Growing up, advertising directly to children was something done aggressively by almost every relevant big company. Maybe it still is, I do not watch any of it. One reads about newer laws and restricted hours and corporate responsibility and hopes that is really a thing. Probably there is a lot of shameless stuff still around anyway. Aren’t there whole shows that are just that?
Dietary changes mean I am eating less carbs and less cereal, and these days I usually opt for the healthier stuff. Most of the time. In a weak moment, shopping when hungry, I brought home an attractively priced box of Post Honeycomb cereal.
The back of the box, in Canada, has been the same for years. It has puzzles, all with a Honeycomb theme. Find dozens of hidden pieces of cereal on the box. Fill in the blanks to get “bring home the Honeycomb”. Unscramble the name of the pictured band, The Post Honeycombs. This being Canada, the same things are said in French. The entertainment value strikes me as very limited.
But as shameless as this may be, there are probably worse examples. Feel free to share, current or past examples. How you feel about it, or whatever else you want.
Most of the cartoons my generation grew up with during the 1980s including GI Joe, Thundercats, Transformers, My Little Pony, MASK, Rainbow Brite, and Jem and the Holograms were all truly, truly outrageous efforts to advertise to children in the guise of entertainment.
Anything in the 90’s with a 1-900 phone number that would go “Kids, ask your parents permission to call this fun phone number!” Nobody I knew asked their parents permission to call the phone numbers that automatically charged you the moment you dialed the number.
Honeycomb is, by weight, 1/3 sugar. That’s not great, but not so bad just before or after a workout. I think Post Sugar Crisp might be closer to 60% sugar? Probably there is worse; sugar cereals were a bona fide attempt to make a cereal as sweet as birthday cake, after some industrialist’s kid expressed that breakfast desire.
Past example, which I think I’ve posted before: when I was 4 or 5 years old, there was a TV commercial for PF Flyers, a sneaker for kids. The ad showed a boy wearing PF Flyers and jumping high, high, high in the air - basically flying.
I so badly wanted those shoes because I too wanted to fly. I convinced my parents to get them for me - I still remember how forlorn I was when I jumped and jumped but didn’t fly like the boy in the commercial.
I’m sure the writers of that ad knew full well that very young children would think that the shoes would make them fly.
This is what immediately leapt to my mind as well. Shameless and amazingly effective - some of those lines are still selling nicely literal decades later.
Yeah, it’s funny how something so misleading just flew over my head as a kid. It would have been just as correct if they’d put a bowl of cereal in a field with a bunch of trucks and tanks and said, “Part of this powerful military convoy.”
Somewhere out there is a graphic designer trying their best to make a cereal box interesting for kids and knowing full well that they’ll just be staring at their tablet/phone/tv anyway.
“Be sure to drink your Ovaltine…Ovaltine? A crummy commercial?” At least you didn’t have to wait by the mailbox for your Little Orphan Annie decoder ring.
It’s pretty much the same as ever, except that they’ve had 50 or so years of practice by now. So they’re better at knowing how to scheme up hyperkinetic ads to gull children into wanting their candy, toys, or whatever.
They’re still making TV series and toys in tandem; look at “Blaze and the Monster Machines” or “Paw Patrol” for modern-day examples of wildly popular early childhood shows that were almost certainly engineered from the start with toy and merchandise sales in mind.
And there are a bunch of crap games that seem to have been invented strictly for the TV commercial value, because the games themselves aren’t even good by the standards of games aimed at six year olds.
I struggle to describe the social benefits of The Hamburglar, a bizarre creation however you look at it. The only recent commercial I have seen is one showing Grimace playing a shootaround with the Toronto Raptor mascot. It’s still strange, but far less so since the original gang, which could possibly only have been conceived using some drugs of great potency?
