Commercialization Of Children S Television

The current rapid growth of TV platforms in terrestrial, sattelite, and cable formats will soon move into digital transmission, offering opportunities for greater commercialization through advertising on media that have not previously been exploited. In

Turning young children into premature consumers has always been a potential danger of commercial television. In recent years improved marketing technology has enabled the television industry to pinpoint specialized audiences at specific times. Unfortunately, the ability to reach a young audience has not resulted in more inventive programming in the best interests of children. Instead, they have been exploited by advertisers who take advantage of this increasingly lucrative market. These developments have lead to mounting public concern, especially by consumer groups such as Action for Children's Television, which petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to set guidelines to protect children from commercial exploitation. This study, commissioned by ACT, focuses on the economic aspects of commercial children's .television and their relation to FCC public-policy options. William Melody examines the economic characteristics of advertising practices and how they affect programming. He traces the history of children's programming from television's early years, when quality children's shows were used as an incentive to promote the sale of television sets, to the present time of poor-quality, commercial-laden programming that exploits the economic potential of child consumers. Mr. Melody demonstrates clearly that as long as advertisers control programming it will respond to their own vested interests and not to the needs of the child. As a solution, he suggests alternate modes of financing children's television to be implemented gradually. In this way, better programming will be provided without causing significant financial hardship to the broadcast industry.

This timely and innovative book provides a detailed history of marketing to children, revealing the strategies that shape the design of toys and have a powerful impact on the way children play. Stephen Kline looks at the history and development of children's play culture and toys from the teddy bear and Lego to the Barbie doll, Care Bears and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He profiles the rise of children's mass media - books, comics, film and television - and that of the specially stores such as Toys 'R' Us, revealing how the opportunity to reach large audiences of children through television was a pivotal point in developing new approaches to advertising. Contemporary youngsters, he shows, are catapulted into a fantastic and chaotic time-space continuum of action toys thanks to the merchandisers' interest in animated television. Kline looks at the imagery and appeal of the toy commercials and at how they provide a host of stereotyped figures around which children can organize their imaginative experience. He shows how the deregulation of advertising in the United States in the 1980s has led directly to the development of the new marketing strategies which use television series to saturate the market with promotional "character toys". Finally, in a powerful re-examination of the debates about the cultural effects of television, Out of the Garden asks whether we should allow our children's play culture to be primarily defined and created by marketing strategies, pointing to the unintended consequences of a situation in which images of real children have all but been eliminated from narratives about the young.