Plastures of plenty
It was while I was listening to Isabella Henriques talk about children and consumerism at this week's Children's Global Media Summit that it occurred to me that where most people see life happening advertisers see empty space.
Henriques, like Kathryn Montgomery earlier this year, is concerned about abusive advertising practices aimed at children. So much UK rhetoric around children and the internet focuses on pornography and extremism - see, for example, this week's Digital Childhood report calling for a digital environment that is "fit for childhood" - that it's refreshing to hear someone talk about other harms. Such as: teaching kids "consumerism". Under 12, Henriques said, children do not understand the persuasiveness and complexity of advertising. Under six, they don't identify ads (like the toddler who watched 12 minutes of Geico commercials). And even things that are *effectively* ads aren't necessarily easily identifiable as such, even by adults: unboxing videos, product placement, YouTube kids playing with branded toys, and in-app "opportunities" to buy stuff. Henriques' research finds that children influence family purchases by up to 80%. That's not a baby you're expecting; it's a sales promoter.
When we talk about the advertising arms race, we usually mean the expanding presence and intrusiveness of ads in places where we're already used to seeing them. That escalation has been astonishing.
To take one example: a half-hour sitcom episode on US network television in 1965 - specifically, the deservedly famous Coast to Coast Big Mouth episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show - was 25:30 minutes long. A 2017 episode of the top-rated US comedy, The Big Bang Theory, barely ekes out 18. That's over a third less content, double the percentage of time watching ads, or simply seven and a half extra minutes. No wonder people realized automatic ad marking and fast-forwarding would sell.
The internet kicked this into high gear. The lack of regulation and the uncertainty about business models led to legitimate experimentation. But it also led to today's complaints, both about maximally intrusive and attention-demanding ads and the data mining advertisers and their agencies use to target us, and also to increasingly powerful ad blockers - and ad blocker blockers.
The second, more subtle version of the arms race is the one where advertisers see every open space where people congregate as theirs to target. This was summed up for me once at a lunchtime seminar run by the UK's Internet Advertising Bureau in 2003, when a speaker gave an enthusiastic tutorial on marketing via viral email: "It gets us into the office. We've never been able to go there before." You could immediately see what office inboxes looked like to them: vast green fields just waiting to be cultivated. You know, the space we thought of as "work". And we were going to be grateful.
Childhood, as listening to Henriques, Montgomery, and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood makes plain, is one of those green fields advertisers have long fought to cultivate. On broadcast media, regulators were able to exercise some control. Even online, the Childhood Online Privacy Protection Act has been of some use.
Advertisers, like some religions, aim to capture children's affections young, on the basis that the tastes and habits you acquire in childhood are the hardest for an interloper to disrupt. The food industry has long been notorious unhealthy foods into finding ways around regulations that limit how they target children on broadcast and physical-world media. But the internet offers new options: "Smart" toys are one set of examples; Facebook's new Messenger Kids app is another. This arms race variant will escalate as the Internet of Things offers advertisers access to new areas of our lives.
Part of this story is the vastly increased quantities of data that will be available to sell to advertisers for data mining. On the web, "free" has long meant "pay with data". With the Internet of Things, no device will be free, but we will pay with data anyway. The cases we wrote about last week are early examples. As hardware becomes software, replacement life cycles become the manufacturer's choice, not yours. "My" mobile phone is as much mine as "my library book" - and a Tesla is a mobile phone with a chassis and wheels. Think of the advertising opportunities when drivers are superfluous to requirements, , beginning with the self-driving car;s dashboard and windshield. The voice-operated Echo/Home/Dot/whatever is clearly intended to turn homes into marketplaces.
A more important part is the risk of turning our homes into walled gardens, as Geoffrey A. Fowler writes in the Washington Post of his trial of Amazon Key. During the experiment, Fowler found strangers entering his house less disturbing than his sense of being "locked into an all-Amazon world". The Key experiment is, in Fowler's estimation, the first stab at Amazon's goal of becoming "the operating system for your home". Will Amazon, Google, and Apple homes be interoperable?
Henriques is calling for global regulation to limit the targeting of children for food and other advertising. It makes sense: every country is dealing with the same multinational companies, and most of us can agree on what "abusive advertising" means. But then you have to ask: why do they get a pass on the rest of us?
Illustrations: Windows XP start-up screen
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.