About Parents for Ethical Marketing

Why Parents for Ethical Marketing?
What's Wrong with Marketing to Children?
What is Ethical Marketing
Board and Advisory Committee
History

Why Parents for Ethical Marketing?

Consumer marketing is everywhere. On television. In magazines and newspapers. On the Internet and on school buses. On billboards and on bus shelters. On milk cartons and cereal boxes.

In our public schools.

And it's almost impossible to buy anything for a child without a “brand identity.” Barbie, for example, can be found on everything from band-aids to board games to backpacks.

As parents, we know there's a problem. We argue with our kids about what to buy, what to wear, what to watch and what to play. We know what is best for our kids, yet sometimes we give in when we know we shouldn't.

Of course, parents are ultimately responsible for raising healthy children. But corporate marketers would have us believe that combating their damaging commercial messages is exclusively our problem

Parents for Ethical Marketing thinks it’s about time that corporations take some of the responsibility.

Through parental awareness, public pressure, and legislative initiatives, Parents for Ethical Marketing encourages corporations to adopt responsible marketing standards and practices that sustain the health of children and families.

What's Wrong with Marketing to Children?:

• Materialistic children are more depressed, more anxious, and have lower self-esteem than those who are not as involved in the consumer culture. (Source)
• The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under two should not watch television because it can harm early brain development; still giants like Disney market videos aimed at parents of newborns. (Source)
• Corporations appeal to children’s natural desire to be older by marketing “grown-up” products to younger kids. Girls as young as six are sexualized by dolls, clothing, and television, leading to eating disorders, depression, low self-esteem, and unrealistic expectations about sexuality as adults. (Source)
• A child’s exposure to advertising is linked to family stress (Source); yet corporate marketers spend at least $17 billion a year to market to children. (Source)

What is ethical marketing?

• Ethical marketing targets only consumers who can perceive and understand the persuasive tactics in commercials.
• Ethical marketing promotes products that are not harmful to children.
• Ethical marketing supports strong families by respecting parental authority in the parent-child relationship.

Staff, Board, and Advisory Committee

Board of Directors

Michael Matejcek has been a college instructor for 18 years and is currently at Herzing College in Minneapolis. He has two daughters and is married to PEM’s executive director, Lisa Ray.

Jeff Zuckerman directs the writing center at Walden University and teaches editing at the University of Minnesota. Jeff has been a social worker with Head Start, a community organizer, and reporter and editor. His master's research focused on parents who choose not to own a television. Jeff's son attends South High in Minneapolis, and his daughter the University of Wisconsin.

Advisory Board

Neil Costa is well versed in digital marketing, having spent the last twelve years of his career building online brands and creating effective e-commerce tools. He has worked in marketing and sales roles at Monster.com, Open Market and Segway. While at Monster, he managed a $20M annual marketing budget with media companies such as FOX, NBC, CBS, Comcast and others. He developed consumer and B2B marketing campaigns leveraging and integrating online, offline and social media assets. He started his career working for PriceWaterhouseCoopers as an auditor. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two year old daughter.

Sarah Sobieraj is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at Tufts University, where she teaches courses in Media and Society. Although her current research focuses predominantly on political communication, her early research explored children’s media including toy commercials and animated programming. She remains interested in these issues and committed to working toward a healthier media landscape for children. Her most recent efforts involve working to eliminate advertising in schools. Sobieraj is currently completing a book that explores public political life during presidential campaigns, chronicling the responses of voluntary associations to key campaign events and the reaction of the news media to these efforts. Her most recent journal articles can be found in Sociological Theory, Sociological Inquiry, The Sociological Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly.

Executive Director

Lisa Ray founded Parents for Ethical Marketing in November 2007. She formerly worked in higher education for twelve years and in magazine and book publishing before that. She has a master of arts degree in public administration/nonprofit management from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters.

History

Or, the founding of Parents for Ethical Marketing, by Lisa Ray

I quit working full-time in May 2006 to enter the world of the stay-at-home mom.

My job as an events coordinator with a for-profit higher eduction company had left me a tad, well, wrung out. Depleted. Wasted. I was a quivering mass of jelly and bones piled in the corner of my office at the time I quit.

I had been yearning to write, as many of us do, because I thought I had something to say. I also wanted to figure out exactly what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life so that I could start a grown-up career. And stop counting meatballs.

The idea of writing a blog did not occur until several months later. One daughter was in school, the other in preschool parttime, so I had a few hours free every day. I decided to just do it.

I dove in head first. I started posting with only the goal that I post almost every day. I found the exercise of writing and posting, without the time for second drafts or feedback, invigorating. I joined a couple online communities. I posted comments on other people’s blogs. And people began to read mine.

In the midst of all the writing and posting and commenting, something happened: a theme emerged. As much as I wanted to be funny and write about parenting and housework – I couldn’t. I kept returning to the topic that really made me angry: corporate marketing directed at children.

Angry? I should say really pissed off.

Some days, I would scan the jobs openings at local nonprofits to see if something caught my attention. No more corporate jobs for me, no sir. After all, I had taken courses in nonprofit management along the way to my master’s degree. And I wanted a new job I could be passionate about.

But my mind kept coming back to the children’s marketing issue.

Then I started to realize something. Perhaps the anger I felt wasn’t so much anger. Maybe it was — passion?

Could this be what I was passionate about?

Then I got this really crazy idea: Why not do something? Why not create a nonprofit? With an agenda I could be passionate about?

Can you do that?

I guess you can. Or, at least, I'm going to try.

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