Upon entering the classroom, though, I noticed that something was different in the room. Most of the desks had little notes on them. At first I figured that they were announcements for voter registration; given the controversy regarding Pennsylvania's stringent voter ID laws, that sort of information was a constant presense. But as I read it, it became clear that these pieces of laminated paper had nothing to do with voting. Or even Shakespeare. Instead it was...well, I'll show you:
Q) IF JOHNNY STAYS OUT UNTIL 7AM WITH JULIE AND GETS TO CLASS BY 8AM, HOW MANY RED BULLS DOES HE NEED?Yep: an advertisement for Red Bull. (I actually kept it for the longest time, but alas, it seems to have been lost to eternity).
Now, had it been any other product, I would have been scratching my head. But Red Bull marketing efforts have been almost as much of a constant at Carnegie Mellon as voter registration volunteers. I remember last spring when women--always women--with cannisters of Red Bull on their backs would walk campus and try to give away free samples of it. Or how The Red Bulletin was handed out during the TEDxCMU event. It's as if Red Bull and the university were in cahoots or something.
Still, this bit seemed a bit off, even by Red Bull standards. It was around this point in the thought process that I discovered that the question in the ad did, in fact, have an answer. Invert the card and what does it read?
A) JUST THE ONE UNDER HIS SEAT.Okay, I thought, is this some meta-joke that I'm not getting? Who keeps Red Bull under one's seat? Had I not happened to look to the right for no particular reason, I probably would have gone on wondering for some time. Lo and behold, under the desk by the door, lay a thin metallic can.
By this time, other people had entered the room, and the investigation was underway. We found that beneath every students' desk was a can of Red Bull, attached by Velcro to the bottom of the seat. (Of course, the Velcro patch on the can itself conveniently blocked out the nutrition information). This just raised so many questions: How much money did this cost? How and when did they get into the room? Was this all just an elaborate commentary on the fast pace of the court-world scenes in As You Like It?
Some students were apparently pleased with this development; at least two people began to drink from the cans freshly removed from beneath their desks. Most of us, though, were not particularly amused. "What's next?" we thought. "Will the professor's lecture be interrupted when the projector inexplicably starts playing Red Bull commercials?" Clearly, no, but it did get me thinking--how far has advertising gone in society that allows some ploy like this to happen?
I'm no expert in advertising, but I'm fairly certain that no one would be surprised to hear that we're constantly deluged with advertisements. On buses, on billboards, before online videos--commercials are everywhere. But I'm most interested in advertisements in schools. For one thing, that Red Bull stunt was the impetus for this blog post. For another, students, especially in a public school setting, are a captive audience. Tell me that there is nothing creepy about that as a development.
I first became aware of corporations advertising in public schools when I read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. In the chapter entitled "Your Trusted Friends", Schlosser writes that, beginning in Colorado Springs in 1993, school districts began allowing fast food companies to advertise on school buses and in hallways, while signing exclusivity deals with soft drink manufacturers (51). One of the few places where one is theoretically insulated from advertising is no more; now one is constantly inundated with ads at every turn.
There is of course a reason that school districts have allowed advertisers on the premises: they need money. I am quite sympathetic to cash-strapped school districts; the question is what is the cost of obtaining the funds. Schlosser sums up the debate like so:
The proponents of advertising in the schools argue that it is necessary to prevent further cutbacks; opponents contend that schoolchildren are becoming a captive audience for marketers, compelled by law to attend school and then forced to look at ads as a means of paying for their own education. (52)If this were the only drawback--exposure to ads in an ad-drenched world--I'd have fewer concerns. I still would take issue with it, but viewing things from a pragmatic perspective, what else could be done? After all, one could argue that money derived from in-school advertisements can raise enough revenue to prevent teacher layoffs. But the companies involved in in-school advertising haven't just subjected children to their commercials; they've tried to alter the material taughts in classes.
Really, why stop at just telling people about your product when you can mold their perceptions of the world and how it affects your company. Schlosser argues that materials given to schools from Proctor and Gamble, ExxonMobil and the American Coal Federation present misinformation on the environmental effects of their practices. "A 1998 study of [corporate-sponsored] teaching materials by the Consumers Union," he writes, "found that 80 percent were biased, providing students with incomplete or slanted information that favored the sponsor's products and views" (55).
All of this, again, is not surprising. But here's where things get scary: companies linked to in-school advertising have been also accused of invading students' privacy. In a New York Times piece from 1999, Michael Pollak notes that one company from California "offered schools free computers with limited Internet access, but then monitors the students' Web selections to get information on what advertising would appeal to them" (B9). Keep in mind, this was happening on machines which were presumably purchased for educational, not personal, use. This isn't trusting Facebook; it's trusting the school board.
I'm not here to offer remedies to the problem, largely because I am completely unqualified to do so. I know little about the intricacies of marketing and have only taken a introductory course on economics, so it's not my place to offer policy prescriptions. But I do have a question that I would like to pose. Given the fact that we have allowed advertisers access to educational institutions, what does all of this say about our relationship with advertisers today?
My view: it would seem we are entirely too trusting of companies hawking their products. Part of it is the image that many companies consciously try to project. Would Burger King or Royal Dutch Shell actively try to cast themselves as complete monsters? Of course not; there's a reason that Schlosser titled the chapter "Your Trusted Friends". But part of the problem is complacency. Whenever advertisers enter another arena of public life, there may be some outrage, but the impulse is to just shrug it off and get on with our lives.
Further, companies advertising their products and services just seems inevitable. We take commercials for granted; they've always been there, right. Hell, you're reading this on the Internet. If there is one thing the Internet is made of, it's advertising (I know you were thinking something else there). Except that wasn't always the case, according to Wendy M. Grossman, the author of Net.wars. The opening sentence of the chapter "Make.Money.Fast" remains one of the most eye-opening statements I've come across: "Once upon a time the Internet had no advertising" (1).
Grossman's description of how advertisers forced their way onto Usenet elicits both hope and despair in me. On the one hand, she notes that the Internet community's response to the first wave of mass advertising was one of passioned outrage, overwhelming the servers of the originators' ISP with complaints (3). On the other hand, it suggests that the efforts were futile. Net.wars came out in 1997, and even by that point Grossman wrote, "There are very areas of Usenet these days where you don't have to pick your way through piles of spam" (5).
In short: we must be proactive. And even that might not be enough.
Works cited:
Grossman, Wendy M. "Make.Money.Fast." Net.wars. New York: NYU Press, 1997.
1-9. NYU Press. Web. 2 Nov. 2012.
Pollak, Michael. "Marketing in Schools." New York Times 29 Sep. 1999: B9. ProQuest
Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2008). Web. 29 Sep. 2012.
Red Bull. Advertisement. N.d.
Schlosser, Eric. "Your Trusted Friends." Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the
All-American Meal. 2002. New York: Perennial-Harper, 2005. Print.
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