On McDonald’s and Report Cards?

I first became interested in Children's Marketing (one of the great social evils of our time), about a few years ago, when I read about a conference of children's marketers that was taking place in Shanghai.

It was a real eye-opener to learn how these adults talk about making money off kids' weaknesses.

Never mind, for a moment, the writings of critics of children's marketing. Just read the child marketers' very own brochures and you'll be in for some intriguing reading. It is barely indistinguishable from what you might call "corporate pedophilia." The basic syntax you see in their brochures, websites and lectures is "How to get into the mind of a child and find their weakneses, in order to make them dissatisfied with what they have, so they will pester their parents to buy stuff they don't need." Or "How to understand the bonds of family so that you can break those bonds apart and then offer to re-attach them by buying your product." That's it. These are the two core statements you find in almost all of their literature. And they often use disgusting phrases like "how to get into the mind of a child" and "how to get into the wallet of a kid" and host cocktail parties where otherwise law-abiding people plot ways to convince kids they are unhappy.

And many of the leading lights, the "geniuses" of this kind of marketing come from some of the best anthropology, sociology and psychology departments in our country. There should a law against social scientists using often publicly-funded educations to wage war on American children's sense of well-being. Because this is an industry whose bottom line is predicated on making kids (from infancy, mind you!) feel unhappy and dissatisfied. (And, again, no one's making this claim more strongly than the marketers themselves!)

For people who care about the rights of voiceless, defenseless animals, there are many parallels and connections. From the perspective of children's marketers (the biggest of whom are, of course, in the animal-killing business), children and families are just another part of the "operation" that begins at the factory farms and slaughterhouse. And there is also a very strong connection to institutionalized, profit-based violence against other humans (aka, the warfare industry).

One of the biggest (if not the biggest) organizers of children's marketing conferences in the world is called IQPC (International Quality and Productivity Center — how's that for a James Bondian corporate name?). Their children's marketing conferences are called Kid Power Xchange.

(Kid Power Xchange — what a subtextual trainwreck those three words are!)

IQPC also runs a popular conference on "network centric warfare." And since children's marketers at Kid Power Xchange constantly talk of children as "targets" or things to be "targeted," you wonder why they don't just called the Kid Power Xchange "family-centric warfare" or "kid-centric warfare."

If you look at http://www.iqpc.com/ they show you the connections right there in their matrix of conferences. In the eyes of organizers like IQPC, "Kid Power" is just yet another exploitable resource, along with meat, junk food and warfare.

So, not only is McD's putting Ronald McDonald on your children's report cards, but they are also doing much of their brainstorming at conferences designed by the same people who design warmaking meet-ups.

As we have known for hundreds of years, there is a strong connection between the violence done to animals and the violence done to children's minds and bodies, and to the integrity of their families. And, if you ever attend one of these childrens marketing events, you will see that it is done knowingly, willingly, consciously. Very, very consciously, and openly. It is sickening.

Just as many people can hardly fathom how otherwise "normal" people are able to brutalize animals in factory farms, slaughterhouses and laboratories, one gets the same sense from reading what these folks do and say. In more than two years of following this topic, I've not yet read a single statement by a critic of children's marketing that was more alarming than what the kid marketers say themselves. And I do not know how they sleep at night.

Again, it is nothing short of "corporate pedophilia," and the pain begins in one CAFO (the factory farms) and just continues at another CAFO (McD, KFC, Burger King, your local school); nonhuman animal families are destroyed at the former, and (if the marketers do what they say they strive for) human families are slowly torn apart at the latter.

Like the animals these corporations exploit, the children have no voice. None of their "targets" are old enough to vote against the adults who are targeting them. Both animals and children are viewed by corporations as soulless pieces of property, things to be "branded" and "modified" and "cultivated" — I could go on about all the similarities, but it would take an entire book to even get started.

You can also the connection by looking at countries in Europe — maybe it's just an accident — but many of the very same countries that have stricter humane laws and where animal rights is more prominently discussed at the governmental level (and where GMO products are labeled by law) are the same countries where many types of children's marketing common in the US are illegal. Yes, ILLEGAL. As far, as I know, the FCC has certain minimal regulations about marketing certain kinds of products to children on TV — which Nickelodeon seems constantly to run afoul of — but as a society, we have virtually no laws to keep corporations out of our children's minds, no laws safeguarding children from corporate pedophilia and family-centric warfare.

There is another connection, too, a very basic one, that connects veganism to the movement for protecting children from corporations: The whole strategy of childrens marketing is to convince kids that "there is not enough! I need more! Not enough food! Not enough 'love.' " A false sense of scarcity is what they sell.

Whereas the vegan message, of course, is exactly the opposite: "There IS enough. We don't need more. There is enough food. There is enough love."

Although our missions are different, the kind of people who work at places like Coalition for A Commercial-Free Childhood and the people who read Animal Person or an Animal Friendly Life or Compassionate Cooks, share so much in common, it really begs the question: Should we be talking to each much more frequently? Maybe there is room for more discussion, and exchanging of ideas?

Case in point: I know this is not an original idea and hope it is happening in many places, but I'll add it here, because I hope it becomes a common experiment.

Maybe one could challenge two schools in the same district, a place where McDs or KFC has their tentacles into our children's lunchboxes (like Seminole County). Let one school implement a completely non-branded, non-corporatized vegan lunch program for a year, or even a semester, and see if the CHILDREN themselves notice any difference. Compare the results from both schools. Heck, I bet it would even create some jobs in the community for all those vegan cooks and bakers, and re-connect the school to its own community via wholesome food choices. Then, let the kids vote: Which food do they want in their schools? When it comes to choices like these — if their minds are left alone by corporate pedophiles — I would trust the natural instincts of children over most of the people who seem to be making choices about food in many of our schools.