Shrinks and con men

Paine likes to think of himself as a Jonah, battling the beast from inside. To be sure, "kids need protected zones where there's less marketing," he says. "Unfortunately, my very creative marketing colleagues are working so there are no protected zones." And "a lot of what I do is advise companies not to do what they'd like to do.

"If you look at Internet usage, you notice an enormous bump at 2:30," he says. "That's when the kids come home and the parents aren't. Everyone talks about parental responsibility, but the fact is that parents are relying more and more on companies to protect their kids. My argument is that any company that markets to kids takes on ethical responsibilities."

And what service, exactly, does Kid2Kid provide? A network of bright teenagers -- "peer guides" or "influencers" in the lingo of the trade -- leads younger kids in focus groups that examine ads and products from corporations like Nabisco, Kraft and AT&T. In other words, they help polish the campaigns for more brightly packaged detritus.

"We picked the color of the SnackWell's cookie box. It was green, an unusual color for a cookie box," says Natalie Dorazio, 19, a Kid2Kid peer guide for five years who enjoyed it so much that she's now studying marketing. "We picked those little canteens of Pringles." (To be fair, Paine and other psychologists also work in public-service-ad campaigns.)

If the fragility of children amid the stresses of modern life is to be respected, it can still be turned to a seller's advantage, gently massaged by corporations that wish to enter a family's comfort zone.

The basic advertising model for kid products is the "nag and gatekeeper" model, the idea being to maximize the nag until the gatekeeper lowers the bar. But marketing consultant Rust targets the mother and child as a snug team. "One thing [Jean] Piaget didn't see," he says in an interview, "is that kids are attracted to novelty only when they feel safe and comfortable.

"Children are very fragile in their ability to deal with things they've never experienced before. There's a wonderful intensity in their way of seeing the world, a concreteness, very deep, very vivid, very unique and rich. But that way of seeing does not equip you to cope with new things, and we have a social pattern in our society -- which I regret, but there's not much I can do about it -- where kids, even preschoolers, are constantly being ripped from one environment to the next to the next.

"One of the reasons for the tremendous and in many ways regrettable clutching that young children do toward brands," he adds, "is their need to fill their lives with familiar things. So sure, they look for Disney. And Mom looks for that too."

So, amid the swirl of afternoon TV, with its nearly indistinguishable action figure programs and ads for plastic action figures, one occasionally sees commercials aimed at cementing the fuzzy linkages of product to emotional comfort.

In a current ad running with the fiendish cartoons of after school, Ronald McDonald comes upon a little girl finishing a snowman. "He needs just one more thing," says the calorie-rich clown in a gentle, caring voice. Waving his hand he creates another snowman, "a friend." The second snowman, shown from behind, has the subtlest of identifying markers -- a McDonald's-yellow scarf.

A familiar product; a friend in a strange world. This is perhaps "regrettable" but not surprising, in Rust's view. "Parents want to line the nest," he says, "with familiar and predictable experiences for their children."

Whatever.

"Should psychologists have their own kind of Hippocratic oath?" Barry Ornstein, a New York ad researcher, told Media Life magazine. "I don't know; that's their business. But we're in the business of manipulating people."

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