Ralph Lauren: Ganging Up on Kids

The inevitable late summer plague has arrived. No, I’m not talking about mosquitoes, or poison ivy, or humidity. I’m talking about the back-to-school fashion frenzy. The buzz this year is about “interactivity." Shopping is now supposed to be ever so much more than interacting with our wallets. Some stores offer shopping sprees to “haulers,” kids who show off their purchases on YouTube. Others encourage them to play disc jockey on life size MP3 players when they walk in. Even clothes themselves have to be interactive. There’s some brand promoting different shaped stick-on patches so that kids can personalize their garments (“But mom, everyone is personalizing this year. If I don’t personalize, I won’t look like everybody else.”)

And then there’s Ralph Lauren. The designer who blessed us with “preppy” in the 1980s has produced a new online book for kids. And guess what? It’s interactive! Little fashionistas can click on the clothes the characters wear—and buy them. An ad on the front page of NYTimes.com called it “The First Shoppable Children’s Storybook.”



The Wall Street Journal touted the brand’s literary debut, The RL Gang, as a threat to Dr. Seuss. Wow. Here’s the plot: Eight kids, cute as hell, arrive at school sporting way cool clothes. A “well-dressed” man enters the room. It’s their teacher, the only visible part of whom is his torso, clad in . . .Ralph Lauren. They kids count to twenty and land in a magical wood, in totally new outfits. They find a little tree that isn’t thriving. They get sad. A kid named River suggests that they water the tree. They do. It transforms instantly into a full grown apple tree bearing fruit. And the kids wear yet another set of outfits. They pick the apples. They count to twenty. They arrive back at school. The room is empty. Their well-dressed teacher’s torso (and presumably the rest of him) is gone. They don’t care. They each give away their apples, but get to keep their trio of first-day-of-school ensembles—for sale in their on-line closets.

The point isn’t, however, that it’s lousy literature. It would be just as problematic if The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins was an online shopping experience. The point is that The RL Gang is another slide down the slippery slope toward seamlessly integrated marketing in children’s lives. David Lauren, Senior Vice President of Advertising, Marketing and Corporate Communications, calls it "merchantainment." Like advergaming, the goal is to make sales by seducing kids into lingering with a product long enough to associate it with fun, or longing, or excitement.

Here’s the problem. We are getting so used to marketers inserting advertising everywhere in children’s lives—in schools, in books, in songs, in games, in the content of movies, that we forget to care. The RL Gang, by itself, is just one little annoyance that most of us can avoid. It’s the aggregate that’s really troubling—a commercialized childhood where everything and everyone is for sale.
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And so it begins: Elmo, my daughter and me

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were forced to confront the fact that our twenty-month-old daughter knows who Elmo is. And she likes him.

For a while, Clara has been saying something that sounded a lot like Elmo. But we convinced ourselves that she was saying “MoMo,” the name of one of her stuffed animals; for parents in denial, toddler enunciation has its benefits. But when my wife dropped Clara off at daycare and she pointed to another child’s box of diapers and enthusiastically announced “Elmo,” we couldn’t fool ourselves any longer. Despite our best efforts, commercial culture has already made a considerable impression on our young daughter. That night, when my wife gently broke the news to me, Clara, who was listening to the entire conversation, began excitedly chanting “Elmo” once again.

It was clear by the look on her face that she liked him and why wouldn’t she? It was Clara’s demographic that the child development experts at Sesame Workshop had in mind when they promoted Elmo from a bit player on Sesame Street to its undisputed star. And it is Elmo’s undeniable appeal to younger children that makes him the engine of Sesame’s marketing machine.

A search at Amazon.com for “Sesame Elmo” results in more than 2,700 products, nearly 3 times the Big Bird offerings and 9 times the Grover paraphernalia. There are, of course, the whole line of Tickle Me Elmo dolls (including Barbie Loves Tickle Me Elmo), but there are also Elmo DVD’s, Elmo video games, Elmo backpacks, every kind of Elmo apparel you could imagine, Elmo’s Punch, Earth's Best Sesame Street Organic Elmo Noodlemania Soup, Elmo cake pans, Elmo soap, Elmo steering wheel covers, Elmo sofas, Elmo humidifiers and more.

We’ve avoided all of the above – no screen time or products with licensed characters for Clara – but in the end her introduction to the cynical world of kiddie marketing came, from all things, a diaper. It reminded me of what punk rock legend Ian MacKaye said a couple of years ago shortly after becoming a father:

I am, of course, disgusted by mass marketing to children. You can imagine my horror when I discovered that it’s virtually impossible to buy a diaper—which is essentially a s**t bag—without a goddamn corporate cartoon figure on it. It’s deeply disturbing.

It is deeply disturbing. What justification could there possibly be for advertising on a diaper, other than its profitable for companies like Sesame when kids eat, play, sleep, and yes, even go to the bathroom, in their brands? Never mind that the diapers promoting Sesame Street are for babies as young as newborns (we were given a pack free at the hospital) when the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time for children under two. In 2005, when Sesame Workshop announced its new partnership with Pampers, a Sesame executive gushed, “We are excited to be able to extend the effectiveness of our brand.” In our house, we use another company’s plain brown diapers, but that hasn’t stopped Sesame from extending its brand to my daughter.


So what’s the big deal? I could tell you how my wife and I would like to make the decision about when and if to introduce Clara to Sesame’s media empire on our terms. Or that we don’t want Clara lusting after toys that do back flips or food because of who’s on the package.


But what it really comes down to this: I hate the fact that someone would exploit Clara’s capacity to love and trust, that Elmo might have an ulterior motive for captivating my daughter. The primary message that merchandising stars like Elmo impart to young children is that to love is to consume. And while that may be the kind of love that our economy runs on, I was really hoping we had a little more time before we had to deal with all this stuff.


After all, she’s still in diapers.

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The Real Toy $tory by Susan Linn, Ed.D.

It’s old news that it is virtually impossible to find a movie for kids these days not selling them toys, clothing, food and accessories. But that doesn’t mean we should stop being outraged about it. Particularly egregious is when a film cloaks itself in positive messages while cynically undermining them by brand licensing, product placement and cross promotions.

So I’ll say this for the Disney/Pixar studios: The company does a fabulous job of making films that simultaneously promote and trash socially responsible causes—the former through creative content and the latter through marketing. It’s true that when Pixar execs partnered with British Petroleum to promote Wall-E, the critically acclaimed animated post-apocalyptic environmental fantasy, they couldn’t foresee that BP was going to cause the worst human made environmental disaster ever. But they surely knew, like the rest of us, that drilling for fossil fuels is not exactly a sustainable practice, and that promoting consumption in children by turning film characters into junk plastic toys is not good for the environment either.

And now there’s Toy Story 3—a sometimes poignant rendering of one boy’s transition into adulthood from the point of view of the toys he’s leaving behind. The film concludes with a lovely and pointed celebration of creative play. I get teary thinking about it. I really do. I got teary watching it, too. (Confession: I’m a sucker for “leaving childish things” behind stories. And, as a ventriloquist who has had a long relationship with talking duck, I can and do invest just about any inanimate object with life.) But the marketing of Toy Story 3 does more to stifle children’s imagination than the film does to promote it. Disney expects merchandising to bring in about $2.4 billion, more than any of its other films to date. A search for toys licensed by the Toy Story franchise brings up more than 300 items on ToysRus.com, most of which squelch exactly the kind of creative play the film celebrates. One business writer described the number of Toy Story 3 products at Target as “jaw dropping.”

In addition to the faithful Woody and the stupid-but-good-hearted Buzz Lightyear, new characters—and new potential for licensing—have been added in Toy Story 3. There’s a strawberry scented villainous bear named Lotso—whose mercantile manifestation is as an ursine “smart toy” a la Tickle Me Elmo, which can be had for $49.95. And in a blatant attempt to broaden the film’s appeal across genders—and to add completely gratuitous, sexualized double entendre to the dialogue—Barbie and Ken have been added to the cast and the licensing frenzy. Little girls, presumably unmoved by action, adventure, and Trixie, a rather appealing but boringly unsexualized cowgirl, can now rush out to buy the Disney Pixar Toy Story 3 Barbie Loves Buzz Lightyear Barbie fashion doll for $16.99—and other Toy Story 3 Barbies as well.

There are also the inevitable Lego Kits--the Lego Toy Story 3 Great Train Chase, or the Lego Disney Pixar Toy Story 3 Garbage Truck Getaway set. It’s well known that children play less creatively with media linked toys and with kits—but even more damaging are the Toy Story 3 video games for Nintendo, Sony PS3, Nintendo DS and X box. And of course, there’s the preschool educational media market: V-tech has the MobiGo Toy Story 3 Learning Software for children as young as three, and Leapfrog has learn-to-read digital story books. Never mind that screen media already occupies, on average, about 32 hours a week in the lives of two-to- five year olds at the expense of the kind of hands-on play that is so revered in the film.

It’s ironic that the real threat to toys like Woody, Buzz and the gang is not that the child who loved them grows up. It’s that, in real life, companies like Disney/Pixar have commercialized children’s leisure time to such an extent that a preschooler who might be the beneficiary of outgrown creative playthings is likely to have no idea what to do with them.


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Consuming Everything: CCFC and the Oil Spill by Susan Linn, Ed.D

I know I'm not alone in my inability to stop thinking about that oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes it's foremost in my thoughts, but often it's more in the background, like chronic anxiety, or some dull but persistent toothache. And, as we go about our daily work at CCFC, I'm thinking more than ever about sustainability and its links to our mission of reclaiming childhood from corporate marketers. We can't achieve a sustainable society without curbing consumption.

Lifetime consumer habits begin in childhood. That's one big reason why children are targeted so intensely with marketing and why it needs to stop. As Josh Golin and I wrote in a piece for the Huffington Post on Earth Day last year, "Marketing doesn't just sell children individual products. Its dominant message is that consumption is the path to happiness and self-fulfillment." Marketers sell consumption, not just as a lifestyle, but as the lifestyle. Limiting children's exposure to corporate marketing allows them the time and space to learn to take their pleasure in other people, nature, and their own creative play, rather than relying for satisfaction on the things that corporations sell. Children deserve a commercial-free childhood, and the earth deserves it as well.

So, while what may be the worst un-natural environmental disaster of all time unfolds, I am reminded that the commercialization of childhood affects so much more than families currently raising children. The primacy of marketplace values-and instilling those values into the next generation-imperils everyone. It's true that children benefit immediately and directly when we limit their exposure to commercial marketing. But the impact is so much broader. Allowing kids to grow up free from bombardment by marketing messages is our best chance to nurture adults who recognize the value of preserving, rather than exploiting, environmental riches-who define themselves more as stewards than consumers. By working for the rights of children to grow up-and the freedom for parents to raise them-without being undermined by commercialism, CCFC promotes a more sustainable world. Read more!