Good morning everybody,
we have already talked about the controversial practice of targeting children, creating products dedicated to them or just trying to attract them through advertising – no matter what type of good marketers are selling. Indeed, marketing for children is massive in food & beverage sector, but a lot of goods are commercialised leveraging on children’s influence upon their parents, such as cars, clothes, software and computers, family trips and excursions and so on. “We’re relying on the kid to pester the mom to buy the product, rather than going straight to the mom”, says Barbara Martino, advertising executive.
This is potentially dangerous for children’s health – if the promoted item is not safe, as for junk food and soft drinks – or psychology – since this type of marketing induces them to desire something and to feel dissatisfied and marginalized if they do not obtain it.
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| Children as the favourite marketers' target |
Today’s topic is even more frightening: it is about creating toys which may store information about kids.
Everyone knows Mattel’s Barbie, personally I played a lot with it when I was a child. Getting Barbies dressed, making them travel, decorate their house and, above all, chatting with them. If they had answered me, it would have been great: every kid would like an interactive toy, a playmate always available when your friends are not around.
Today, the interactive Barbie exists: it is called “Hello Barbie” and it has been presented by Mattel on the 16th of February at the 2015 Toy Fair in New York City, but it will go on sale this fall. It is a Wi-Fi connected doll able to answer when kids are talking to her, because it stores information with a cloud-computing system.
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| Hello Barbie presented at the 2015 Toy Fair |
The problem is clear: these information are in possession of Mattel, for this reason children’s thoughts, emotions, fantasy will be a sort of information that the company could use for commercial reasons. It is kind of creepy and, immediately, words as privacy violation and children manipulation come to our mind.
Hello Barbie has been co-created by ToyTalk, and its CEO, Oren Jacob, stated:
«All of ToyTalk's products in market have been designed to meet or exceed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and have also been independently verified as such by KidSAFE+. While the underlying technology of our products works much like Siri, Google Now and Cortana, ToyTalk products never search the open web for answers. Responses are carefully crafted by our own writing team, and conversations recorded through our products are never used to advertise or market to children or anyone».
According to them, the conversations are only used to developing, testing and improving speech recognition technology and artificial intelligence algorithms, and absolutely not for marketing and advertising.
Let us assume that this is true: but don’t you find it sinister? These toys are eavesdropping: they listens to our children private thoughts and they store them. When a little girl plays alone with her Barbies, she opens up her heart: she expresses wants, desires, dreams that no one should be able to listen – not even her parents. I believe that also kids need their privacy, and it is really disturbing that people could eavesdrop what children say in their own rooms.
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| Hello Barbie may spy kids |
The children advocacy group “Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood” has started a campaign against Mattel’s Hello Barbie, called Stop Mattel’s "Hello Barbie" Eavesdropping Doll. They believe that
«Kids using “Hello Barbie” won’t only be talking to a doll, they’ll be talking directly to a toy conglomerate whose interest in them is financial. It’s creepy – and creates a host of dangers for children and families”.
Clearly, Mattel and ToyTalk may claim that they will not make use of the information provided by their dolls to create customised marketing campaigns, but who knows? And, assuming that it is true, there would still be an ethical issue, wouldn’t it?
I will be really glad to have your opinion about this topic, and to know the position you are going to take when Hello Barbie will be on sale.
Carlotta Neuenschwander
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