Critics of advertising aimed at children say that Madison Avenue should stop exploiting youngsters by turning them into little insatiable consumers.
But marketing executives in the $500 billion-a-year industry who dream up the campaigns and slogans meant to capture the attention of children argue that they are simply informing the consumer, and follow all the rules in doing so.
"There are people who take pot shots...who believe marketing to children should be banned," Paul Kurnit, president and founder of KidShop, a youth-focused marketing and communications consulting company, told Reuters. "This has been going on for many, many years."
At KidScreen magazine's Advertising and Promoting to Kids Conference that ended on September 20, the advertising industry celebrated its fifth annual Golden Marbles awards in a Manhattan ballroom, recognising the top 10 ads that "inform, educate and entertain."
A group opposed to just about everything the industry stands for held its own forum two floors below and then protested outside the building.
Jocelyn Longworth, editor of KidScreen magazine, said she could empathise with the critics' goals saying they were well meaning, although perhaps "naive about the nature of the business."
"It is a business, it's people selling things to make money and that's the reality of the world that we live in," Longworth said.
Controversy over advertising sweets, cereals, snacks and certain toys is not new, dating back to the early days of carnival barkers. Experts say the average US child is bombarded with some 40,000 commercials a year on television alone.
Corporations are now using more sophisticated marketing techniques to grab a child's attention and hold it, often for years.
Opposing groups such as Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children say children are easy targets.
"Corporations have continued to find new ways to expand the children's market by ignoring ethical standards, even those they themselves have put into place," Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told the SCEC's second annual "summit" called, "Consuming Kids: Marketers' Impact on Children's Health."
"When TV was deregulated in 1984, violence immediately became a major vehicle for marketing to children through linking violent cartoons to toys and other products," she added, citing professional wrestling action figures as examples.
SCEC is an advocacy group that aims to "protect our children's health and well being," according to its website www.commercialexploitation.com.
The group wants legislators to make schools commercial-free zones, fund research into the psychological and health consequences of marketing to children, eliminate marketing to anyone younger than eight and require the Federal Trade Commission to investigate corporate marketing practices aimed at children, among other initiatives.
However, most advertising executives said they felt there were enough guidelines set out by the Children's Advertising Review Unit, which is operated by the Council of Better Business Review (www.caru.org) to keep the industry honest at self-regulating its ads aimed at youngsters.
CARU says, for example, that the advertising presentation should not mislead children about benefits from use of the product, that children should not be urged to ask parents or others to buy products, and care should be taken not to exploit a child's imagination.
"The infrastructures that are in place are quite good and quite effective in making sure that their messages are not exploitative in nature," Longworth said. "For me, the system works the way it is... Children are very sophisticated" when it comes to understanding marketing messages.
It's not only questionable toys that opponents deplore, but marketing aimed at young girls' self esteem, and fast food ads, especially in low-income, black communities.
"They're not selling only food, it's a whole lot of other things that are being marketed," said Velma LaPoint of Howard University in Washington, who has conducted research on black perspectives on marketing fast-food to children.
LaPoint's study says parents can help by eliminating or reducing a child's fast-food consumption and by advocating a limit on the fast-food restaurants in their communities.
"You're trying to reach your audience, and the only way to do that is to market to them and to speak their language," Selina Gruber, president of Children's Market Services Worldwide Inc. and a psychologist, told Reuters. "For the most part, (advertisers) try and not do negative advertising, and very often the advertisement is directed towards the parent.
"It's mainly on TV that advertising reaches children," she added. "I think bad advertising, meaning that it's not truthful and that it's too aggressive and violent...is negative. But there's an 'off' button. It depends on the parent to be able to control it."
The contention that parents, not corporations, are responsible for preventing the negative impact of marketing on children is cynical "industry spin", said Susan Linn, associate director of the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston.
"I think that the worst thing is that marketing to children succeeds by exploiting their vulnerabilities," she said at the SCEC gathering. "Greed is also the motivation."
The 2000 US census recorded 105 million households in the United States, and one advertising giant's report says advertisers spend some $2,200 a year on each of them.
The Centre for a New American Dream says that by the age of three, one in five American children begin to make specific requests for brand-name products.
Older children, aged from 12 to 19, spent a record $155 billion of their own money in 2001, up from $63 billion four years earlier. In the 1960s, children influenced about $5 billion of their parents' purchases. By 1984, it increased tenfold to $50 billion. In 2000, marketing expert James McNeal said children under 12 influenced family buying to the tune of $500 billion.
In fact, one report given at the KidScreen conference focused on how a child's brain develops and using that information to market to different age groups, starting with the two- to five-year-olds, to build "positive associations with the brands, which will carry on later in life."
"Today's children have access to more information than they ever had before," KidShop's Kurnit said.