The New Product Placement

Last fall, a half-dozen child psychologists lurked around New York's Yale Club at a convention called "Advertising & Promoting to Kids" in search of new, higher-paying clients. They were hoping to sell their smarts to marketers and advertisers attending lectures on "Emotional Branding" and on the troubled post-September 11 economy. As marketer David Bryla put it, today's advertisers must employ a "full frontal attack" on children. Over the past decade more and more psychologists have been helping corporations win their war, successfully preying on kids' developmental stages, anxieties and vulnerabilities.

In the crowd sat Susan Linn, an idealistic, old-fashioned therapist, gasping and sighing in disgust as the guest speaker declared, "Remember folks, all kids want to do is fit in!" and "Brand them when they're babies!" In disbelief, Linn exclaimed loud enough for her fellow attendees to hear, "These are the only people I know who talk about kids incessantly without asking: 'But is it good for them?'" Linn has been mortified over the fact that psychologists are using their training, as she sees it, to exploit rather than to help kids.

Linn was at the conference not as a participant but as a spy. As an organizer of another conference, held at the same time one floor below, called "Consumer Kids: Marketers' Impact on Children's Health," she wanted to hear the rhetoric firsthand. The Harvard-affiliated group she works for, Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children (SCEC), had intentionally planned the conference, along with a demonstration outside the club, to fall at the same time and place as the advertising one.

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