Consuming Kids, from the Media Education Foundation, is a fascinating study about how marketers target advertising at children. In it’s brisk 67 minutes, Consuming Kids, using archival footage, excellent current examples, and well-selected interviews, provides damning evidence regarding the negative effects advertising has on young children. It provides a brief history of some of the legislation, in the form of deregulation in the 1980s, that created the situation where advertisers have free reign to market to children of any age. It also presents interesting comparisons of advertising between the past and the present to show how the approach to advertising to children has changed. The film is very well-structured with each segment becoming more enlightening as it progresses into how marketers lower the age bar for marketing sexual imagery to children and how they use psychology and science to undermine parental authority.
Not only is Consuming Kids an excellent documetary specifically about marketing to children, it also presents a great overview of media literacy issues in general.