zlacker

Up to now, I have vigorously shielded my toddler from marketing - as far as he knows, the TV occasionally shows holiday church services and election results, and "his" laptop shows fairly non-violent excerpts from BBC animal documentaries and bird-watching videos (he's taken to asking to watch by making the slurping sounds the desert rain frog in his favorite video makes as it's eating termites, then exclaiming "froggy!").

I know he needs to be exposed to some marketing while I'm watching along to talk about it so he isn't completely defenseless against it later, but I don't think that time is quite yet. So far, I'm going with his being able to separate "real" from "pretend" as a minimum.

>>Mandie+(OP)
Start with advertising from the past and work your way forward? It looks lame now, but that stuff used to consistently work.

>>jdouga+bg
Talk about how media is produced. Every second is because someone made it so. None of it just happened.

Show them how it is done. How one can cut, edit and change the sound.

Ask who did it, for what reason, for which audience, to what end?

Equip them with the tools to question the things they see. Then they have the means to engage with marketing.

It’s a long road. There will be glitter and cheap plastic toys along the way.