Generations of American children have grown up with eight words spooned into their ears, from the time they enter kindergarten all the way until they graduate from high school: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
It turns out that message and other similar ones have a deeper, darker history, chock-full of corporate mind control and corruption.
In the 20th century, advertising executives, at a loss for how to further increase the sale of their sometimes sinister products such as sugary cereals, devised the most devious marketing campaign in modern history — a campaign so legendary it carved straight into the American soul.
The pseudoscientific message of breakfast’s importance was one entirely fabricated by Big Cereal, a group of cereal companies that congregated to impress upon the American youth the absolute vitality and importance of their product.
Spearheaded by Kellogg’s, which owns everything from Corn Flakes to Choco Puffs to Pop Tarts, a massive advertising campaign was launched to impress upon youngsters the importance of breakfast and, more importantly, cereal.
The example of Big Cereal shows the dangers of allowing advertisers free access to target the minds of children. In a day and age when advertisements are omnipresent, the priority of American policymaking ought to be preserving the independent thinking of American youth.
When tasked with entertaining my 8-year-old cousin for a week, having exhausted all the customary physical sports and been weathered down by consistent, nagging pleas, I turned to what countless parents across the country default to as a means of engaging their children: the iPad.
Over the course of a week, I grimaced each time I saw him click on the dreaded red and white of YouTube Kids, a sure sign of the ceaseless stream of advertisements to come. Even Roblox was loaded with not-so-subtle product placement. Perhaps even more jarring than the volume of ads being shown to the youngest of all internet users was the content: video game ads that ought to have been accompanied with an epilepsy warning; fast food ads that dressed up “food” filled with carbs and microplastics; and a variety of toy ads designed to hijack impressionable young minds.
The effects were tangible. It was impossible to leave the house without having him beg for one of the flashy products that had paraded in front of his eyes during his scrolling sessions. Most shockingly, each new advertisement seemed to degrade his capacity for critical reasoning; accepting what was shown to him seemed like his only viable option, and continued exposure appeared to make him increasingly malleable to these corporate machinations.
The negative effects of ceaseless marketing in children’s lives stem from their susceptibility to outward influence. Corporations stand to gain large sums of money from developing their customer base at an early age.
And every parent’s worst nightmare is a child’s unrelenting, publicly embarrassing stubbornness. Whether it’s the tantalizing vibrancy of a candy store in a mall, an alluring toy that all the other kids have or the Juul Pod that older kids smoke in the bathrooms, companies find it alarmingly easy to draw and maintain a child’s attention.
Most psychologists concur that childhood influences reverberate throughout a person’s adult life; indeed, most of who a person is or strives to be is defined in childhood. Businesses take notice of this, with metrics known in corporate jargon as “customer acquisition cost” — the amount of money a corporation must spend to gain one new customer — and “customer retention cost” — the amount of money the corporation must spend to maintain this new customer.
So when a company “buys” a child, the goal is that they buy that customer for life; a report from Packaged Facts by Chicago School of Psychology PhD James McNeal observed that more than 25% of brand preferences in later adulthood begin in childhood.
The free choice of an adult to buy a product and then not buy that product in the future is limited in the case of children, and these limits remain with them well into adulthood. Often people revert to consuming products that remind them of their childhood in the name of nostalgia, a common process termed “nostalgia consumption.” This subconscious preference for products they were conditioned to enjoy in their childhood is a directive which may be difficult to disobey.
America is hardly the only country in which the ubiquitous specter of advertising plagues youth. In Oceania, children raised on “Vegemite,” often considered an off-putting spread elsewhere in the world, continue to eat Vegemite well into their adulthood due to their childhood conditioning.
The idea of conditioning children to enjoy certain products over others is antithetical to the idea of the free American market. While companies like YouTube restrict the type of advertising allowed on their Kids platform, restrictions are often limited to inappropriate content. Furthermore, while ads hosted as a part of YouTube’s monetized scheme are regulated, in-video ads, or creator sponsorships, are entirely unregulated.
The bottom line: The increasing prevalence of advertising targeted at youth progressively gnaws away at the free choice and will of the future of the American populous, transforming the next generation into zombie slaves to consumerism. America must cut the legs off the massive advertising industry to revitalize individualism in the marketplace and protect our most vulnerable population: children.
