/ 14 July 2003

A is for Apple Mac

For the insatiable predator that is the advertising industry, children are the ultimate target. Young minds, not yet armoured by cynicism, are open to the flood of half-truths and outright lies that are the bedrock of selling. Catch them young, and you have loyal consumers for life.

Apart from snatch-and-grabs by the footpads of Disney, McDonald’s and Barbie, children have so far been protected fairly well by legislation and parental concern. For how much longer?

Many European countries protect children from the lure of the advertisers, but then developed nations can afford to. For what price would South Africans, earning a fraction of their northern hemisphere counterparts, sell their children to a brand?

Consider an ”educational” feature in the widely read Huisgenoot and You magazines. Claiming to be a literacy aid, the weekly feature essentially requires those starting to read — five- to seven-year-old children — to study the logos and brand-names of major corporations. Ten years ago A was for ”apple”. Thanks to advertising agencies, it is now for Apple Mac.

Discerning parents can exercise their right not to buy such magazines, and some parents may welcome the scheme: anything to get the offspring reading. But branded spelling is potentially the start of a process with society-altering effects.

Consider the Khaya Lebantwana Primary School, a fictional example of the poor, understaffed schools that dot rural South Africa. The grade one teacher, earning an erratic R2 000 a month while trying to deal with scores of malnourished seven-year-olds, is approached by Coca-Cola. The soft-drink giant will pay her R1 000 a month and provide her with T-shirts and knick-knacks if she incorporates Coke’s products into her classes.

She is given storybooks in which little Sandile goes to the shop to buy a Coke and has a magical red and white adventure. She can tell her class how bottles are made, how sugar is grown — and how good it is for little bodies — how carbonated water differs from river water, and so on.

Once this is a reality — and without preventative legislation there is no reason to believe it won’t be — it is a small step to brand-bashing for seven-year-olds.

Sandile is accosted by the hideous bog-monster Pepsi, its name changed to Pepsee to ward off legal action. In better-off schools, coaches are paid to punt Slazenger and Gunn & Moore, until children would rather be seen dead than with a Wilson or Grey Nichols. Most parents cannot resist that kind of pressure.

Grade one teachers, though, are small fry. Corporate sponsorship of schools and their activities is already commonplace, but the curriculum is still independent.

It makes financial sense — and, it could be argued, cannot hurt pupils — for corporations to fund subjects in return for branding rights. Story sums are a case in point: what real difference does it make to a child if ”a Nissan Hardbody One Tonner” travelling at 100kph leaves Durban, rather than ”a car”? Surely pre-schoolers aren’t harmed by being taught to brush their teeth with Colgate and Oral B?

What happens later in the child’s development? This ”advercation” is perfectly suited to pre- and primary school: the target market is the country’s largest, as the drop-out rate has not yet begun to take its toll and children have generally not yet begun disliking subjects.

So what happens when primary school consumers become high school consumers? Those inculcated with a belief in the sanctity of certain brands, and with the faith of most young children that what they have learned is true, will find terrible disillusionment ahead of them. As their critical powers increase, they will discover the mendacity of advertising.

At worst they will consider all adults liars, and all authority figures charlatans and mercenaries.

Education and branding have had a low-key partnership in South Africa: Grasshoppers, Bata Toughees and Colleens are synonymous for a generation of parents and primary school pupils with shoes and pencil-crayons, just as most English university students are more familiar with the name of The Norton than the poetry it contains.

But advertising, like nuclear devastation, is a destructive force that cannot be corked back in its bottle. It needs to be policed and stamped on when it goes places it shouldn’t. The classroom is such a place, where T should be for tree, not Target Demographic.

Tom Eaton is a freelance journalist