After reading through Kid Kustomers the first time, I found that I agreed for the most part with what the author, Eric Schlosser, was saying. However, after reading it more thoroughly, I noticed that he was very skilled at manipulating the evidence he found to suit his own opinion and the points he wanted to put forth. Marketers do target children, and probably way more than they did in the past. Even though he may have sought advice from “experts” on the matter, I found that his observations about children and advertising were mostly very broad generalizations. Some of which just didn't seem to ring true. For example, I’m pretty sure nobody in my first grade class knew who Joe Camel was. I know I didn’t.
In this article Schlosser comes across as suggesting all parents spoil their kids and that all kids nag their parents around the clock. He makes subtle suggestions that all children are malicious and calculating in their nagging tactics. He also suggests that kids know exactly what they’re doing when they nag. In my opinion, when children nag, they realize that it gets them what they want, but maybe not the higher implications of their actions, like the fact that it also gets marketers exactly what they want.
When parents allow their kids to badger them into submission, the kids know they can get away with nagging and use it for leverage. It only makes the kids persist with their nagging because they know it works. But it will also make them spoiled. If marketers can count on parents to surrender too easily to their nagging children, then marketing is working on the adults ( though maybe indirectly) more than on the kids.
Schlosser successfully uses ethos by tossing in little nuggets of professional advice from professors and other authors to back up his opinions. He gets us to feel sympathy for the children and displeasure with the advertisers through his use of pathos. And he appeals to his audience’s sense of logic by pointing out lots of facts, some well known, but most are pretty obscure. All these techniques make the readers think he knows exactly what he is talking about.
I think the main thing the author is trying to accomplish in this article is to disturb and scare his audience ( which I believe he succeeds at ). His book, Fast food Nation, centered on many of the same principles. By pointing out the flaws in the advertising business he hopes to make us realize how amoral the efforts to turn children into consumers are. I appreciate the fact that he is trying to stimulate conversation and reveal what is wrong with our society, but I think he likes to phrase his writing in such a way that makes his perspective overly pessimistic. I think he wants to point out what is wrong with the modern world, and he does so in the extreme.
