My kid is only two, so I'm not quite there yet, but most of this children's advertising makes my skin crawl. I'm glad to see that I was right about Paw Patrol, it's clearly modeled to be source for many lines of toys (wide cast of characters, each with their own theme and accompanying accessories that can be infinitely re purposed in different toy sets). Slap on "super hero" mode and you've added a whole other dimension to the matrix of possible toys.
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.
> My kid is only two, so I'm not quite there yet, but most of this children's advertising makes my skin crawl. I'm glad to see that I was right about Paw Patrol, it's clearly modeled to be source for many lines of toys (wide cast of characters, each with their own theme and accompanying accessories that can be infinitely re purposed in different toy sets). Slap on "super hero" mode and you've added a whole other dimension to the matrix of possible toys.
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.
Yeah, it's not new. It's a tried and true strategy that has been refined over the decades. That doesn't make it any better. It was as slimy then as it is now.
It is maybe worth noting that TMNT started as an indie comic making fun of superheroes. Think about it, superhero turtles livin in the sewers... No particular point, I just think it's funny.
The point I choose to see is that consumerism and capitalism do not discriminate. Anything and everything can and will be assimilated and squeezed for every cent that it’s possible to extract, no matter how punk and anti establishment/anti commercial your original creations may have been. (see also: the appropriation of feminist/LGBTQ/other originally fringe movements iconography by major companies the moment it became profitable to do so)
This is one of the strengths of capitalism, I have thought about it many times.
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.
Yes, TMNT was very cool at the start, I always assumed it was some 'big monolith' that they sold out to, in fact, it was the original creators themselves. They saw $$$ in toys and completely adapted the creative line for toys, cartoons etc.. They pretty much cashed in on their indie creation.
The story that I always remember is that TMNT is based roughly on Daredevil
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!
There’s a lot of comics nerdery scattered throughout the early issues. Up to and including an issue that is basically about Jack Kirby and how Stan Lee screwed him over.
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe is a another classic example, as much of its storyline and character designs were constructed around being able to reuse random molds left over from other toy lines.
And all of the transforming robot series (Transformers, Gobots, etc.) were just attempts at repackaging existing toy lines from Japan for the US. That's why one of the Autobots (Jetfire) is a Macross fighter.
There is a Netflix series "The toys that made us" which chronicles the history of the toys and the TV shows. In some cases, the cartoon came first. In most, the toy came first followed by a manufactured cartoon to sell the idea to kids:
If anyone wants a taste of this show, this 1 minute clip about the arbitrary origins of He-Man’s Battle Cat is one of the funniest things I saw last year.
As a kid in this era, toys lines of shows/books were an immense joy. I understand concern over teasing kids too much with commercial products.. but unless it devolves into large social mania..(in which case makes some regulations) I don't think it's a problem at all.
Toys are what kids want. They want to connect reality with imagination at their level. Just like video games.
I remember transformers being one of the worst. Evey episode introduced new "characters"... Voltron was good, and then they needed a robot with like 50 cars that made up the big guy so there were more toys to sell.
> Star Wars isn't worth billions because of the movies, it's worth billions because of the branded products.
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.
What scarcity? They may have played that close to the vest to not spoil the story, but just look at Disney run with it now[1]. It's hard to imagine a scenario where they weren't fully aware of the demand for merch that the character would generate.
> Childrens TV shows were always about selling toys, that was always the bread and butter.
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.
That doesn't extract any legitimization from me, exactly like reading of a horrible crime in a newspaper doesn't mean the perpetrator has my blessing. People have been doing it; not "always", but for a while. It was a shitty thing to do from day one, and it's getting more and more extreme.
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.
At this point the biggest problem we have is extended family who all want to buy loads of stuff for our kid that they don't need. That's not even considering we have nowhere to keep everything we get. Most of it just goes straight to a donation box somewhere.
I've learned that for many people, gift-giving isn't for the recipient, it's for the giver to feel good.
Oh man, I'm glad i'm not the only one. Please let me know if you have a solution. It is really difficult to, in a kind way, tell my generous friends and family, "Please don't buy my kids anything. We have more clothes than we need, more toys than we need. They are just going to play with it today then throw it in front of the already overflowing toy box because we literally have no place to put it"
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're in the exact same boat. Our families will just not stop buying gifts for our three-year-old. We have two 'solutions,' which are sorta kinda working but are not totally satisfying:
- 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.
For us all toys from birthday go in a cupboard and we take out only one toy each month and they have to take out one toy for thrift store/NGO/younger relatives.
One great option would be to open up a college savings plan (529 Plan) for your children and ask them to contribute some small amount to that. It's less awkward than just saying "please stop buying us junk", but it can have the same effect + money for education!
I have this same family problem. My brother did the 529 thing for his kids. Behind my brother's back the most problematic family member in this area was really nasty about it. They were insulted. They went on this rant about how Christmas is "their thing" and they aren't going to let us ruin it by restricting how much stuff they buy our children. I hope this 529 things works for some families, but in my experience it's a failure.
We have straight up told extended family either not to buy big gifts for birthday/Christmas, or, alternatively, have said that they can buy those gifts for their house so the kids can play with those toys when we visit. It's been pretty helpful. We've also suggested getting the kids things like yearly memberships to local museums or the aquarium in lieu of gifts.
We had been relying on the grandparents to cover all the toys for our kids (4, 2 and 2).
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.
Yeah, that was apparent with Paw Patrol, but the show itself isn't bad. Every episode is centered around helping people and working as a team. "Hey team, there's a problem, let's go fix it!" That's the core focus and messaging. The stories aren't about buying things. When kids emulate Paw Patrol, they're going on missions to solve problems and using the associated vehicles as tools. Which is what the pups do.
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.
I have a 3-year old, and he loves the Paw Patrol. When it comes to children's cartoons there are very few I can tolerate watching myself, but Paw Patrol isn't the worst.
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!)
The "STEM" in Blaze and the Monster Wheels annoys me much more than Paw Patrol. The errors in explaining friction (pushing does not slow things down until enough force is applied), cancelling sound by shouting louder, a general lack of units, badly explained electricity, the list goes on.
> Who is Ryder? Is he a mad scientist? How did the Mayor get elected?
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.
I recall an episode where the Mayor mentions her grandfather used to be the Mayor, there is a statute involved of him. So it seems nepotism is alive and well!
We spend our childhood wanting to grow up and do things adults are allowed to do, and our adulthood reminiscing about how good our childhood times were.
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.
The unboxing video addiction + YouTube's creepy as hell recommendation engine/Elsagate is what got it banned in my house when my daughter was about 4. After a bout a week she didn't miss it.
I went to this discussion thread and am gratified to find the phrase 'Paw Patrol' in the top comment. Although I don't think its anything new, tv shows as insidious toy commercials has been around since I was a kid.
> 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.
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).
>Variable reinforcement works. Collectible card games (all the way back to MtG in the 90's) and MMORPG PvE grinding use the same mechanism.
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.
My son is just past two as well. Here's a few things that have worked for us. YMMV of course.
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.
This is the future of advertising, imho. If we can target native advertising then people won't be able to tell the difference between content and ads. Consequently, they won't be able to block them without blocking the content.
Imagine an NYT text that's sort of personalized to you. Very cool concept.
People forget that most shows on radio or television were about the sponsor, and the content was secondary. What we're used to from the 70's through the 90's was a change toward more of a separation. We're now seeing the shift back.
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.
> In old radio serials, sometimes the actors would break character right in the middle of a scene and do a commercial.
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.
Followed by the Minority Report Ads that scan your retinas and the giant 3D ads from Blade Runner 2049. And then eventually just beam them into dreams like in Futurama.
One of the great things about the Star Trek universe was the complete absence of advertising. That does sound rather Utopian.
Personally, I don't see how this could be anything other than scary and unsettling.
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.
The cartoon was entertainment in it's own right? It may have been a facade, but the veneer was pretty thick.
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.
Unboxing videos are also entertaining. One must remember that there's a reason The Price Is Right still has such a high viewership---people actually enjoy looking at stuff and imagining they have it.
that's a bullshit comparison based on a bad premise - you think the price is right is driven by consumers wishing they owned the product, rather than the fact that is a game easily played along at home with friends or family. Save for the final showcase items, they're bidding the cost of eggs half the time. this comment is out of touch as fuck.
Being entertaining was how they sold toys to kids. The cartoons were selling the mythology behind the toys and showing kids what the gimmicks and features were, and how to play with them.
But yes a lot of old 80's cartoons literally only existed to push a toy line.
Children's cartoons on TV aren't usually great, but at least there's a curation process. There's only so much airtime, so we're only going to spend a minute asking us to tune in next week. Not 20% of the time asking us to subscribe and like amd follow. FCC enforcement makes it unlikely that truly awful stuff gets mixed in.
If you watch the films, you can see this really started in Return. I'm sure the first two sold a lot of merch, but the films weren't designed around it.
If that doesn't work, try telling them that star wars is just Dune dumbed down to a level that children can understand and enjoy. That'll get them riled up.
When my child (5) was learning about commercials, I explained that they are a company's way of trying to convince you to buy something. A lot of times they are misleading or don't tell the whole story, so you shouldn't believe what you see in an advertisement.
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 have a list that our daughter asks us to put toys she wants on. Then we wait. After a bit we go over the list with her and see if there is still the desire. It has been edifying that most of the time the desire is gone and we remove the item from the list.
I have wanted to do something similar to efficiently dispose of my child's toys. Step 1: I put a red sticker on any toy I don't think has been played with in a while. Step 2: three weeks later, if the sticker is still there then I take the toy and put it in a holding pen. Step 3: if the child has not noticed it was missing three weeks later, the toy can be recycled/donated.
We haven't done this yet, but it's on our list of things to try.
I did something extremely similar with my not-quite-hoarder wife. She had an uncanny ability to ask about a thing the day before it was to make its way out our door. And my “holding pen” was 3 months.
We got into the habit from an early age of just shouting “Cheeky People” over adverts. Until he was about 5 our son would call all adverts the cheeky people, and generally ignore them.
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.
The first three suggestions I would deem kid-compatible (maybe a bit too complex, but that depends on the particular kid), but...Elder Scrolls and Fallout? That stuff's for grown-ups, maybe older teenagers, but definitely not kids of the ages that this thread is about.
The game in question is Minecraft, which in fairness is about as flexible as they get. Sadly it’s also riddled with multiplayer servers taking real money for cosmetic upgrades and super powered pick axes now.
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).
Immunity was my exact concern as I read about the children being shielded from TV advertising. Yes, it's more tranquil at home, but I have to wonder if to some degree those children are being robbed of a strong modern-day immunity that they'll need later in life?
Perhaps you case illustrates that it's a broad-spectrum immunity that needs to be developed.
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.
If that's the case, it's weird the mods decided the system needed a nudge for this story. This is very much "The Atlantic Discovers Why He-Man Exists, Only Now YouTube."
What's really sad is that now even children's BOOKS are now mainly a promotional channel for TV shows and toys. Book characters like Pete the Cat or whatever exist mainly to prime children to desire the Pete the Cat toys.
> Children’s shows have long featured cute characters who are easily repurposed as stuffed animals or figurines, Golin noted, but in the past few decades, they’ve become especially common (think Peppa Pig and Dora the Explorer)—largely because merchandising opportunities are now baked into the concepts from the start, rather than developed after the fact.
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.
The author of the article makes this out to be something new, while also correctly stating this is decades old. I don’t blame OP for running with the article’s intended subtext.
I remember them, where critical parts were made out of metal and the toy actually had some heft and durability to them. Now toys you can fix are considered hobby grade.
Fortunately they never did this to us when we were kids.
(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!
I've got two kids still in the "target range" for all these attacks.
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.
My daughters love Paw Patrol, the shows, the books, and the toys. It's fun, and we're happy to indulge them.
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?
Title should be “Toy commercials are being replaced by product placement and YouTube influencers”. Can’t stand clickbait titles and articles like this that keep stringing you along, expecting to get your answer, paragraph after paragraph, only to save the disappointing answer for the last little bit.
I figured as much. Considering it is TheAtlantic and it being on HN and throw in the title and I figured it's another targeted hitpiece on social media.
> Title should be “Toy commercials are being replaced by product placement and YouTube influencers”.
Nefarious product placement has existed for decades in movies, tv shows and magazines like The Atlantic. "Influencers" have peddled products forever. We used to call them celebrities ( aka influencers approved by the elites ). So what is the fuss really about?
My daughter developed a rapid and acute love for Ryan's Toy Review (which started as an actual demonstration of toys, but very quickly converted to a heavy and subversive push to sell their own product line). It's been a slow process of steering her away from that content without being too overbearing and triggering a backlash of tears and acrimony, since she's too young to understand the reasoning if we just cut it off and say "no, it's not good for you"
Most people don’t seem to have a problem putting their little kids in front of YouTube, whereas many technologists absolutely reject that idea. Kind of makes you wonder why.
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?
It's not only about kids. I usually watch videos regarding CNC stuff on youtube as I'm involved in CNC machining and I often find myself impulsively buying nifty things featured in those videos, although I understand they won't be of much use to me.
This wouldn't be an issue if parents wouldn't use YouTube as a kid-pacifier.
What about you spend time with your kid, talk with it, play with it, say, until it has a two-digit age?
You dont have the time for this you say? Well, maybe you shouldn't have a kid then.
> You dont have the time for this you say? Well, maybe you shouldn't have a kid then.
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.
While it’s pretty clear that shows like Paw Patrol, Super Wings, and others are built around toys. The article never made it clear why this was bad. The shows still have to be interesting and entertaining to be watched by kids. I personally like Paw Patrol and others for the little lessons learned along the way. This is coming from a parent of a 2.5 year old.
Don’t give your kid unfettered access to YT. A video here and there is fine but the stuff that comes up even on YT kids if you just let them click around is toxic and creepy.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadThe 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://www.netflix.com/title/80161497
[0]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjoe3Qo_DymYyBR6X9VxFjQ
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.
[1] https://www.shopdisney.com/franchises/star-wars/
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.
That doesn't extract any legitimization from me, exactly like reading of a horrible crime in a newspaper doesn't mean the perpetrator has my blessing. People have been doing it; not "always", but for a while. It was a shitty thing to do from day one, and it's getting more and more extreme.
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.
Imagine an NYT text that's sort of personalized to you. Very cool concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera
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].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J4LYVs5Gg4
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.
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.
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.
(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!
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.
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).
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.
> Title should be “Toy commercials are being replaced by product placement and YouTube influencers”.
Nefarious product placement has existed for decades in movies, tv shows and magazines like The Atlantic. "Influencers" have peddled products forever. We used to call them celebrities ( aka influencers approved by the elites ). So what is the fuss really about?
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.
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?
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.