(music)
Adolescents are a much more lucrative and direct market to advertisers, because adolescents tend to have a bit of money.
They’ve either got pocket money from their parents, or they’re starting to have some sort of part-time job
babysitting, paper rounds, whatever it is.
Advertisers, I mean, there’s no point in pretending, otherwise they make no bones about it. They’re all about getting you to go up the shop and buying something.
So we need to literally deconstruct it, and teachers need to be completely upfront about what the purpose of it is
why it’s being done, and what the advertisers are hoping to get out of it.
And what I love about teenagers, and what always gives me hope for the future, is teenagers are naturally subversive.
They’re naturally averse to being manipulated. So point out the manipulation, and they will
at least use their judgment a little bit more than just being swept along.
For teenagers debt is the new black, it really and it’s particularly hard as a teenager,
we tear our hair out, in the world of financial literacy, how do we get to teenagers and in particular how do we get to eighteen to twenty one year olds.
Advertisers are very skilled at making whatever it is seem very appealing, very desirable, very cool, very trendy.
Now, they make tell that on their brief, it says eighteen to twenty-five year olds. Well, if there’s one thing a fourteen year old is dying to be, it’s an eighteen to twenty-five year old,
so whilst they may not be directly targeting those people, they will be influencing and impacting on much younger consumers, and that’s just a fact of life.
(music)
We're all susceptible to desire, and advertising works entirely on desire.
Young people may be more susceptible, because they’re trying to work out who they are,
and I think, for a long time, they start to use brand identity as a replacement for their own identity while they create an identity of their own.
One of the big challenges for teachers, parents, primary school kids, mature age kids, who are in high school or right through to university
Bluntly right now, the marketers have got it all over us.
The balance is a bit out of whack. We consumers are under significant pressure,
We're presented with a life, that we should be leading, we’re presented with the perfect life.
The perfect life doesn’t exist and the big problem, and certainly the psychologists and big marketing companies know this, is that even the best of us with money, still have weak spots.
I always say this about advertising and advertisers. They’re not moral, they’re not immoral, they’re amoral.
Their goal is to sell as much product as possible. So they’ve done the research, and they know that if they put the chocolate bars right by the till, they sell more of them.
So that’s why they put them there. It’s not a nefarious manipulation of children directly, but it is in a way, too.
We may hate the fact that our world is full of salespeople, but it is, and our kids have to deal with what is.
So basically, I think this is quite fascinating and a great challenge for teachers, and again parents and so on,
is how do we actually get a bit of balance back in the hands of the consumer, against the power of marketing
And that I think is a real part of financial literacy. It is just giving you the ability to look at something and saying
"Well I know they’re saying, that that slightly bigger plasma screen means that the football is going to look better or cartoons will look better.”
I think the ability is to push back a little bit and say, “Is it really that essential?"