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Comment by dbasedweeb | Hacker News Reader

Of course, most programming for kids has been just that for decades, with a few notable exceptions (Sesame Street, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, others probably). The programs themselves when I was a kid typically took the form of a 22 minute toy advertisement, interspersed with more advertising. Of course, they didn’t have data on my particular viewing habits and a psych profile, but honestly it still worked pretty well.

The best bet if you care about your kid is probably to try and curate yourself. That’s definitely doable if you’re well-off in a two parent home with one child at a time, but how many families does that describe on average?

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> they didn’t have data on my particular viewing habits and a psych profile

I'd bet that 8-year olds (as a population), with their under-cooked brains and extremely limited autonomy have MUCH more predictable psych profiles and viewing habits than adults as a population.

Anecdote for illustration: I, and everybody I went to school with, watched the same show when we got home from school. How much more predictable a viewing pattern can you get? Plus, you can bet that I wanted whatever toy they were advertising, and bugged my parents about it as soon as I could.

Thinking about it, I'll never see data to confirm this but I'll bet childrens' TV advertisers have better conversion rates than Facebook, with all of its carefully mined and organized profiling data.

I have a friend at Bandai that says the US market actually has laws that prevent the situation that occurs in Japan.

Shows like Power Rangers basically have their entire commercial blocks bought out by the toy company that manufactures the Power Rangers toys. This creates a very interesting relationship where the show runners and toy creators work together when creating the next season, where the two companies have veto power over ideas from the other. The toy companies come up with special guns or powers unique from the previous toy line, but the show producer can argue that it wouldn't translate well on screen or that there aren't enough good story lines and vice versa.

In America atleast the toy tie ins are limited in the amount of advertising they can show. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the limitations on online advertising are far weaker than their television equivalents. This tracks with my own viewings as a child from what I can remember. I remember being bombarded with toy ads when I was young, but I also remember being excited about toy tie ins I didn't know existed when I got my parents to rent Power Rangers on VHS and having the first and last 5 minutes of the video tape consist of toy advertisements.

I agree, and again anecdotally I found the same to be true when I was a kid at school. At most you had a few sub-groups, like the guys who were into Transformers, and the guys into GI Joe. We were not a sophisticated bunch, but then as you pointed out, our brains were still larval. When Lunchables came out, we all wanted them. From my recollection we didn’t even like the taste, we just wanted them.

There was some variation, but it was all on a predictable theme.

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