year-old study found that 96 per cent of five to six year olds, 85 per cent of eight to nine year olds and 62 per cent of eleven to twelve year olds "do not fully understand the purpose of TV advertising". At the time, psychologists in the US used those findings in their bid to press the US Federal Trade Commission to ban toy ads on TV, on the basis that children under the age of eight didn't understand "the commercial meaning" of ads. Advertisers persuaded the FTC against a ban.

But in the 1990s similar arguments led to a ban on toy ads on TV in Greece and Sweden. Swedish law bans any product ads that aim to attract the attention of the under-twelves. Now the European advertising industry wants to see those bans lifted, or at the very least to ensure that they don't spread. Ironically, some psychologists who might usually be more comfortable arguing against sales pitches to children have had to concede that are shrewder than they once supposed.

Take Jeffrey Goldstein, a psychologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Goldstein, who also writes reports on the latest research into children and television for companies such as Nintendo and Compaq, believes that the test used in the 25-year-old study was too stringent. To be deemed "fully aware", kids had to explain verbally that ads were trying to sell something and make money out of children.

Psychologist Henry Wellman, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, argues that Piaget's framework does not fit the modern child. "Children [nowadays] are exposed to a much wider range of social interaction. They go to day care; they don't live in nuclear families. They engage much more in pretend play," Wellman says. Children communicate with far more people at earlier ages than they did in the past. It grows them up.

According to Wellman's analysis of thousands of children's conversations, "around the age of three to four children understand that what you display on your face doesn't necessarily go with your internal state. By the age of five to six, most children understand you can deceive people by showing one kind of overt behaviour and feeling something else." If you understand deception, you are well on the way to understanding advertising.

Piaget may have chosen just the experimental subjects to exacerbate any difference in the cognitive abilities of children of the 1920s and of the present day. He based most of his key ideas on observations of his own children — Jacqueline, Laurent and Lucienne — whose upbringing was very sheltered.

His studies also suffered from a problem that plagues child psychology to this day: how do you get a child to make explicit what may be an implicit understanding?

One way to tease you out what children implicitly understand about advertising is to see whether they realise that TV ads are different from regular programmes. In one such experiment, 66 children aged between four and eight years old watched two sorts of ads. The genuine version extolled a face cream on the basis that it made users better looking. A doctored version praised the cream but the punch line was that it gave users disgusting spots. The children were asked which they preferred — and why. Children aged four to five liked the funny endings better and did not notice whether or not the punch lines made commercial sense. All the eight-year-olds were totally familiar with the advertising game. They laughed at the doctored ads─not just because they were funny but because they were pathetic as ads. A face cream that gives you spots is not a product that will sell, they pointed out.

    But it was the reactions of six-year-olds that revealed most. Just over half understood that there was something wrong with the funny endings, even though they couldn't always say just what. That suggests that many six-year-olds only have a limited understating of what ads are trying to achieve, says psychologist Brian Young of the University of Exeter, who reported the findings at the 1998 British Psychological Society conference.

An experiment conducted by the CRU reaches a different conclusion. Four-year-old children were shown TV commercials and were asked—using dolls representing mum, dad, children and so on — to select the doll that the advert was talking to. "We found if there was a frozen pea commercial they moved the mum forward, if it was a toy they moved the child doll forward," Smith says. If four-year-olds understand whom a sales pitch is aimed at, he says, it is reasonable to assume they have some implicit understanding of advertising's goal.

    Smith has not published this research because, like much of the CRU's output, it is only available to clients. Smith says his study and others reassure him that advertising to children is not "sinful or wicked", but, he concedes, one should "be mindful of the gullibility of young children".

Although the growing consensus is that by the age of five many children realise there is something different about ads, some psychologists claim they still do not truly understand the purpose of advertising.

How can they, asks Young, when they don't even know how to "sell" them selves? "A number of studies," he says, "show it's only around the age of seven that children get a sense of promoting themselves. For example, if you ask six-year-olds to put themselves forward to become one of a team they tell you about themselves warts and all." Only around seven — still young, according to Piaget's theories — do children understand that if they want to convince others to have them on their team, they need to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative in the best tradition of Madison Avenue.