AML PANEL ON YOUTH MARKETING: Transcript of event

November 2, 2005

Carly Stasko and Trevor Norris

National Film Board,

150 John Street,

Toronto, Ontario

Barry Duncan: We’ve got four panelists and we’re going throw it open, so it’s going to be very much an evening where you are going to be in the drivers seat.   I would like to introduce the members of the panel. I think I’ll start on the far side with Debbie Gordon, Debbie is a member of the AML executive, but she’s also in charge of a program called Mediacs, and she does media literacy in the schools as well as being involved in advertising and marketing to kids.  

To her right is Richard Kanee who is the manager of New Media Business development for CHUM interactive and we look forward to the CHUM perspective.   And then to my immediate right is Max Valliquette who is with Youthography which is indeed one of the most important and certainly one of the largest youth marketing groups in the country.

And then to my right is Anne Sutherland who is with the EBP   Nucleus Strategic Planning and she is the co-author of a book called Kidfluence – Why Kids Today Mean Business.   So that’s our panel and I think we can get started with Debbie Gordon.

Debbie:   So I’ll just tell you a little bit about who I am and what it is I do. Barry asked me to bring in a clip just to give you a sense of the discussion that I have with the students in the classroom.   So well run the clip and do that.

My name is Debbie Gordon.   I started a series of media workshops about 5 years ago I guess, this is the fifth year for Mediacs.   I work with students at all levels, ideally starting at Kindergarden right through to Junior High and Senior High.   I’ve done some University work, I love it if I can get into a Montessori school.   I’ve done a lot of workshops for parents as well these days, and teachers.   It’s all about helping kids and parents think critically about this media world.   It’s very much about empowering children to make smart choices.   We all want our children to be critical thinkers and what I try to do is to give them the benefit of my 15 years experience working full time in the advertising industry.   I’m also a writer, covering a lot of stories these days around children and their relationship with the media.   What I try to do is share the media world with kids, and the inner workings of it, so that they can decide for themselves if they are going to consume or not consume, and what they think about a brand.  

A lot of my work these days is on the interactive media front.   I have a workshop called the “Wild Wild Web” that seems to be keeping me busy.   I’d say that about 90% of my bookings right now are on that particular workshop.   It’s all about online marketing and online selling, and it talks about some of the risks associated with the internet.   The new culture of social networking which is so important to kids today.   Whether that’s through instant messaging, MSN platforms, AIM, Trillium, whatever the platform happens to be, and this incredible networking vehicle called the “blog” or an online journal or websites, webpages.   In my experience about 50% of children now how created their own communication tool online and often it starts with a personal profile and evolves from there.   Which is a wonderful creative device for children and I think we have to recognize the power of these new tools, but also help them understand how to use these media vehicles in a safe way.   

So that seems to take up a lot of time.   I find in that particular area, a lot of children are navigating these spaces on their own because they have so lapped their parents when it comes to understanding technology and so my advice for parents is always “Get your ten year old to show you how to use MSN.   If they are on MSN, you should be on MSN.   Go through their ‘buddies’, see who has a personal profile and see how kids are communicating”.  

So that’s a big part of my focus.   I also deal with body image.   I have a workshop called “Ad Hawks” which is very much “Advertising 101”.   Koolaid today, I actually worked with Dr. Mark Tromblay, who is the guru in this country on obesity and some of the health risks facing children, and how we can get kids to think critically about some of the food choices we put in front of them some of the time they are spending in front of these screens, and figure out  what a healthy balance really is.   Again it’s about giving them some of the tools to make smart choices.  

There is a whole range of workshops.   There is a “Simpsons Workshop” at the secondary level which is a lot of fun, and a journalism workshop as well, which I tend to give more of in times of war.   So two years ago when Iraq was being bombed and Bagdad was lit up at night, my phone was ringing off the hook to help kids understand how this story is being covered and how it’s being reported.   I can’t believe how much fun it is to sit in the classroom with children and allow them to share their media experiences because media can be such a wonderfully empowering tool for kids, we just need to help them understand how to use it in a healthy way.   So that’s what I’m all about.

Do you want me to put of the clip? Or should we just go around?

Alright, let’s throw up the clip.

I’ll just give you an example of one of the exercises that we might do in the classroom if we were doing my “Ad Hawks” workshop, which is very much an advertising 101 session.   We talk about the role that advertisers play in our society, about consumers and producers, how much time children spend consuming media messages, some of the various advertising techniques that are being used in the industry, focusing these days more on the online forum or tool box because there is an awful lot coming out of mobile media and interactive experiencial media these days, and Max can certainly talk to that a little bit more later.   What we do is we really deconstruct and pull apart commercials.   I will show them an evaluation grid, if you like, and we think about the business objectives, first and foremost.   We’ll look at a media text and will think about what were the business objectives, what was that advertiser, that marketer, trying to accomplish when they created that particular execution.   Who were they targeting? What do we really know about that target over and above the particular gender or age-group?   What do we know about what’s going through their mind and what’s important to them?   And again it’s asking kids to reflect on that, and they have a point of view - a very strong point of view about the media world they inhabit.

Then we’ll talk about what sort of benfits are being sold to them.   Are they being sold facts about the product or are they being sold feelings?   And it’s all wrapped in a creative idea and how would you evaluate that creative idea.   Is it empowering? Is it informative?   Is it something that you enjoy watching?   Do you want to see it again. So those are all the choices and some of the discussion that we go through.

Video: Milk Rap

Television Commercial in the style of a hip-hop music video for Milk with the slogan “Want Milk? Uh Huh Uh Huh!”

Lyrics:

“Straight to your bones,

from the farm to the fridge.

We know what you want ,

because we know how you live.

We got the big bad Bessie,

With the M.I.L.K.

Want milk?   More Milk! (repeat as chorus)”

Debbie:   I’ll invite everyone else’s comments as well.

Ok.   So I’ll play that in a classroom and I will have an entire class of children singing along.   They are very familiar with that particular execution and they LOVE it, they absolutely love it.   And we’ll talk about “Who do you think is being targeted?”.   And if I have the time, what I have is the actual shooting of that particular commercial as well, so they get to hear from the director, from the stylist on the set, and they get to hear from the set director and some of the actors etcetera.   And kids love to go behind the scenes.   You know the DVD’s that we get, that we are able to buy the extended version and perhaps hear from the director, and in the same way they love to hear about it from an advertising perspective.  So we will talk about who is being targeted.   We’ll talk about “Are you being sold facts or feelings?”   And most kids will say “yah there is a healthy benefit that is coming through from that particular execution”.   But for sure they are trying to sell you a feeling of being cool and of course that’s played back in the tag line and in the super that you see at the end.   So that one is almost spoon feeding them.   They are able to get it for the most part.  

Most kids though, I mean if I show that in a grade two classroom, they all kind of giggle because it’s a little bit naughty right?   I mean if they are lucky they get to watch Much Music over their brother or sister’s shoulder, their older brother and sister’s shoulder.   But the fact that your seeing a little bit of rap, it feels like a music video treatment, and most kids typically pick up on that.   And they quite enjoy it, they enjoy the musical treatment and they think it’s targeting them. So in a grade two classroom they’ll say, “It’s targeting me”.   If I go into a grade five classroom they’ll say, “It’s targeting me”.   If I go into a high school classroom they’ll say the same thing, because they can relate to so many of the production elements that are included in that particular commercial.   So it’s definitely been a home-run.   I find most of the Milk production, and I show them the campaign that is coming out of the BC Dairy association as well, which is just fabulous Darwinian, The evolution of the Species creative, I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to see it because it’s coming out of BC, but it’s just brilliant animation.   It integrates so beautifully with the science curriculum as well, because it’s all about science.   So that is in a nutshell, a very small nutshell, some of what I do in my workshop.

Richard:

I don’t know how I follow with that.   I’ve got no multi-media unfortunately.   I’m Richard Kinny???, I work for CHUM Television in our New Media Department, and as was mentioned my job is Manager of New Media Business Development, which is, I’ve spent a lot of time at my in-laws trying to explain just exactly what that means.   And I still don’t have a concise line, I’ve got it down to around ten words or so.   But essentially, I’m tasked with a couple of things, mainly exploring emerging platforms, things that aren’t broadcast and things that aren’t traditional web sites and understanding how they are relevant to our audience, and more importantly, or equally as importantly, or hand in hand how they are important to our business.   How we can explore and exploit them both to deliver content to our audiences in new and different ways. In ways that they are asking for and anticipating as well as looking at new opportunities to generate revenue that fall outside of our traditional ad-driven revenue streams.   And hand in hand with that, it is also working with our ads-sales department, to look at these emerging platforms and trends and ways of delivering content and media and understanding how advertisers can reach their target audiences through these platforms.   So I’ve worked on everything from implementing enhanced television applications with Rogers digital cable, through to, what I’ve spent the last couple of years on which is primarily on the mobile space, which is something that we are playing a lot of catch up with in Europe and are just now starting to see the applications in terms of marketing and how we can use this as a vehicle to speak to people in a way that is a lot more intimate and a lot more one-on-one than a lot of other platforms. So that’s my background.  

Anne:

I've worked in business for over 20 years and what I started to see in the 90s happening, I worked at Kellogg's at the time, and we were doing a lot of research with moms of course because Kellogg's needs to understand moms to understand how to sell their products to her family, and what we were hearing in the early 90s was that it wasn't just mum thinking about herself, it was mum thinking about the kids in her family and what they wanted.   So it started to switch from what mom wanted and what she thought was right for bringing something into the house because she wanted it for her children, to us seeing her say "Well the kids want this and I'm bringing that into my decision-making", and we were hearing more and more of that, and that led us to doing more and more research into what was happening in families to drive that, and that became the thesis to the book Kidfluence.   Because it really is about a fundamental shift in our society based on population change.   The first reason why you're seeing the amount of kidfluence is because generation Y is the second-largest population group in Canada and North America behind the boomers, and not surprisingly it was the boomers who had most of generation Y.   So they end up having a huge impact on the business world and on every aspect of our lives.   So what you started to see was that Boomers wanted to be a different type of family than the families that they grew up in, so they treated their kids differently and the kids started to have impact in the family, and when business started to see this day started to pay attention because business is always looking for a competitive advantage and they started to pay attention because the Boomers have always been a part of the population that they would sell to but now that their children had arrived, and were another big part of the population that were not only influencing but driving the purchases in those homes.   And that's an important shift because businesses have to pay attention to those kinds of fundamental changes in our world.

There are other issues that are fueling that, so you take parenting and the perspective of a Boomer and how they want to raise children in their family and how they include them in conversations.   We've moved from a hierarchy situation in our families to what they call a bi-directional relationship sounds kind of clinical but which basically means that families have discussions now.   So we all grew up, well some of grew up in the era of "You do as I say" and "You go to your room", and there was a children's table and adults had a special separate worlds and kids had a not so special separate world and what the Boomers as parents decided is that they didn't want to separate those worlds anymore they wanted to have a shared family experience.   So that includes many different things, that includes things like "We have discussions about things in our households now", "We decide together which restaurant were going to go, to which trip that are going to take, which computer were going to buy."   And it's just a natural human dynamic that when people are included in the conversation they contribute to a conversation and then they expect to be included in a conversation the next time a conversation is happening at the dinner table, their voices start to become more proactive and rather than waiting to be asked, now they are actively pushing the door and this is a dynamic that has led to kidfluence and what people see as an increase in kid marketing and kid advertising.   The home situation is ripe for this to happen.  

At the same time the world has been changing in the last twenty years to not only being more of a consuming culture, and it's a natural evolution of where we are, as well as the technological changes that have happened.   So when you get to a point when all these things are coming together we see fundamental shifts.   And over the last ten years people have spent a lot of time talking about marketing, advertising and the impact of brands on kids.   That's the genesis.

Barry: Okay the man who is turning out this stuff, Max.

Max: Thanks its good to be pigeon-holed, no just kidding.   My name's Max Valequette and I work for company called Youthography, we're a youth market consultancy which means we do sort of everything for clients who have as an end-user a young person, and that can be a typical for-profits packaged goods company, we have a lot of those clients, that could be the government, we have a lot of governmental work, and that can be not-for-profit and we do a lot of work in that sphere as well, so were sort of everywhere.   We do a lot of marketing, but it doesn't tend to be advertising it tends to be what they call in the industry “below the line marketing”, meaning promotions and events and that kind of stuff.   We do a lot of research, some of that is specifically for clients and some of it is to publish reports and studies on what we see is going on in youth culture in Canada and North America and the rest of the world.

I come at this not so much from a marketing perspective, although that's what my company does, but from an interest in youth culture which is always been a big thing for me.   I've always been interested in pop culture.   My first job was at an advertising agency where my job was to be responsible for bringing in new information and new media into the agency so that they could understand what was going on in the world.   So I watched television and read books, and read magazines, and went to movies, and it was the best job of all time.   My friends all laugh because they described as being no lifestyle change, I was just finally getting paid for what I had already been doing.   And so it that's how I've actually come across all this, I'm a big consumer of youth culture, and I always have been.   I also host a used issues talk show on TV Ontario called Vox Talk, which is actually not so dissimilar from my company in that it's really all about what's going on in the lives of young people.   We cover things like social issues or consumer issues or personal issues or athletic issues or political issues - pretty much everything.   And that's how Youthography operates as well. So that's what I do.

Barry: Excellent.   I think now maybe we could just have just an exchange among the four of us here, before we take it to the audience.   So are there things Richard or Anne or Debbie, which you would like to raise just from what you've heard?

Debbie:

I think one of the observations that I have in the classroom is that children are doing a fabulous job now of understanding advertising, they have become so much more savvy.   We've been talking about that for many years, how kids are so media savvy.   And when I started doing decent workshops of five years ago, that wasn't the case, I was having a really hard time reconciling that with what I was seeing in the classrooms particularly with younger children.   The majority of the work I do, I would say is children between grade four in grade nine.   And so I was hearing this coming out of the industry that I spent so much time in, but I wasn't seeing it in classrooms children weren't necessarily understanding when they were being sold to.

I think when it comes to traditional media forms there is more media literacy going on, we're talking more about it, it's a big part of a shared conversation that's coming through our newspapers and the popular media etc.   Where I find kids are struggling a lot these days is in online media, and that's part of the exercise, is to make a particular web sites feel as though it is content and not necessarily advertising.   So there has been an enormous shift to things like “adver-gaming” or the terms that Neopets uses "immersive advertising", and they've managed to pull in about 60 million, I think is the last count, in terms of registered guests on that particular site.   So I'm finding as I start to explore some of those areas of advertising, that kids are less able to identify that.   They enjoy it a lot, they spend a lot of time there, but they don't see it as advertising.  

When we talk about Web marketing they see pop-ups, and they see banners as advertising and they are an annoyance more than they are any sort of recognized pitch, but when it comes to actual web sites I do a whole workshop on stickies.   Whether its games, or contests, or downloads, or mobile, or wallpaper, whatever the tactic happens to be to get them to stay on a particular site, I would say the majority of children aren't there yet.   They don't see that as content.   So maybe Max I don't know if you want to go into that.

Max:

Sure... yeah I think the big battle, if I can put it that way, in the advertising or marketing world over the past few years has been, I guess the battle has been fought over "When do people know that they're being advertised to?".  

Its an interesting one for us, there are companies that are very much like mine, who practice only hidden advertising, which is still called "roach marketing" by some people, or “stealth advertising” or something.   We're not fans of it, we did it accidentally once, believe it or not, and learned a lot from that, even though we hadn't intended to be stealthy about a product we were advertising for a client, we really didn't mean to, and we learned a lot about it.   I'm not a big fan of it for a couple of reasons, in that I do actually find that with increased media literacy, it's just a bad thing to suggest to a client that you hide the fact that your advertising, because then if someone finds out, which they will, they'll get upset that they were sort of being lied to, so that is a problem with it.   And that's sort of on one side, and I think thank God most people are moving away from that.

The most famous example ever of what that advertising can look like is when Sony and Ericsson??? launched a camera phone, the first-generation camera phone, and what they actually did is they had people pretend to be tourists on the street in New York and they would hand you a camera phone as you walked by and said "Hey can you take my picture with this? I'm from Holland or Japan, or whatever”, and people would go "Sure" and they'd go "Oh my god it's a phone! And you want me to take your picture with it! That's amazing!" and they go "Oh yeah it's a new phone it's my new Sony phone, isn't it amazing? Please take my photo".   So you're actually having that potential consumer experience the product but not telling them that you're being paid by that company to market that product to them, and there was a lot of that going on a little while ago and that really added fuel to that fire of "When are people being advertised to?". And that stuff is awful.  

The immersive thing however we are going to see a lot more of, as people get more and more media choices and have the potential to turn away from advertising.   Advertising pays for the lion's share of the culture that we consume and the easier it is to ignore advertising means the more work that advertisers are going to do in trying to make sure that you can't turn away from it.   For better or for worse, that's fortunately or unfortunately, depending on what your perspective is on it, that's what's happening.   So I think that's where a lot of this is coming from and the way a lot of people look at the Internet, is the same way they look at product placements in TV shows. I think in the 12 months leading up to July of this year, there were a hundred thousand different elements of product placement on network television shows in the States, I think that's a number I read.   Because people aren't watching commercials the way they used to, so you try and get money to produce an episode of CSI and that comes from advertisers and if no one is watching the commercials, advertisers won't pay for it, so you got to work that Pizza Hut box into the crime scene or something, and that's what people are doing right now.   So I think that kind of emmersive thing we're going to see a lot more of, and it's really coming from the fact that consumers have the right to turn away from advertising. That's where it's coming from right now.  

Richard:

The other thing that is tangential or very similar to product placement is "advertising as content", which is one of the things that blew me away.   One of the things that we started experimenting with is we launched a ring tones store a couple of years ago that's enjoyed a lot of success.   McDonald's was looking for some innovative ways to reach and communicate their brand messages, to reach youth audiences, that sort of thing.   The thought of taking their "I'm loving it" ring tone, the Justin Timberlake produced song and making it a ring tone, and making that available for free download, that was bantered about and something McDonald's thought they'd experiment with.  

I was a little skeptical and thought, "Well, maybe we’ll move a few of them", and I was blown away, especially by one support call that I had to field, which was a teenager, who not only wanted it, but was sort of desperate to have it.   The language that she used was that ours was the only site where she could get it and she been trying for three days to download it and could I please help so she could get this ring tone.   If I were to download a Juicy Fruit ring tone I would think all of it as an ironic joke, but for them it's actual content, it is something great, it's a Justin Timberlake song.   There are blurry lines between what is marketing and what is content, and you saw it with that Seinfeld and Superman clip that's made its way round and round the Web last year, and BMW films and stuff like that.   We do a heck of a lot of it on muchmusic.com through various adver-games and that sort of idea, which is take a game and wrap the brand around it as opposed to build a piece of content that is about your a brand, which is sort of interesting.   I'm not sure how critically people are thinking about the fact that "When my phone rings now, it's a free ad for McDonald's for whoever is standing around me".

Max:

If you watch the television show 24, all the good guys drive Fords, for instance, and Ford's is a huge sponsor of theirs.   They created a piece of content where Keiffer Sutherland drove the Ford F150 before season two or season three.   The first episode was presented commercial free by Ford but at the end or at the beginning or maybe both there was a sort of an 8 minute movie that featured his character and the production values were as good as the show but you could sort of see the relationship is carried out all through the seasons, the good guys drive Fords.

Anne:

I think though what we're seeing is a fundamental shift.   The technology is driving a lot of this, as adults of a certain age, we don't understand a lot of the new technology and the way people interact with it.   And we especially don't understand how our kids interact with it and the relationship that they have with it.   So that makes us nervous we hear from a lot of people saying "I really don't know what's going on".   Yet when they do surveys with parents and they say "How to you supervise Internet usage in your household?", they believe supervision means they're providing a good place and ensuring adequate time sharing between siblings - that's supervision.   As parents we sit there and say “Well you know, we took the TV and we put it in the den, and you sat down in front of the TV and you could kind of tell what was going on”.   If you were a teenager growing up and you were talking with your friends on the phone, your sister, your brother, your mother, could overhear you on the phone.   They could kind of get that gist. Are you upset are you not upset? What kind of phone conversations are you having? So that's not happening anymore in these kinds of households.  If your kids are online, they're doing their homework (supposedly), they're researching, their playing games, their instant messaging their friends, and you don't really know the experiences they are having, the way they're reacting to them, and the impact it will have on them in the long run, and I think that makes us nervous.   Whether that's marketing or advertising or business, is to me a different discussion than, "It's the world we live in today and it's hard for us to understand something we've never experienced ourselves."

Debbie:

It's really online literacy, which my sense is, were not particularly doing a good job off in our homes or in our schools, I mean we've wired our classrooms but we haven't wired our teachers, rewired our teachers to any great extent.   So a lot of these kids are educating each other.   It's a viral tool it's a viral medium and they're sharing and they're learning from each other.   But there's a lot of issues associated with how kids are using some of these tools, not the least of which the fact that they're sharing.   We haven't talked about how privacy is such a sacrosanct and wonderful privilege in a democracy, but were not talking about that with our kids.   So if they think they can win an iPod, they will share their e-mail address and where they live and any other information they want to know about you as parents.   So we need to help them understand that that information is private, we don't know who is taking that information and running with it.   So there's lots of issues when it comes to how we're using the computers both adults and kids.  

Last night I was doing a parents session where parents were saying "How long should my child be on MSN per evening?"   And it's like there's no magic bullet here, there's no prescription.   You as a parent have to decide what works in your home, but I think that parents are scrambling and struggling with some of these new technological tools and some of these opportunities that kids are bullied into when they're taken advantage of.   And I think it's a great thing, I couldn't live without MSN and I don't think a lot of kids can, we just need to figure out how we can make it work for us as families.

Anne:

A theme I see in here though is, where is the push-pull mechanisms of marketing, there's a quote in this document that we were just handed that says that "parents feel that marketing pushes things too much on kids and 78% of parents reported that they believe that marketing and advertising puts too much pressure on their children unnecessarily", there is equal research that over 70% of parents wouldn't buy something without asking children, and that's a classic   "push pull".   So you are asking your children "What should I buy", and then you're blaming marketing for telling them to buy something.   There is a dynamic involved here and it's shared.   We might see our side as innocent but the other side is a business proposition that companies are putting forward so it's an interesting, so I just thought that quote is interesting because we see the complete opposite.   And they ask their kids for specific brand names when they make those requests.   So you go to the grocery store and you say “should I buy cookies,” and they say which specific cookies should I specifically get because they don't want to make a mistake. So that's an innocent question, it seems from a parent to ask the child. But actually, you've told your child that the brand name of the cookies is important and that they should pay attention to the advertising that told them to buy that brand of cookie because you asked them what brand they want.

Debbie:

And in Anne's book it said that 90% of the requests that come from kids are branded.

Max:

I do a lot of public speaking and I tend to have two groups that I wind up speaking to.  Groups of marketers often built up around one industry.   And increasingly to the school boards, who often invite parents out.   And if I make the same speech, sometimes it's tailored for one direction or the other obviously, but if I make the same one-hour speech and I'm doing it to a group of marketers, I'll get ten questions at the end that will probably take me another 15 minutes to answer.   The same speech to a school board with a group of parents in the audience, last time I did it for the TDSB at Earl Haig in Etobicoke, my speech was an hour long. The total time I spent there was two and half hours, because I got so many questions from parents at the end of it to would ask just exactly those questions. "How much time should my kids spend on MSN", "Should I get a second computer for the home because it seems that my kids need it?", and all these questions about how their own kids are dressing and all of stuff.   I don't have kids, I'm not a parent, so my responses I can tell you what I think hypothetically would be good parenting.   I hope that really works for you, mostly what I end up saying is that more information you have about what your kids are doing, the easier. And the less judgmental you are about them, and the more it will open up a dialogue the easier it will be for you.   I get a ton of questions these days about how other daughters are dressing, especially from moms who will say "My daughter's 10 years old and she's dressing like Christina Aguilera, and not Christina Aguilera in 1999, Christina Aguilera 2003". [Laughter] I'm glad four people in the audience got that! It's just amazing to field those questions because I do think that when I was growing up, I can't imagine my parents asking some guy onstage about that, I just can't imagine that.   So I do think there's a thing about parents not keeping up with the culture as much and I do think that's technologically driven more than anything else.  

Anne:

But the business demands it.   I worked on Zellers many years ago, and they were positioned as Mum's store, which means they want to support mums and help them do the jobs that they have to do and have the right products and services.   And they felt very strongly that they wouldn't bring in lines of clothing that they would think mom's would think would be inappropriate for certain ages of kids.   So you know they drew a line and said, under twelve we wouldn't want to support that "look", that "not appropriate girl look".    Well they lost sales.   Why? Because Mum's and kids were going somewhere else to buy those clothes.   Zellers sits there and says "Ok, I'll take this ground and say, I won't support that, but my core customer Mum's aren’t supporting me in that position, because they are going to the mall and their buying those clothes at other stores".   So then Zellers had to change their position, and they brought those kinds of clothes into their stores.

MAX:

Welcome to the "Stuff by Duff", which is their biggest selling brand.

ANNE:

Their biggest selling brand.   Why? It turned-around the children's wear division at Zellers.   They had made a different decision than the year before.   So I always think it's interesting when we say, "Where is the pressure point?".   Business' make different decisions for competitive advantage, but their audiences have to support those decisions for them to be a success.   Those mum's and kid's chose something else, and then they complain about it.

MAX:

I'd go a step farther and I just don't think there's been a single original thought in the marketing industry ever, and I work in it so I know.   The funny thing is that there's never been a marketing decision made, really ever, that hasn't gone to massive amounts of potential buyers for their opinions on it before it turns into anything.   So as Debbie would go through her Ad-Hawks workshop, part of the process is the focus group part of the process, where you let potential consumers tell you what they like and dislike about what happens.   And commercials that have $150,000 invested in them don't make it to air because people said they didn't like them and so they don't go.   Products get launched or don't get launched based on what consumers are talking about.   Marketers still make mistakes.   You know, New Coke, was focus group tested up the ying-yang and it crushed Coca-Cola for a few years.   None the less there isn't a single decision   a marketer ever makes. It's actually what most people who work in the industry dislike most about the industry.   It's very difficult to take chances in it.

Barry:

Could I ask what either one of you or each of you would consider unethical practices in advertising campaigns and marketing strategies?   What would qualify?

Debbie:

Well from my perspective we talked a little about “roach marketing”, which is deliberately deceitful and I think that was a bit of trend a couple of years ago.   The industry got a bit of a black eye, and seems to have retreated a bit from that particular tactic.   Really, I think it's very much.... I don't think there is an awful lot that is unethical.   I think it may be below the radar and kids don't recognize it, or we as parents don't recognize it as selling.   Some of the viral tools that are being used right now.   Max and I were talking the other day about the Stewie DVD, the Family Guy has produced a DVD which I'm sure all your children would know.   And the Family Guy is one hot property.   The Simpsons and Family Guy-- go into any classroom and that stuff rocks.   It's all about satire, it's all about wit and rye, and irony, and kids love that.   That is the diet that they are growing up on.   The Family Guy has come up with a wonderful, "wonderful", that's editorial content, but it's a viral campaign that's really a lot of fun.   And kid's are doing the work, they're sharing it with each other, and hence the term "viral" which is really describing a whole new category.   Some of you may have heard, "Subservient Chicken", and I guess "Raging Bull" did that before subservient chicken, but I guess now, maybe last year, Burger King created a website where there’s a chicken in a college type room who is dressed, almost like they borrowed a chapter from the porn industry, and it's like a web cam parked on this chicken and he's wearing guarders and a little skirt and he's doing his thing in front of the camera and you type in a command and the chicken dances or he jumps on the couch or he does whatever that command happens to suggest, unless you push that command too far in a particular direction in which case he "no no no".     But it was incredibly fun and very engaging for kids and I think within the first 24 hours it had a million hits, and so how many months later, it's cracked the 50 million mark.   So we enjoy it, whether it's kids or adults, we enjoy it and we send it to our friends.   And "fwd to a friend" is another "sticky" strategy that's being used all the time.   You won't find a youth directed website that doesn't have "fwd to a friend".   And again, it's a great excercise in the classroom, because kids will think "well why are we seeing ‘fwd to a friend’ on so many of these vehicles" and it's because they realize "Well wait a minute, I guess it's because I'm doing the work for these marketers".   So it's a bit of a paradigm shift, if you like, where now kids or adults are taking more responsibility in the marketing and sharing of information and news.   I mean JibJab, during the US election was so enormously successful.   And so a lot of marketers now are using that particular technique.   Is it deceitful?   I'm not sure, I think we need to understand that it's one of the tools of the toolbox, and then we'll make our own choices, whether or not we want to be part of that sharing.

Anne:

This is a word that I've come across only when I've talked on panels like this and I've never had the discussion when I've been in a business meeting.

Barry Duncan: Trust educators to ruin the party.

Anne:

Unethical is people who lie and cheat and steal, and I'd like to know how many people are voting Liberal in the next election? Because it's not a business issue, it's a human issue. One.   And Two, there hasn't been a marketer or a business that I have been involved with that doesn't want to make a positive connection with it's consumer.   It's not looking to undermine or be deceitful, because business' who make positive connections with their customers are sustainable businesses and they are profitable businesses.   So, Distasteful?   Disrespectful?   In Poor Taste?   There's lot's of examples of that, but there's lots of examples of that in your neighbors as well.   That's us as human beings.   I can honestly say that anyone who has unethical business practices, they won't be in business for very long.

Richard:

I can actually point to an example.   I have similar reaction to you with this question.   Well, unethical is sort of hard to talk about.   We sort of talk about this stuff all the time and you try to measure it against your own moral compass, but truly unethical, I've only seen it in one context and that's in mobile content.   It's pervasive in Europe and it's a matter of time before this stuff becomes entrenched here. Because with the mobile phone, young people aren't just influencers but their spenders as well.   They are actually spenders on media and whether that's a premium text message to send their message to screen or buying a ring-tone or a game to their phone, very similar to instant messenger, it's spending that's very largely unmediated by controlling influences like your parents and that sort of thing.   And because this is very new technology people don’t really understand it that well and that’s where you do start to see some profiteering.

There were some ads that appeared on Much Music that said “Text in to receive a joke to your phone”, “Receive a free joke” is what the banner screamed.   In reality what they were doing is opting into a subscription program where the first joke was free and everyday after that they would get dinged with a new joke that would be a $1.25, on and on and on.   And of course you don’t see it, it doesn’t say it anywhere, there’s no way to opt out, all you’ve done is responded to a call to action of an ad.   There is no where that you went to sign up where you could go to un-sign up .   And because the information was really hidden, what we ended up seeing after the first month was a lot of people calling us and saying, “I just got   forty dollars in premium charges on my phone”.   And so we very quickly responded and had a lot of internal discussions about setting up guidelines about how we want to manage that type of advertising on our airwaves.   In Europe the situation has gotten so bad.   I don’t know if anyone read about how MTV in Germany put a moratorium on ring tone ads because a lot of them were operating this way.   If you’ve been in Europe recently and you pick up a magazine you’ll see a print ad full of ring tones that you can download for your phone, but every time you do that, you are opting in, it says so in the fine print, but you are opting into these programs.   And kids were racking up huge bills in Germany and MTV said you know we've got to do something, this is a real concern.   That’s the one instance of unethical advertising that we’ve seen, we’ve taken a lot of steps to curb that, especially because we want people to interact with us in this way and we want them to feel good about it.   Because it is an emerging platform, and it is an incredibly powerful tool in terms of being able to influence what your seeing on television, when it’s managed and handled responsibly.

MAX:

And for me, all the stuff in regular life that is unethical, is unethical in advertising and marketing.   So lying, cheating, stealing….watching America’s Top Model, that stuff is all bad.   I draw the line at certain places.   But what I do think is interesting in all this is that we always go back to the internet which sort of enables a lot of this “bad behavior”.   Not that I’d want to put anyone in the audience on the spot, but there are a lot of young people in the audience, so I could ask people, “so how many people in the audience have ever downloaded music”.   A lot of hands would go up?   Please raise your hands.   Now keeps your hands up if you’ve only downloaded music legally.   (most hands go down) So there we go.

GUY:   How about ever?

MAX: How about ever downloaded music legally?   There we go, we’ve got a person.   I go to a Russian website for all my music downloading, and I pay for it, but the Ruble is so devalued that it’s really very cheap.

Guy: And that helps you sleep at night!

Max: Exactly, Globalization has to start working for me at some point.   So what I think is interesting, is that a lot of these behaviors also become enabled, it’s human nature that the easier it is for you to do something, and the more removed you are from the consequences the more you are going to do it, that’s where all of our moral compasses stretch.   And I think a lot of these advertisers think, and I don’t condone it, a lot of them think “Ok, this is a quick buck I can make off of ring tones”.    The same way everybody in this room who has downloaded music has at some point said, in our own head we all make the justification, “Does it really matter if Biance gets my buck twenty-nine for this song, no, she’s’ got enough money”.   Unh, it’s still stealing music.

So it’s interesting, I just think that the internet enables a lot of these snap decisions, maybe if you were thinking about it more in the long term or you were closer to the consequences you wouldn’t.   It’s like the way we’ve all written an email that we really wish we could pull back the second after we’ve hit “send”.   I’ve written ten or fifteen of them! So that’s just something that I think happens.   I think the internet really does enable that behavior, because you get fast reactions, but you are removed from the consequences.   So it’s were you see more of it, with online stuff.

Guy:

Just one more interesting observation, a friend of mine pointed out.   To steal a DVD is a misdemeanor, to copy a DVD is an act punishable by Interpol and breaking all of these international laws.   It sort of speaks to that point.   Maybe the punishment doesn’t need to be so high because the consequences are so much more tangible if you get caught by the security guard at the door then they are really tangible consequences.

Debbie:

The other thing, to stay on the internet turf, is privacy policies and that’s something that I recommend to all my students.   Read a privacy policy before you download something like Kazaa.   Take a look at their terms of conditions, see how many ad ware programs or bundles, they won’t tell you about spy ware, but there a good chance they’ll tell you about ad ware

Find out if you are getting sixteen pieces of ad ware that will be downloaded onto your hard drive.   Take a look at a privacy policy to see if they’re selling your personal information to a third party, so that if you get lots of spam, you can trace that.   One of the suggestions I give to students all the time is to have a second or a third email account, a hotmail account if you like, one that you don’t care about. So that if you want to participate in a contest or something on a website, have a throw-away account so that you can do that.   I test this all the time, so I registered my daughter for Neopet, we read the privacy policy so we knew what would be coming, so we set up a new hotmail account that had never been used, and we were able to follow how many emails came through that particular account.   And we are over 150 in the last four months, so we know in fact, that her information and that particular email address was sold to particular companies.

So it’s just “Buyer Beware”, and it’s a way for children to be pro-active and to feel that they are being their own advocates if they choose to participate in that particular forum.   And that’s what we really want them to do, see that it’s consumption, and so to practice wise consumption.

Barry Duncan:   Ok, thanks Debbie.   I think it’s appropriate that we get the audience involved.   We have a cordless mike, so if I could have one of the AML executives, Cam or Ian, or someone, grab on to this, we’ll get the audience going.

Audience Member 1:   As you were talking about the ease and the enabling factor, of constantly being able to do these things as the technology increases, to constantly be able to buy and to be exposed as well to all these things.   In the context of a question about ethics, for me the ethical problem with all of these ever-sophisticated ways of advertising to such young people is that it creates a need.   I believe that seems to be the goal of many advertisers:   To create the message that “this product is absolutely the best things, and of course it’s indispensable.”   To me that’s an ethical question.   The more need that’s created, the more difficult it is for young people to be able to detach themselves from these needs.

There was another thing that went through my mind as one of the panelists in particular was speaking.   The film The Corporation, in the segment on marketing to children talks about the “nag factor”.   You are talking about the push-pull, because again, in terms of need, it seems to me that if you create a constant nag factor in a very very young person who believes that they absolutely need this thing in order to be cool, to be valuable as a person, to be a person, then, one is faced with an impossible situation of turning away from that choice.  So yes, I suppose the parent shouldn’t cave in, and start soliciting what brands the kids want. As I was saying it may be very difficult not to do that when the impetuous is coming from a very young person who has been directly and very aggressively marketed to, and convinced that this is an absolute need.

Anne:

Can I just talk a little bit, just to build on the cycle question, because it comes back to the consumer culture we live in.   And we as adults, we fuel it, we fuel it best. The boomers have fueled it more than any other previous generation and we are the examples that we’ve set for our kids as well.   This raises a good question.   “Did the advertisers create the need?”   Yes, they said “You must have this”, whether they said it would make your hair shinny, or said it would help you fit in at school or any of those reasons.   But kids are also growing up in a society, whether it’s at home, or in the rest of society, that’s reflected to them that says that those needs are important, and valued and created.   So I look to my son who says, “I absolutely need a new coat this year mum, because this coat is ‘in’ versus last year”, and I went, “Well your right, because I bought myself two coats this year.”   I didn’t like last years coat anymore.   It’s that consumer culture that we live in and I just find that that cyclical quality, we can’t separate from the advertiser, to the societal part, to the human nature part, that we have created this consumption.   And we are on to the next thing before we’ve finished the last thing.   And I’m not saying that it’s good or bad, it’s just an observational point of view.

Audience Member 1:   But it hasn’t always been that way.

Anne:

It always hasn’t been that way because it’s evolved.   It has evolved in the last thirty years of business practices.

Richard:

We ran out of real needs a long time ago.   The rest of it is manufactured needs.   I mean even cars were largely a manufactured need.   And industry forces are greater than us poorly little marketers involved in manufacturing those needs and inhibiting progress and there are huge challenges if you are trying to extricate yourself from those currents.   How do you shop responsibly and make decisions based on real needs and where do you draw the line between the real needs and the wants that are valid and the wants that are grey, but you’ll indulge once in a while and the needs that are completely manufactured but you’ll indulge once in a while.   You know the shopping cycles and the cyclicality of consumerism.

Anne:  

That’s a personal judgment.   Choice is really what really marketing led to.   You’ve all watched Little House on the Prairie, you go into to buy flour and somebody offers you a different type of flour, choice was created.   And I always say to people, “Would you rather go back to no choice?”   We all benefit from the choice and that’s the world that we live in.

Richard:

That’s a debatable point.

Anne:

It’s not just good or bad.   You can’t separate the pieces.   That’s what I find interesting about the discussion.   It’s the wag the dog…it’s the chicken and the egg thing.   We get to the argument that “It must be advertising’s fault that’s fueling this”, I say that it can’t be separated from the other components.   So we have to look at the whole before you can actually understand the dynamic of the parts.  

Debbie:

It’s almost similar to the obesity discussion that’s going on these days.   In fact if we stopped and think about what culturally has happened in our society, and in the suburb for example, and the fact that if you want to buy milk you have to get into your car and drive to get milk.   The fact that you take an escalator to get to your gym.   You know you drive your car so that you can get on a treadmill for fifteen minutes.   Some of the choices that we are making as a culture, are not just about the advertising and the selling, there is so much more than that, all the conveniences that we’ve introduced into our lives are also fueling this enormous epidemic.  

And while it would be nice to be able to evaluate each variable fanatically, but sometimes it’s a challenge to do that.

Richard:

All that being said.   Parent’s are certainly the underdogs in that fight when you look at the billions of dollars that are spent on marketing versus the resources that are being provided to parents to enable them to make good choices or educate their kids.   And that’s where the consumer driven society really falls on it’s face.   The ideal of “The best product will win”, sort of looses out to “The person with the deepest pockets who can keep throwing money at the problem, until they’ve beaten down their competition, or won, or all the rest of it.”   There is no right or wrong answer for somebody who works in media, for whom McDonalds, and Dentine and Hershey pay for my very lavish lifestyle, it’s something that we wrestle with a lot.   Every time we sit down to brainstorm a new video game to market “Alesse” ,it’s something that we all ask ourselves, and sometimes we do it in a very joking way, and sometimes we do it in a really earnest way.   It is a cycle and unless you want to go live in the back woods, it’s really hard to extricate yourself from being a part of it.

Audience Member Two: (Carly Stasko)

One of the question I have, is, we are looking at this youth demographic which is marketed to more than any demographic before.   What do you think that is going to translate into when they grow up and they become more politically active, and it’s not just consumer choices that they are making?   How do you predict that is going to change?   That is what I’m curious about, especially you Max with all your research, you might have more insight on that.   I am so curious about the choices that they make, if it’s so different, and with the new technologies.

The other question I want to ask in on the ethics tip.   We know that it’s unethical to have child labor, but when we have children nag their parents to buy products, they are working for the advertising companies, and that’s child labor.   This isn’t my idea, that’s Sut Jhally from the media education foundation.   I have found that to be a very intriguing idea.   Who else knows their parents better, to sell to them, than their own kids, and they know that kids are coming from divorced homes, coming from parents who don’t have enough time to spend with them, and exploiting that.   So what about the ethics of that?

Max:  

I’ll start.   And I’ll try to do both questions.   I guess I dodged the first round of ethics questions, so I should probably take this one first and foremost.   It’s difficult.   It becomes very charged very quickly.   There were words like “exploiting” used in your question. I don’t ever think of myself as someone who exploits, which maybe I do, but which I never really thought of myself as that kind of person.   Honestly what you do as a marketer, is you really spend a lot of time going “God I hope people really like this”.   My day goes, “I hope people really like what we are doing, so it will be successful, so my client will come back to me, so I can pay my staff”.   That’s pretty much my day.   That’s my tail wagging my dog I guess.   And so you don’t ever really think of it as something exploitative.   This is the point that I think it’s hardest for me to get across, I don’t know if you find this.   I don’t actually want people to buy anything that they don’t want, I feel like I’m John Cusack in Say Anything.   I don’t want to create artificial need, I don’t want to respond to needs that aren’t really there, I don’t want anything artificial to happen out of it, because I believe that those are the easiest things to deflate, and those are the things that will ultimately sink my company.   If all I do is work in a field of artifice, It’s really easy for something more authentic to come around and completely mow my lawn and then I’m out of work.   So we try and push very hard on things that are very authentic and then it’s ideally not exploitative.  

We do this much stuff   (hand gesture) at Youthography, and that’s about how much stuff we’ll do if you are twelve years old or younger, that’s the sort hypothetical line that we’ve drawn.   But there are things we won’t do and there are marketing campaigns we won’t run if you are under.   Mostly because, and Debbie and I have talked about this for a long time, I want to make an authentic connection with someone who realizes that they are being marketed to, but is cool with that.   And one of the points I always make to my clients is that I don’t think young people hate advertising.   I really just think that young people hate bad advertising.

This whole thing about “fwd to a friend”, I don’t view as unethical because I think that if you really like the entertainment experience that was just brought to you by BMW films, if that’s your thing, and you want to forward it on, I don’t think that that is any different than someone saying, “My god , you should have seen Veronica Mars yesterday,” or “I saw an amazing show at SPIN gallery”, or whatever is your cup of tea.   So I sort of see that as advertising plays in our culture more and more, hopefully it gives the young consumers of that culture more power to reject things that they don’t like.   And that is where I’m coming from.   So I don’t see it as exploitative, ideally, because there is a lot of stuff we won’t do for people who are younger than twelve.   So I think ideally, we want to create marketing programs that people actually like.   I don’t think, it’s not a popular opinion, I don’t think that liking marketing is a bad thing, I think liking bad marketing, or lying marketing or unethical marketing, is a bad thing.   And hopefully, the world I want to work in is a world where were creating, quote un quote, “good marketing”.   I sounds kind of naïve, but that’s honestly how I go to work.

In our research we ask the question, “Are you planning on voting”.   We get huge numbers that say “Yes, I’m definitely going to vote.”   And then when it actually comes to an election, the numbers of young people who actually voted, are literally half as high as the people who said they were going to vote.   And I think that one of the things that is happening, and this is just a hypothesis from my perspective, so I don’t know.   But I think that one of the things that is happening is that young people are being so engaged in every process right now but the political process.   Your parents want to know what you think, your schools want to know what you think, marketers, for the love of god, always want to know what you think.   If you don’t like Coke, send them an email, someone will get back to you and will apologize.   But in politics you have to be 18 before you can vote, and I think that the most important part of the political process is voting, it’s the way we express ourselves as voters best of all.   And what I think will be interesting with this next generation is that they are going to have been empowered by all the choices they’re making as consumers, or as students, or as culture watchers, or as culture jammers, whatever they are doing, except for in the realm of voting.  

And I’m terrified that ten years from now we are going to have people who feel much better about all the choices they make to have an impact on society, except for voting.   And that’s the one that truly scares me.   So you can be sixteen to drive a car, you’re supposed to be nineteen in Ontario to drink, but for the love of god, people are doing that kind of stuff, people are having sex at fifteen or sixteen on average, but you’ve got to be 18 to vote. And by that time you’ve been interacting with the world so much, but you haven’t had a chance to actually go and do that thing.   So I’m very scared that it’s going to lead to young people who are just not a part of that process, because they’ve been a part of every other process and it doesn’t mean anything to them anymore.

I’ve heard in other countries, if I can just as an aside, somewhere in Latin America, I’m sorry I’m not sure where, where they run a youth election at the same time as the regular election, and even though your vote doesn’t “count”, it’s published in the papers saying here’s what young people did versus what adults did.   It’s amazing to me that a lot of marketers will come back and say “Government should do this, Government should do that”, I believe that our government should be a lot more active in encouraging that kind of stuff.   And so honestly, that stuff scares me a lot more than any of the other stuff we’ve talked about in terms of consumerism.

We’ve got like a big generation of young people that just don’t seem to care about voting.   Yay! (sarcasm).  

Anne:

The generation wants to be participatory because that’s the way they’ve grown up.   And they expect to be interactive.   I teach at college, so I’ve asked the college kids, so I ask them why they don’t.   Because they all do the same thing, they say “Oh ya, I’m going to vote”, and then the day after I say “Who voted?”, and nobody did.   And when you ask them “Why?” they say it’s because “It doesn’t matter”,” It doesn’t impact me”, “Nobody’s listening to me anyways”, “The issues aren’t about what’s important to us”.   So that’s like the classic things you’d hear in any kind of political needs situation.   It actually has to be relevant and meaningful to them to actually make them act.   But all of their behavior up till then would suggest that they want to be participating, because they knock on the door and it’s always been open.

The second thing is that they expect it to be customized to them.   Totally customized to them.   “Not the way other people like it, only the way I like it”.   So they are coming into the workforce.   “Well I want a laptop.”   “Well junior employees don’t get laptops”.   “Well I want a laptop, I should get a laptop, it’s best suited to my situation, blah blah blah”.   Everything is about customizing it and personalizing it to them because that’s their whole life experience.  They don’t fit into the “Well that’s not the way it works”.   Which is what we all find out when we go out and get jobs.   That’s going to be a huge issue to deal with in the work force as they grow up to be adults.

Richard:

Sounds like politics suffers from bad marketing.  

Max:   Yah

Richard: It’s not positioned as cool.   Or they don’t do a good job of positioning it as cool.

Max: Yah, we got to work with the Ontario Government on an anti-smoking campaign called “Stupid” and the website was stupid.ca.  And I don’t know if you’ve had the government as clients?   You don’t look forward to it, because you justify everything about fifteen times more than any other client.   You know when Molson comes to us and says “Will you do work for us”, it’s not like there is somebody from Labatt looking at it and saying “This is what you’ve done wrong”.     When you work for the provincial government, and it happens to be a Liberal government, there will be people from other parties who as soon as you watch it, saying “Here’s what’s wrong, here’s what’s wrong”. And we got the government to take a chance.  

We worked with a really good advertising agency and we did all this sort of focus group testing for it and we came up with this really interesting idea.   We found in focus groups, that both smokers and non-smokers who were teenagers, nine through fifteen described smoking as “stupid” -both did.   It was one of those moments that you have when you are a researcher in a focus group when you go “ah ha” and the metaphorical light bulb goes off on top of your head.   And we managed to convince the government to essentially tell smokers that they are stupid.   Which is something that they really didn’t want to do, because they knew that there would be backlash from the, what do you call it, the “for choice people”, or the “my choice people”, the tobacco lobby, disguised as regular people.   And it was amazing to get them to take that choice.   And with a lot of my other clients it would have been a lot easier, because they talk to young people more often and they are worried about young people more often, and the government in general they are just not.   They are worried about that person on the other side of the bench who is going to yell at you for calling people stupid.  

The website has been hugely popular.   I don’t know if you’ve seen the commercials.   There is one where a girl is rolling around in dog crap and she’s saying “Does this seem stupid? Well stupid is actually smoking”.   We felt really good about this, because when you see a fifteen year old who is smoking, and we talked about this, we asked them, right now “What is smoking?”, and at the top of their list people said “Smoking is stupid”, we got that right away.   But the miracle of that wasn’t that we had that insight, the miracle was that the government was actually willing to say, “Let’s do this, Let’s go this far with this”.   Which is actually incredibly rare, that they actually only thought about, “Who is our end consumer?”   And they realized that if you want to get nine to fifteen year olds to not start smoking, let’s think about them instead of the backlash we’re going to get from the opposition.   That never happens.   But you understand that if young people are edgier than most people in the population and the government gets pushed back from doing anything, even remotely edgy, you understand how it’s hard for them to be relevant to young people.   So that’s a tough one.   I don’t know how to fix that.   If someone has an idea, tell me after.

Debbie:

I just wanted to talk a little bit more about, or to tap into Max’s comment about encouraging youth to vote, and Anne’s’ comment as well.   I guess I’m in a great position because I’m able to go into a lot of different schools and see how the classroom is designed and how teachers are interacting with their students.   It’s such a great thing to go into a classroom and see a news board.   And see how the issues of the day are being talked about and discussed in the classroom.   There is a handful of teachers that I come across, because of curriculum pressures, where we are actually talking about the world that we shared and the world that we inhabit.  

So for example, just bringing in the editorial cartoon, I haven’t seen the Globe and Mail today, but I assume that it’s probably about Gomery in some context or some reference to Chretien.   Just bringing that it and sticking it on the wall, or having on Monday morning students bringing in a particular news story and talking about what’s going on in this world around them.   You want them to have a point of view on politics or world issues whatever that happens to be.   I have an image that I’ve put up as we talk about how images can be effective.   Which is a picture of George W and his father who are in New Orleans and who are fishing.   Now did anybody get that?   Because that was a viral email.   You can see that the streets of New Orleans are flooded and there is George and his father holding up their catch.  

And it’s an incredible image and of course you know that it was superimposed, one image on the other, but you have to help kids work through that and why did it happen and what was the political message that was being shared by those who created that?   And I’ve now shared that image with maybe a hundred and fifty kids, and they go crazy over that particular image.   They want to talk about it because they have a point of view and a perspective.   It may be coming from their parents, it may be coming from Jib Jab, it may be coming from their peers.   But they have an opinion about George Bush and the Republican party and we could spend an hour talking about that.   So I think maybe in our classrooms we have to work a little harder to bring what’s going on in the world into the classrooms and to get children to reflect on that and invite that discussion.

Just to respond to one of your first questions about corporations.   One of the things that I ask students to do is to think about how brands are giving back to the population at large, to their buyers, and that is something that I think is really important.   What kind of philanthropy or cause related marketing is that company practicing.   So if you are paying fifty-seven dollars for a P.Diddy T-shirt, where is that money going and what is P.Diddy doing to give back to the youth.

Max:   It’s just Diddy now.

Debbie: I realized as I was saying it. Things are changing so fast it’s hard to keep up.   But I think it’s important.   We want to turn children into activists and aware consumers and that’s something that we talk about a fair bit in my workshops as well. And a lot of what’s going on in society, whether it’s the run for the heart or breast cancer fighting, a lot of that is coming from corporations as well.   And it’s a fair question to ask of companies who are selling products, is “How are you giving back?”, “How are you giving back to youth?”.

Barry Duncan: Another question from the audience.

Audience Member Three: (Trevor Norris)

I’d be interested to hear what some of the panelists think about some recent developments in marketing.   Such as neuro-marketing, where medical equipment is used to take images of the brain and look at how people respond, not only to taste and physical sensations, but to the images and meanings associated with them.   It’s just within the last few years that some universities have been doing research in partnership with different marketing companies.

Debbie:

Well I have a point of view.   I’m not particularly fond of the practice when we have a health care system that is failing so many of us.   Most of that is happening in the United States where it’s “pay for your health”, it think those MRI machines could be put to better use elsewhere.   I guess I equate it to invisible marketing, we were talking about unethical practices earlier, that sort of where I draw the line.   I think there is a parallel happening there.   That’s my point of view.   I’m not fond of the practice.

Anne:

Can I get clarification on the question.   Is it “What is our point of view on that practice?”

In Canada?   I don’t think it’s going on here.   It wouldn’t even be an issue.   It hasn’t even been brought up or talked about.   The idea of having science as a practice, I haven’t even come across.   The fact that there is a possibility to do it?   There is the possibility to do many things and again our ethics show in how we choose to use it.   We could have done that science many years ago.   There’s a certain cycle to how the news comes out with these things, because neuro imaging is old.    But what is our fear of that?   That it would become common practice and that we would not be in control.   Because it’s one of those, I feel like it’s back to watching the drive in with the subliminal messages and me not knowing, and I fear that because I loose control. Is that what the question is?

I guess I don’t understand how it would be used.   Because right now we have science that shows that kids in the way that they develop have certain needs at their growth and developing stage.   And we know that in school age, mastery is a big part of their development need, and we use that information to figure out strategies to talk to kids at that age .   So I’ll use an example which I don’t think is ethical or unethical, which is how Tony the Tiger advertised Frosted Flakes because it helped you do things because Tony showed you how to do things and they tapped into the idea of mastery and kids development needs at that age.   They didn’t have to attach anything to my brain and learn something about that so I guess I’m not still clear about what’s the outcome of that science.

Max:

What I would add to that is that I don’t think it would work any better or worse than any other research practice, truth be told.   It sounds like something incredibly complicated.   Which means that if, most of the people that I know who work at advertising agencies, it makes it easier to screw up.   So I honestly don’t think that it could be used effectively.    I think that fundamentally where you question comes form and we touch on it with words like “ethics” and we touch on it with words like sometimes “persuasion” or “manipulation” depending on what we are talking about.   But fundamentally people’s problem with marketing is that they feel that it’s going to make them do something that they don’t want to do. And ultimately I think that what we have to do as consumers of everything, as consumers of politics, as consumers of brands, and products, and services, and charities and love and hate and laugher and everything, is we have to make sure that we are taking control of our own choices.   And I really fundamentally believe that no body can make you do something that you don’t want to do.   I think that the biggest lesson that parents can give to their kids is that they don’t have to do things that they don’t want to do.  

When I look at something like that I think, “Man, some dumb agency is going to spend millions of dollars on bringing in someone to do a brand map and a brain map and lay them over each other and it’s not going to work, because it doesn’t work like that. But I do think it plays into a fear that “marketing is going to make me do something that I don’t want to do”.   And my big response to that is, for the love of god, please don’t do it.

And look all the hands go up.

Audience Member Four:

The issue of choice has come up many times.   And when marketing to very young people, I feel, well if you could comment on this, there’s a passivity that is part of that marketing.   So part of the goal of that marketing is to get a consumer for life.  And if you are hitting a consumer at an age when the choices and processes of making a choice are not as developed as they could be even in teen years, or young adult years, that choice isn’t there.   And I think that perhaps, saying that they are able to make that choice, and that they are not going to do something they don’t want to do, isn’t really true with that particular age group.   So could you speak to that?

Anne: What age group are you referring to?

Audience Member Four:   To the tween groups.

Max: I think that’s a fair point, but I attended something today titled, as much “marketing to teens, as marketing to tweens”, and I do think your right.   On the other hand, if we say the exact same thing but with public service messages like, I remember “School House Rock” when I was a kid, or I remember “Stop, Drop, and Roll” when I was a kid,   and I’m sure there are people older than I who remember “Duck and Cover” and things like that.   As soon as these messages turn into public service message and we think, “Oh that could be something positive for children”, it doesn’t actually become about the marketing, it becomes about what’s being marketed.

In general people are fine with a marketing message that encourages positive behavior or positive societal behavior, but when you throw cereal in there, people aren’t fine with it.    So again I think it’s a business thing instead of a marketing thing, and where I would come back to that is… Ya, I do think there are things that shouldn’t be marketed to tweens and to kids.   I think that Quebec of all provinces has much more stringent standards on how that works than any other province in the country and that is not a bad thing.   I do think we should be careful about that.   I agree with Debbie that schools should essentially be marketing free zones, but then I think, wow in an under-funded education system, what’s better, no computer lab or a computer lab brought to you by Pepsi?  

There’s going to be so many grey areas within it all, but do I think the rules for marketing to tweens should be different than marketing for anybody who’s more developed and able to make those conscious decisions, absolutely, and everybody should say exactly that as an answer.   But everybody has their own lines that they’ll draw in different places.  

Anne:

I think Quebec is a great example, because when you work in the cereal business in Canada, you can advertise to children everywhere else, and you can’t advertise in Quebec.   And their business is less developed in Quebec, with certain kid brands, but they still have a business and they still stay in business, they haven’t taken them off the shelves.   So they’ve found other competitive ways to compete when the rules changed.   So if Canada took that on because they wanted to, because they wanted to take that stand, we’d still be able to support the business and we’d still be able to do that.   Nobody has anything against making choices of those rules either, it’s just that if we live in a world where those rules don’t exist, then the businesses have to be able to market and be in business the way they do to support their businesses.   So I think that that neuro-imaging science would be helpful if it could give the concrete evidence of where that line is, of where they’ve developed that choice and where they can’t develop the choice and then you could use that science to actually create a powerful message as to why we shouldn’t market to that age.

That evidence doesn’t really exist in a way that people really want to support at this point, otherwise we’d have that rule in the rest of Canada.

Max:

The funny thing about it with most of my clients, is that they’d prefer to not have to worry about teens and tweens.   Because they are really really hard to connect to, for marketers.   It’s actually very difficult, much more difficult than to someone who’s in their 20’s, or 30’s or 40’s.   And so they sort of do it because that’s where their business comes from, and marketers are people, and the guy running Frosted Flakes at Kellogs has a target he has to meet or he gets fired, and you know that’s how people think about it.   But truth be told, you would actually get a fair amount of support for that from the marketing industry from people who have to work there because it’s so difficult.

Debbie:

My comment would be that as an industry, as part of the free market in Canada, we begin the selling process to children at a very very young age.   Take for example, McDonalds.  I was at a conference in Las Vegas about a year ago, they were presenting, their target starts as young as two.   We better be there, and if you take a look at their web site, it supports it, they have games, advert-games, that are very simple and very graphic.   Blues Clues, or Ford, had a “Clue into Safety” program, that wanted babies on mother’s laps as they talk about how to play safe on the street, and hopefully as children age they will have warm fuzzy thoughts abut Ford, as they make their way towards purchasing a car.   So Ford has decided to start very very young.   We live in a society where marketing to children starts at an incredibly young age, and I just say thank goodness for the fact that we have Media Literacy K-12 in our schools, because I think that we need to be helping children to think through that process so that they can recognize that it’s a pitch.   Somebody is trying to sell them something.   Sometimes parents choose to do that in the home, sometimes we’re simply caught up in living and we simply don’t take the time.   It’s important that we help children to make those smart choices, and realize that it’s going on around them, there’s lots of it going on around them.   Is it going to change?   Quebec fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, decided no broadcast to children.   Marketers tend to buy border stations, perhaps in an attempt to get around that. The internet, mobile marketing, there are very, maybe creative may not be the correct word, but there are ways to still connect with kids beyond using traditional broadcast tools.

In the UK, they’ve decided to come down hard on some of the food marketers as well, because of some of the obesity challenges that exist.   They are cleaning up their schools thanks to Jamie Kennedy and they type of food that they are serving.   So we live in a consumer culture and our kids are being pitched to on a 24 hour and 7 day basis.   I think our job is to help them understand that, so that we can help them make choices.   It seems like such a simplistic response but I think it’s not going away, so I think we need to cope and help them think through it.

Barry Duncan:

Could I ask about the status of the phenomenon called “Cool Hunting”?   A lot of teachers have shown this “Merchants of Cool” documentary that was broadcast on PBS.    A lot of people have seen it.   I’m just curious to hear how valid that technique is?   Is it used extensively in Canada or more so in the United States?   Any responses?

Debbie:

I don’t know, I’m reading a book by William Gibson, which is all about cool hunting.   But Max, what would you say? Have you been accused of being one?

Max:  

Umm, yah it’s funny, it was sort of an idea. It’s all Malcolm Gladwell’s fault.   In 1996, or 1997 or so, an article came out in the New Yorker that Malcolm Gladwell wrote called “Annals of a Cool Hunt”, and he followed a couple of American “cool hunters”, and the idea was, it’s a fairly simple one, if you find out what the coolest people are doing, you can replicate that on a larger scale and make money out of it.   So I think a cool hunter took him on a tour of the East Village in N.Y., which wasn’t nearly as gentrified as it is now, and all of these “hipsters” were wearing hush puppies.   And two agency guys who worked for Hush Puppies agencies realized that these shoes were sort of cool with people and that’s why there was a whole Hush Puppy rebirth in the mid to late nineties.   The story goes something like that.   Cool Hunting as an idea is very much a ‘give a man a fish rather than teach a man to fish’ idea, it’s kind of ridiculous, because you are supposed to go to your clients and tell them what’s “cool”, but they all work with such long lead times, and they all have to get their plans together so far in advance when they ever actually put something to market.   By the time that they are actually ready, that that thing that was cool when you told them it was cool is no longer cool anymore.   So it’s sort of a funny, odd idea, but it comes from the fact that everybody thinks of cool as being a real short-hand to good marketing.   And that’s sort of where it is.   It sounds all funny and sexy, but it’s a joke.

Debbie:

I do think that “cool” is always attached to kids and teens because we think that’s what they are looking for and that’s what they need to fit in, but there is just as much research to show that they respond to other appeals.   So Telus has ads that have run for the last ten years that have bugs and spiders and frogs and they’re cute, and they appeal to kids just as much as they appeal to teens, tweens, and young adults and grandparents.   We tend to gravitate toward the things that we think are cool because they’ll have way more power than just general human appeal like bugs.   But kids will respond just as well to that, and they’ll pick Telus because of that or because they want to.   I don’t think “cool” has more power, just because we associate it with teens and tweens.   Cool is important to lots of adults as well, but it doesn’t have that same stigma.

Max:

There is someone who is actually in this room right now who I remember seeing I think three years ago with a t-shirt that said “Cool Hunter” on it that I think was being worn ironically.   And I mean that’s three years ago that I think that I saw you in that shirt.   It’s very much the industry propagating itself, and it really doesn’t work.

Audience Member Five:

As an educator I am really concerned about how consumerism bumps up against citizenship.   It seems to me that so often they are really in contradiction with to each other, and so I want to come back to ethics and I’d like anyone on the panel to address this again.   I think ethics, and politics, and activism, and consumerism, all these things are very connected. I’ll give just one example, because I think when we talk about ethics in advertising there are a number of examples.   I teach grades seven and eight and if there is a “crie-de-coeur”, it’s “that’s not fair”, and if you can plug into that crie-de-coer of “that’s not fair”, then you can bring in media literacy.

Let me bring in a very concrete example.   Let’s talk about Shell, Shell Oil as an example, they are currently running advertisements on television about how they are concerned about the environment and how they have experts who are wandering around in forests wondering about various aspects of the environment.   Meanwhile, just two weeks ago, we had in Toronto, the brother of Ken Saro Wiwa, who has brought his book out, “The Politics of Bones”, and he’s talking about how still Shell in Nigeria, they have been for the last twenty-five years and continue to be there.    The point is, that if you are in a classroom and you are talking about media literacy, and you’re talking about advertising and marketing, I think ethics very clearly enters into a discussion about what messages are being sold, what messages are not being included.   What information is being excluded.   And so I think ethics are critically important in this whole idea of marketing and advertising.   I invite you comment on of that.

Max:

I’d love to say something about that, I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.   One of the problems that often happens is, that that’s not just a Shell issue, that’s an entire oil industry issue.   Don’t get me wrong, killing people in Nigeria is not a good thing, but man, oil really, right now is not a good thing.   It’s responsible for a lot of terrible things that are going on. It’s a flawed and screwed up industry.   So one of the things I wonder about from an ethical perspective is, and I think we’ve touched on this a lot - the idea that it’s all part of this larger system and that it feeds itself - is that part of the conversation might be to say “I saw a Shell commercial on TV yesterday who’s outraged about this?”   And one of the students in the class, who is sort of your leading thinker, your forward thinker puts their hand up and says “I am too!”   And then you say “Let’s talk about Shell”, and by the time you’ve told the story of Nigeria, the class is outraged.   The next step is to say let’s talk about the entire oil industry, what’s going on in the world right now, and how the entire oil thing works.   And that’s devastating, and then all of a sudden it gets difficult to live your life. Because you’ve got to get on a school bus to get home and that school bus uses gas, so maybe you can bike home or maybe you can’t, or maybe you heat your home entirely through firewood and you don’t worry about the emissions that even that creates, I don’t know.   It’s difficult sometimes living in this world because ultimately so many of the choices we make have a negative impact.   And so, I agree with what you are saying, I think that it’s important to get that message out, and say that there are large corporations, small corporations, governments, who spin their information, and spin their public perception, and want to be seen as good guys, when really what they are is not good guys.  

The problem is that when you get into those areas it’s often more of a problem of an entire industry.   It’s like talking about clothing and the choices we make and there are a couple of big makers of clothes that are known for overseas labor and known for sweatshops, but if what I read from some anti-corporate websites is right, something like 90% of the clothes we buy in North America are made overseas, in probably dodgy labor practices.   So it’s like, you feel good because you are not buying from Nike or Adidas and then you put on a pair of New Balances and your like, “Yah I’m ok”.   And ultimately, eventually, you have to make a choice that you can live with.   So I would just put it backwards and say, I completely agree with everything your saying, I really really do, but it goes so much deeper than Shell, and I wonder how you walk away from that feeling decent about the fact that you have to put gas in your car to get home.   And this is where I struggle with it, and this is honestly my biggest struggle in the whole thing.   Fundamentally we do make consumer choices and I feel like there isn’t a good one sometimes, period.   And that’s the part that really worries me. How to do you arm somebody with the ability to go home and feel decent about the fact that what they could afford to buy for dinner isn’t killing people or isn’t having a hugely negative impact.   So I’ve just rambled, and that’s my thing.

Audience Member Five :

So your ignoring that?

Max:  

God no.   Are you kidding? Absolutely not.   But I think that people need to sleep at night.   And if every consumer choice we make is a bad one, you go out and you get active and you try to feel good about those things in whatever way you can, but the truth of the matter is that there have to be some choices that you feel better about and there has to be a way to live your life in a world that is often going to ask you to do things that have a negative impact.   I don’t think we shy away from that negative impact, that’s not at all what I’m saying.   I just think that the problem is bigger than Shell.   I think, Shell is a problem, but I think the problem is bigger than Shell.

Anne:

The question I have back to you, is why is this asked in an advertising context?   Because to me, business that is unethical, or that you think isn’t telling the truth….   We have many governments around the world that we don’t support and agree with, if they advertise and say something different, is that what we have an issue with?   Or do we have an issue with the government.   That’s what I’m trying to separate, is we keep coming back to ethical advertising, when what we are really talking about is ethical business or ethical human beings and what they choose to then say.   I don’t even know how to approach your question because that’s not a practice that people want to support as a business.  

Shell came out and said something different about themselves.   Why is that unethical?   That’s the way they see themselves and the truth… I keep coming back to the Liberal government.   The Liberal government is going to come out and tell you that of course they are great and you should support them because they are going to support your education and health for the next ten years.   But we’ve just lived through something for the last few years that tells us what that business is really all about.   Advertising is unethical now when they come out and say something different than what they actually are.   I can’t separate….

Richard:

So it seems like the response to ethics is that you start asking questions and all of a sudden you sort of get to “Well gosh, the whole basis upon the way that we live our lives is kind of unethical”, and that all seems very hopeless and we can all sort of put our ethics there.   And I do that on a nightly basis myself, “Well gosh I’ve got to design another interactive Alesse game marketing to thirteen year olds”.   I don’t know if thirteen year olds are having sex, and I guess they should be protected and we should make sure that they know that Alesse is a good way to do that.   But I think it’s really easy to abstract it to a point where it’s out of your control, and then it’s really easy to point fingers and say “It’s all about the advertising, if we fix the advertising, then the companies can’t hide behind cool marketing and it will all be better”.   There is a certain amount of accountability that we all need to face in our daily lives which means that parents need to be accountable about making good choices and helping to educate their kids about what marketing spin is.    And as marketers we should be truthful and we should be fact-focused as opposed to positioning or feeling focused.   As broadcasters we should be conscious about the kinds of messages we put on our airwaves and it takes.

You know change happens slowly over a long period of time for the most part.   It’s valid to ask these questions in this context because that’s why we are here.   Hopefully you’ll all be attending the ethical business session next week and we’ll be able to ask the corporations why they are choosing to move their manufacturing to places where they pay people peanuts a day to work.   But I don’t know, that’s my ramble for the day.

Max:

But I think that’s a wicked example because even that one is difficult.   Because, ok we shouldn’t support brands that engage in unfair labor practices, absolutely, but if the choice is, and this is oversimplifying it, but if the choice is working in a factory somewhere that isn’t glamorous where you don’t make a lot of money, or having no job at all, that’s not good.   Now we shouldn’t support factories where labor practices are such that peoples human rights are being violated.   At the same time there have to be places around the world where things are manufactured where people just don’t make what we consider to be a lot of money, but it’s better than what the alternative is for them.

Guy:

But it’s not an either or, but it’s a slow evolution hopefully and the more we talk about it and the more we are aware of it, then that’s where positive change can happen.

Max:

And what’s so difficult about it is that when we investigate it, we use extremely black and white terms.   For something that is actually extremely grey.   And it’s going to end up coming down to… ethics is such a funny word, because there are things ethically that everyone in this room wouldn’t do, that I would never do, and things that I would do that people in this room would never do.   It’s such a personal thing ethics, I can go and get a copy of “On Ethics” and we can spend the rest of this time reading it but I wouldn’t recommend that – people would sleep.   And so I just think that that is so hard, that is so difficult.   What it means in being an ethical marketer, comes down to being an ethical person.   Everybody’s standards are going to be different, and hopefully we’re going to hold ourselves to the highest ones, but it’s just so hard, because it’s so grey.  

So coming back to the Shell thing, is it bad that Shell lies about what they do?   Sure?   Is it worse that people are dying over oil?   Un huh! So I’m happy if Shell still has that great ad of the people running around in the forest and the fish swimming around if nobody ever gets killed over oil.

You know, what’s the real issue there.   Is it as Anne says, their business practice, or is it their marketing?   The truly awful thing there is that people are dying for oil, that’s the worst, it doesn’t get worse than that!

Audience Member Six:

I just have a question, or a comment.   I think what we have to do, is be responsible, and since we are talking about advertising tonight, and advertising is much more powerful a teacher to our students and to young people, than government or business. Business of course is working through advertising. We are concerned and we do want to send out the message that whatever you can do and what ever each individual in the room can do, to take care of our young people and to really be responsible.   I think that’s the difference.   I mean we see it in a lot of places, I mean anybody can say, “Don’t give money to that homeless person, because they are going to use it on drugs and alcohol, so therefore I can walk along and never ever do that”.   Well until we solve the bigger issues, let’s all do what we can do.   But let’s all really and truly own responsibility for young people, for our children.  I think that’s been missing for a long time and maybe whatever we can do…. Your comment was great, about hey let’s look at maybe not advertising to tweens and to young children, and going back to having stations that don’t advertise.   I think there’s a lot to be said for that.   You even just see, in the world of hockey let’s say, you get the player that actually takes the awareness that they are actually a role model to young people, and you have others that could care less.   So, I think that all we have to do, is that in this room, everyone involved in education, and in media and in advertising, does everything in their power to be responsible with our young people.  

Anne:

I think that everybody would say that we want to feel responsible.   What it keeps coming back to is that it’s a citizen’s choice.   Like somebody made the choice in Quebec to make those legislative changes, that’s not going to come from business saying, “Let’s not advertise to children anymore”.   That’s going to come from concerned parents, educators and society as a whole.   And if that’s important to us in this society, we would be making an issue about it and going and making sure that legislation happens.

To say that it’s the businesses responsibility to shut down that marketing opportunity.    I don’t think you are going to get it pushed that way.   It really comes from us saying that it’s important to us, that kids are important to us, that’s the way we want to see it in Canada.   And again I always have to come back to personal choice.    I understand that advertising has a huge influence on popular culture.   It has a huge influence on everything we do.   But both my husband and I work in business, both of us work in marketing, and we made the personal choice, that our son grew up without advertised television until grade four.   Why did we pick grade four? Because of the research I had done.   There is a little bit of a divide of what’s happening with children’s development needs then, we decided that was our responsible choice in our household.

So here he is growing up, not knowing what’s advertised on TV until grade four, then we can sit down, we have conversations and stuff like that.   That’s what I’m talking about.   I recognize that we live in a world that if we walk outside, he’s going to get inundated, or the kids in the school yard are going to tell him things.   The small little choice that I made, to make myself feel like I was doing the thing I wanted to do for my family, was to make that choice.   And it ends up being a big thing.   And he ended up being invited to a birthday party where the theme was The Simpsons, and he didn’t know who they were.   It was probably humiliating to him for a small part of his life, but he got over it. And now he knows The Simpsons, he’s going into grade eight.   He can talk about The Simpsons.   That’s why I say there are big issues that society has to make choices about, and there’s personal issues we make, and we try to work together to get to a good place.

MAX:

I don’t have kids, but that’s why I don’t let my dog watch TV either.   (laughter)   I do think, that what it really comes down to for me, as a positive thing to do is, I think media literacy has to start at an incredibly early age.   So if anybody, has the opportunity to find a media literacy organization and bring them into your classroom, I’d recommend that, as step one.   And then the other thing to do as a consumer, is to obviously look at your choices, and if advertising plays as much of a role in consumer choices as people say they do, I think people are often willing to complain about bad advertising, I think the other thing to do is to send a missive to a company who practices ethical advertising that you like and let them know that that had an effect on your purchase choice.   Because truth be told, business goes where the money is, and if they learn that they can’t afford not to, they’re going to learn from people responding to them. So if that’s something everyone in this room feels passionate about, and there’s advertising that you feel is ethical and you feel it’s going to have an impact on whether you buy something, by buying something, or by writing them and saying, if I’m ever in your category I will be buying from you because your business is ethical.

Debbie:

I think that is really great advice, and I guess that that empowering message is certainly one that I take into my classrooms.   I mean 50 cent’s “Candy Shop” last year, was airing and I had a number of black girls wherever I seemed to go, who were saying, “I find this utterly insulting.   I despise the fact that my sisters are being portrayed as sluts and whores.   I’m so offended by this particular music video”.   And so my question to them is “What are you going to do about it?   You have a choice, you are a consumer, stations like MTV (sorry Much Music) have made decisions to run that, for whatever reason, they’ve been able to rationalize this decision.   What are you going to do about it? If you are offended, how are you going to respond?”   It’s perhaps not even a choice they even thought they had.  

In a couple of cases kids wrote to Universal Music, and in a couple of cases they wrote to Much Music.   But I think it’s important for them to understand that they have a voice.   In the same way I was shopping with my daughter and friends for running shoes not long ago, and we would go to look at the shelf.   And my daughter said “No way, I’m not buying Guess Runners because I can’t stand Paris Hilton”, and then we went on to Nike and she said “No I refuse to buy Nike, because they use slave labor”.   And then we went on to another brand, and I mean she rejected every single option on the shelf and we went home without running shoes.   So for me it was really a fascinating exercise to see how she’s internalized some of the choices, at age sixteen, that she has as a consumer.   Yes so it’s much bigger than us as individuals.   This pressure to buy and sell, but I think really that we have to help children understand again, that it is about choice.

Barry Duncan:   We might have time for one more question, or we could call it quits.

Audience Member Seven.

You may hate that I’m going to do this, but I’m going to return to the question of ethics, but in a slightly different way because of what Debbie was just talking about, and because of what I think has been missing in this discussion so far.   And I’m going to ask of you who work in advertising, about the way that ethics itself becomes a vehicle for advertising.   I think there is a way that your daughter just demonstrated, that she is a very knowledgeable consumer who cares about ethical issues, and doesn’t want to buy a brand if it’s associated with an unethical practice.   So I want to ask you, when you are talking with companies or so forth, then build that into the advertising campaign.   I know that they do at Starbucks, at Mountain Equipment Co-op, and stores like this, they very deliberately target consumer’s sense of ethical responsibility and that gets pulled into the campaign.

Max:  

I think the Body Shop is an example of a brand that did very little “advertising”, as it were, but a lot of marketing, to get the message out.   You know “Not Tested On Animals” was a big thing, and they had a huge impact, truthfully, on the rest of the industry.   They are not as popular now as they once were.   But boy for a while they really changed the way that the industry functioned which can be a really positive thing.   It really really can, and that’s the most positive aspect of this.   Again I say this, and it sounds like marketing double speak but whatever, it’s a message that is grounded in something authentic and real, and it’s ultimately going to be better than a message that is grounded in something that isn’t.   And coolness is so fleeting and doesn’t really mean anything, but standing for something that somebody else wants to stand for is great.  

The problem is that as a country we are actually leading edge in this stuff.   A lot of this comes out of Vancouver, No Logo was written by a Canadian, the Adbusters movement as it were, and culture jamming is very much a Canadian thing.   Thinking about globalization, the Corporation was made by a bunch of Canadians.   We do this much better than a lot of other countries around the world, and we still probably don’t do it enough.

The other thing of course is that it means that you are going to be looking for that hook.   It means that less ethical marketers, if that’s a sort of expression we can agree on, are going to try and find those elements of corporate social responsibility that they can push forward.   It’s funny that you used Starbucks as an example.   Starbucks is one of those brands that a lot of people just hate, they hate it because it’s huge, it’s everywhere, it’s big, it’s whatever.   But you read about them as a corporation, and I think that there are a ton of other corporations that do a much worse job thinking about the world around them than Starbucks does.   And yet they are everywhere and many people choose Starbuck to pick as the brand they hate, and talk about from a global perspective how awful they are.   And a lot of anti-globalists have an anti-Starbucks thing going on.   But boy there’s got to be a thousand corporations in this world that are much shittier than Starbucks is.  

So people are going to pick their battles on corporate responsibility, to some extent where they want to. My understanding of Starbucks is that they are better let’s say than Shell, and there are probably a lot of large scale coffee companies that don’t think about the world the same way that they do.   That is my guess.   Anyway they get more targeted than anyone else, and that’s one of the things about marketing, when your brand is the one that is best known, you are a lighting rod and there are people who are going to reject you.   In this country we see it a lot, just because you are a large brand.   So independent of corporate practices and your social responsibility, there is an element in this country, of a fair number of our population who is just sick of the ubiquity of marketing, and rejecting the biggest brands out there regardless of what they are doing.

Debbie:

Let me quickly share a product experience that lasted three years.   It was called “Funky Fries”.   It was manufactured by Heinz through their Orida brand in the United States.   Funky Fries are several products including cinnamon and sugar dipped french fries, chocolate french fries, blue cool french fries, and a couple of others.   And if you take a look at their website, again this is a company that is trying to sell fun through colors, but it backfired on them.   I mean the market place decided that there was no appetite for this particular product, and kids didn’t buy into the “cool sell” because they realized this was over the top.   Often they were grossed out, sometimes the gross-out factor can work in your favor, but this time it didn’t fly.   I show the packaging in schools, and kids are grossed out by it.  

I think that kids are learning to advocate for themselves.   Nutritional profiles, where the government or the market place is determining some of the parameters around marketing.   We now have nutritional profiles on food as of Jan 2006.   It is mandatory in the country now to tell people what’s going in the food they eat.   We’ve had labels on our clothing for twenty years, but we haven’t known what goes into the food we eat until 2003 when it became optional, and by the end of this year it’s mandatory.   Now when I go into the classroom I’ll ask the students, “How many of you are reading the nutritional profiles?”   And it’s a badge of honor for a lot of kids now and I’ve seen that change dramatically for the last couple of years.   Where they are saying “Right, I need to see how I’m feeding my body”.   Ya we still have some serious problems, but it’s so exciting to see how kids are taking these responsibilities, because however that message has trickled down, they’re getting it and they are realizing that there are some issues that need to be dealt with.

Max:

What I would just want to add to that very quickly is, that what’s funny though is that if that kid, that twelve year old kid, in grade seven or grade six, the cool 12 year old in grade seven or grade six, says “Oh my god how come you are wearing that brand, that’s awful”.   We all go, “Oh my god, that’s a huge marketing problem, why are kids learning to feel pressure from other kids, and oh my god that’s so awful”.    When that cool kid who’s in grade seven or grade six, sees someone eating a taco, a burrito from 7-11 that frozen wrappy thing and says, “Why are you putting that in your body, you’ve got to be putting something better in your body!”   It’s the exact same process, it’s someone looking at a person who they think is cool and learning a piece of behavior.   Or parodying a form of behaviors.   And in one way it has sort of positive aspects and in the other way it has a negative aspect, or an negative outcome and a positive outcome. And I guess the point I would want to make about this is, that marketing is a medium, it’s a means to an end rather than an end.    There are positive aspects to it and negative aspects to it and I think we’ve gone through a lot of both on either side.  

I think we make good choices and see through it and recognize what’s behind it.   My worry coming out of panels like this - and believe it or not I end up doing a lot of them- is that people think that if you stop the problem in marketing, you stop the problem in business.   I think that what I would like to end on, is the point that it goes deeper than that.   It can be a positive tool to get people to think about what they put in their body.   Because that good looking kid at school said, “What are you doing to yourself?”   That can be really positive as well, but it’s coming from exactly the same place as, “Why are you wearing the wrong baseball cap”.

Barry Duncan:

Well on that summative note.   I’d like to thank the panel for one of the liveliest, provocative, ethical discussions in a long time.   And we would hope that the audience, you will come back to our next event.   We are hoping to do something on global studies and the media.   And we want to thank the National Film Board for letting us use their venue.

We’d like to thank Debbie, who brought these marvelous provocative clips. I could go on…., it was really an excellent session for us all.   I’d like to thank the audience for your questions and comments.

<<Applause>>

And our AML President Carolyn Wilson.

Carolyn Wilson:

Thanks Barry.   I would also like to thank everybody for coming, and thank the panel for that wonderful discussion and for giving us so many ideas and strategies to take into our classrooms and into our home.   So thank you.

As Barry Mentioned, we have another event coming up in the new year.   The event “Global Narratives” will focus primarily on the Asian influence in North American culture, looking at films, comics, and fashion.   So it promises to be quite an interesting event.   So if you enjoyed this one, please consider coming out to that.   And also consider supporting the Association for Media Literacy.   The AML is a voluntary non-profit organization, dedicated to promoting media literacy.   And our members enjoy access to resources, to our website, to events such as this one, and we are also involved in conducting a lot of workshops for parents and for teachers.   So we have some information on the tables outside if you’d like to take a look, if you didn’t pick anything up already.   So please consider that.   And as a thank you and a sign of our appreciation tonight, from the AML, Cam has a little present that he’s going to explain and give out to someone.  

"The advertisers aren't evil. They are just doing their job, which is to sell a product.  But the consequences, usually unintended, are often destructive to individuals, to cultures, and to the planet."  - Jean Kilbourne