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Belch: Advertising and
Promotion, Sixth Edition
VII. Special Topics and
Perspectives
ETHICAL PERSPECTIVE 22-2
22. Evaluating the Social,
Ethical, & Economic
Aspects of Advtising &
Promotion
Marketing to Kids in School—Is It Cool?
In 1990 an entrepreneur named Chris Whittle created a
national controversy and gave parents and educators
fits because of a plan to put news programming and
advertisements in high school classrooms all over
America. In return for providing free TV sets for every
classroom and a satellite hookup, Whittle’s Channel
One would be allowed to show a 12-minute daily news
program that contained 2 minutes of commercials for
products such as acne medicine, electric razors, cereals,
and candy. Channel One struggled in its early
years, as many schools were reluctant to provide marketers
with yet another way of reaching young people
with their advertising messages. However, as the
demand for upgraded technology in classrooms
increased and funds available to pay for it decreased,
many school districts became more receptive to Whittle.
Today Channel One broadcasts into nearly 12,000
middle, junior, and high schools, and some 8.3 million
teenagers see its news show and commercials every
school day.
Many educators, consumer activists, and parent
groups feared letting Channel One into schools on the
grounds that it would open the doors for corporate
America to reach students in a place where they are
supposed to be learning English and math rather than
watching commercials. Marketers recognize that the
youth market is a gold mine, as there are nearly 48 million
U.S. children in kindergarten through high school
and their purchasing power, as well as influence on
their parents’ purchases, is immense. Moreover, this is
the only market segment whose members are held as a
captive audience for six to seven hours a day. The concern
was that marketers would find all kinds of creative
ways to reach a market that was entirely
off-limits just a decade ago.
Channel One has clearly helped spawn the new
breed of in-school marketers that are taking advantage
of the financial squeeze many schools are in and
making them offers they find hard to resist. However,
not everyone is welcoming the commercialization of
America’s schools and classrooms. For example, ZapMe
Corp., a California-based computer marketing company,
had plans to wire America’s classrooms by donating
120,000 top-of-the-line computers to 8,000 high
schools, along with high-speed, broadband Internet
connections. The hitch was that the equipment and
access would be supported by banner advertising and
the company would get permission to monitor the student’s
Web browsing habits. ZapMe was launched in
1996 and by the middle of 2000 it had wired 2,300
schools in 45 states, providing approximately 2 million
students with Internet access. However, the company’s
© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2003
plan was plagued by political problems as consumer
activists and organizations such as Commercial Alert,
which is dedicated to protecting communities and
children from commercialism, cried foul. Ralph Nader
called for parents to “join together to keep ZapMe and
other advertisers out of your children’s schools.” By
late 2000 ZapMe announced that it would not add any
new schools to its program, and a year later the company
abandoned its plans to wire the nation’s schools.
High-tech companies are not the only ones finding
their way into schools. General Mills’ Box Tops for Education
program allows schools to earn cash by having
students collect box tops from the company’s products.
Pizza Hut offers a program called Book It, which
awards gift certificates to students in elementary
schools who complete reading assignments. Since the
program’s creation in 1985, Pizza Hut has given away
about 45 million coupons worth $178 million of pizza to
schoolchildren. Individual Pizza Hut franchisees are
also free to coordinate additional in-school programs.
The most common in-school marketing agreements
are with local soft-drink bottlers, which pay school districts
large sums of money for exclusive vending
rights. Companies such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Dr.
Pepper/Seven-Up leave the negotiation of these “pouring
rights” to their independent bottlers. While the
agreements with soft-drink bottlers may generate
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in extra revenue
for the schools that have them, they are also
highly controversial. The vending machines are targeted
because of the lack of nutritional value of soft
drinks and concerns over youth obesity. To alleviate
these problems, many bottlers offer a variety of beverages
in the machines, including fruit juices, juice
drinks, and water.
As more schools open their doors to marketers,
there is concern that the commercialization of our
nation’s classrooms has gone too far. Gary Ruskin,
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