Toy commercials are being replaced by product placement and YouTube influencers
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The unboxing videos in particular I think are just completely terrible. It's naked consumerism-by-proxy without even the pretext of entertainment. The consumption is the entertainment. Consume, discard. Consume, discard. Next toy.
Lastly, perhaps most awful of all, are the actual-in-the-plastic-flesh "loot crate" type toys that I see at target. They're literally opaque, mystery containers that let you know all the different things you could get from it. This isn't an entirely new concept, but when they're actually called some variation of "loot crate" or "unboxing," it makes me sick. It's sick consumerism at its worst. A big middle finger to whoever decides to actually market these to children. It's disgusting and I hate all of it.
Don't get me started on Christmas and gifts and presents for kids. By age 7 it already made me feel uneasy.
That was always the case though. Star Wars isn't worth billions because of the movies, it's worth billions because of the branded products.
Never seen Transformers toys? GI Joe? TMNT? Childrens TV shows were always about selling toys, that was always the bread and butter.
I agree with everything else though, theses unboxing videos and theses "loot crate", they are quite new and play with the instant dopamine rush. They are quite dangerous and seriously need to be stopped. It's crazy that the FTC put so much effort with COPPA to stop "tracking kids" on Youtube, but did nothing against theses kind of videos.
Oh yeah definitely, it still quite bad. It was just to mentions how that strategy isn't new and that we lived through similar abuse.
It came up in a fairly exemplary way once when there was a fashion photographer in a group I went drinking with. Nice bloke with some interesting stories. He mentioned a plan for an elaborate practical joke at a fashion show by showing some crudely made post-apocalyptic style collection. Anything "scandalous" would effectively just end up being good publicity.
In Daredevil, Matt Murdoch pushes an old man out of the way of a truck that contains chemicals that blind him but give him superhuman abilities. He is then trained by his mentor Stick the fight against The Hand.
In TMNT, there is an incident that involves chemicals getting into a sewer that transforms the turtles as well as the rat that is with them. That rat is named Splinter, and he trains the turtles to fight against The Foot.
Also no particular point aside from my own amusement!
https://mobile.twitter.com/ponettplus/status/113087611982831...
Toys are what kids want. They want to connect reality with imagination at their level. Just like video games.
Counterpoint: Scarcity of baby Yoda merch. The show purposefully withheld information about the character from marketing departments for fear of spoiling the story. Star Wars wants to make tons of money, sure. But it's not why they're huge.
As the article points out this simply isn't true. They weren't always like that. It was the direct result of a change in law during the Reagan presidency. All of your examples come after that.
Look at kid's shows from before the change in law. Say, the 1960s. Underdog, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Gilligan's Island, Flipper, Green Acres, Captain Kangaroo, etc.
We have a friend who only buy a select number of presents for their children. It essentially follows the pattern: something wanted, something needed, something worn, something to make, something to read. There is - of course - a cute accompanying rhyme that I don’t know. It limits expectation and pushes back a bit on the whole Christmas hoopla. Their kids seem into it.
Like you, our child is too young to understand/care at this point.
I've learned that for many people, gift-giving isn't for the recipient, it's for the giver to feel good.
The closest solution we've gotten is to not do that, but instead use it as an opportunity to talk to the pre-schooler about charity and sharing with the less fortunate, eventually leading him to the "lets give our extra toys we don't play with very much to other kids" thought.
- We end up making a lot of donations to local thrift stores, women's shelters, and other charities immediately following holidays and birthdays without telling our kids about it. The toys they don't play with simply disappear.
- If the gift is something we want him to eventually play with but that he doesn't have the attention span to remember in the near term, we just hide it in a closet and give it as a 'gift' for completing his 'good behavior' chart later on. He's always surprised and excited. Nice win-win for us.
- N-2 members got huffy that they wanted to see the kids open things. No college contributions.
I stopped participating in Christmas years ago. Was very freeing.
But then I felt bad saying that out loud, so the couple days before Christmas I bought a bunch of stuff I thought they would like.
Turns out I would have been just as well off just letting them get the gifts from the grandparents. Too many for them to appreciate all of them anyway.
Unboxing and "loot haul" videos are a whole other thing and are absolute garbage, totally agree. It's especially gross when it's little kids as the "talent", being pushed by their parents. Buy a bunch of those eggs. Film their kid(s) opening them. Slap on some wacky editing and SFX. Upload. Just gross.
As you say the themes are largely positive, there's a decent range of characters and locations, and usually he's happy to watch an episode a day.
But I do admit I find myself wondering far too much about the backstories! Where does all the technology come from? Who is Ryder? Is he a mad scientist? How did the Mayor get elected? Why does the other Mayor, of Foggy-Bottom, never actually spend time in his own town? And finally at what point (I guess I missed this episode) did the evil-cats become mirrors of the Paw Patrol?
(Also: Sea Patrol? What a crazy and impractial dock for the boat!)
Maybe I should take it less seriously.
These are all questions I have asked myself after the second or third consecutive Paw Pareol episode/story. I'd also ask why Adventure Bay has no leash law and why it would allow anyone to carry around a chicken as a pet (not to mention stored in a purse).
I still can't figure out how Mayor Goodway got elected unless either Adventure Bay has hereditary rule, or the producers are trying to prepare kids for the reality of government incompetence.
There is a certain percentage of movies, music, toys, and other forms of entertainment that play directly, and profit greatly, from this seemingly universal quirk of humanity.
Variable reinforcement works. Collectible card games (all the way back to MtG in the 90's) and MMORPG PvE grinding use the same mechanism. The only way to combat it (positively) that I can think of is to offer something even more appealing, which for a parent is either impractical or unsustainable.
From a parental perspective, is there a way to combat all the advertising and variable reinforcement products other than counter-conditioning those things with aversives?
And aversives have to be carefully set up to be associated only to the toy or loot box or game, and not associated to you (which would be very bad).
Two things that came to mind were delivering bad news (not something you just made up on the spot) right when the loot box or toy is opened; or, perhaps, sabotaging the toy, if it's a present, by adding something the child is afraid of, like a centipede or tarantula, not long before they open it... but I'm not sure the sabotage is easy to do without risking it being associated with other things (like you, for putting the fear-inducing thing in the box).
Even real life is like that though. If you don't understand the mechanism/pattern that makes something work then it'll appear as variable reinforcement. Human relationships are a prime example.
1. Wooden toys - Brio, stacking blocks, etc.
2. Toys from charity shops. Buy, if he's not interested, they just go back. Cheap & recyclable.
3. No YouTube, no iPad, as little TV as possible.
4. Outdoor activities - scooter, balance bike, local park, etc.
5. Imaginative play - teddy bears picnic, etc.
6. Repetitive games. I hide a dinosaur toy around the house every night, the game is he has to find it the next day. It creates a nice bond.
7. Some toys we rotate. Stick them in the garage for a couple of months and swap out with others, it's like they never existed before.
8. Books, books and more books.
9. Music - nursery rhymes, music we like, him "helping" me on the piano, dancing, etc.
10. We spread Christmas out over about a month, due to the amount of plastic crap family buy him. More than he can enjoy in one go.
11. Most important of all, socialising and knowing when not to step in. Kids are mean. Sometimes too mean. It's difficult to know when to step in, but they need to learn the world is tough.
12. The most important, general comfort, love and explaining situations. Small children seem way more receptive to explanations than I would have thought before having a two year old.
We have yet to have been hit by a "daddy buy me X" plea based on TV ads. We did get them based on simply seeing things on a shelf in a store, so it's not that the child is immune to this sort of desire.
We haven't done this yet, but it's on our list of things to try.
Even now he’s very scathing of adverts on TV, although annoyingly started to get sucked into wanting overpriced cosmetic DLC for games.
You might want to check out games where there are free modding tools and extensive fan-made mods available, like Planet Coaster or Parkitect (both Rollercoaster Tycoon-style theme park building games), Cities: Skylines (a SimCity-type city builder), or the ever-popular Elder Scrolls or Fallout series.
I’m considering moving him off the XBox version and over to a Raspberry Pi or similar soon so he can just play with mods, but that’s a whole other can of worms around properly managing internet access (something he currently does in a very controlled environment).
There are obvious limits to this, but i like the idea of it. That's what sales and marketing has become (not necessarily what it always was).
Depending on the competitive spirit of the children, this could be a way of framing consumerism that makes them reconsider, or at least pause.
Perhaps you case illustrates that it's a broad-spectrum immunity that needs to be developed.
The author of this article doesn't know much about the subject. I stopped reading at that paragraph. This shit has been going on since the 80's at least. He's off on the history of shows being made specifically to sell toys by 100%. He-Man is the first one of these I'm aware of.
We combat with several approaches. 1) we watch what they watch and have them tell us if their preferences change so we know. 2) No YouTube, even YTkids - except on AppleTV - and we can monitor - and that's infrequent. 3) we keep them really busy on other stuff (pet, homework, family projects, outings, afterschool activities, even select videogames)
This is not ideal or possible for everyone, but this has resulted, I think, in a good outcome so far.
I enjoyed many cartoons as a child and never got any of the toys. The only ones I remember wanting were the transformers, because my friend had them and so there was social pressure.
Arguably the whole of HN (the argument is far from watertight IMO ;o)) is here to promote YCombinator and their associates; but it's still valuable to me beyond that. I mean that's how it works, provide something of benefit and surreptitiously embroigle your insidious messages in to that of how someone is inferior without your product.
If you ask my parents I'm sure they would disagree and just say it was a way to sell toys to kids
But yes a lot of old 80's cartoons literally only existed to push a toy line.
We don't subscribe to cable, so we're happy to buy the seasons outright and commercial-free.
She asked for the Paw Patrol Mighty Tower for Christmas. She already had last year's lookout, but whatever. It's not like we bought her a lot of toys.
But, what was a little creepy was when we realized that every kid at the same daycare asked for and got the same Mighty Tower. We know they sometimes watch freebie videos at lunch time, so maybe those videos have commercials?
It may just be that the kids are convincing each other of the ideal request(s).
(Goes back to assembling my Optimus Prime LEGO set and finding a better combat vehicle for G.I. Joe to ride around in.) Oh, looks like @dwild already mentioned this!
Maybe. Or maybe there's been children playing without their parents for periods of time since forever, and it's unrealistic to believe that every second of play time should be supervised.
Is it because we have a better understanding of how this particular “sausage” gets made?
And if that’s the case, shouldn’t we say something?
Sometimes the mods decide that an article or submission was missed by the HN crowd and deserves a second chance. To do that they will sometimes de facto resubmit the item, which involves some minor tinkering with the data fields underneath.
That may have happened here.
Toys, meh.
Making kids fat for life is also big business.
Gambling and the other drugs on top of sugar aren't great either.
I'm not sure why people worry about toys so much.
The best way to complain about a title on HN is to suggest a better one. You did! No one has any idea how rare this is.
Imagine an NYT text that's sort of personalized to you. Very cool concept.
In old radio serials, sometimes the actors would break character right in the middle of a scene and do a commercial.
TV news anchors actually wore sponsor patches on their suits, and the sponsor logos were on the set, in a very NASCAR fashion. If you're ever in Baton Rouge, the state museum there has an old preserved TV news set and you can see the sponsor logos on everything.
Jimmy Kimmel does this occasionally, with a full-on commercial as a skit in the middle of the show (clearly marked as an ad for broadcast purposes). The humor value generally comes from his sidekick Guillermo always being featured and always being pretty bad at it.
https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/twice-as-happy-...
That sounds like it would lead to a extra-potent filter bubble effect [1].
That's not a cool concept at all. That's a horrifying one.
One of the great things about the Star Trek universe was the complete absence of advertising. That does sound rather Utopian.
First, we should be able to exist in a world where advertising isn't so pervasive we can't even figure out what is real anymore. We're already heading toward this Orwellian dystopia of a glossy marketing shine on everything (and that's another State Farm touchdown!). It's a problem because it dehumanizes the receiver as just another set of body organs to manipulate into spending money, and it seems to turn the receiver into an inattentive, quivering set of reflexes. I can't imagine most of us thinking that would be a desirable world to live in.
Second, I feel that a writer should be able to write something once and it be done with. If I were writing an article for the NYT, I would push back as hard as I could if the publisher wanted to have some AI algorithm tailoring my message to sell a product. That is the opposite of respectable journalism, and perhaps with the exception of novel cases, the opposite of respectable writing in general.
Third, I think we as a society should be able to read someone else's views and be able to exist with the tension of them being somewhat different than ours. I don't want everything personalized to me. Let me learn how other people see things. We as members of society should be able to see ourselves as contributing members of that society and not merely individuals. We need works of thought to parse and debate so we can participate in the Great Conversation that humanity has continued for millennia.
If what you're saying is the direction we are going, I'm not a fan.