In reality, you know, if people would get the freakin TV's out of the dominant position in their households, about 90% of all marketing to children would vanish.
My kid doesn't know about stuff except if friends tell her, or she sees it in the store, or she runs into it online. We haven't had a TV in years. We get news, weather, etc. online. We have VCR and DVD for movies, we have video game consoles. But not TV.
As a result, she's unusually impatient with commercials. She didn't get bred to have a 3 minute attention span thanks to time in front of TV, and when we watch something that has a commercial (on video) or she hears a commercial on a restaurant music track that is local radio, she thinks it's stupid, why would anybody want to spend their time listening to that stuff.
We live about 500 yards from McDonalds, and within 3 blocks of about 15 other food places, so it ain't like they're a secret from her though LOL, and we used to live at those places instead of cooking.
But my point is that the dominant form of media marketing to children is TELEVISION.
Culture-wide, parents choose that.
Most parents work a job, come home, they're exhausted, there's still dinner, cleaning up, errands, chores, whatever, and bedtime. My friends' kids, all of them, spend vastly more time with the TV than their parents, because their parents work for a living and the kid has hours when they are still at work, and there is usually some time in the evening the parents want a little TV so the kid has that too. Plus the little kids tend to live in front of the TV and they are so demanding time/attention-wise that lots of parents are grateful for the TV getting the toddler off their back for awhile, I certainly was back then.
Maybe the issue isn't just McDonald's advertising, or that parents allow that food, but that parents allow that advertising. Sure, they'd see little things elsewhere, but only an infintesimal fraction of what they see on TV.
PJ
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