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Babes in Willy Loman-land
Why does my kid have to sell stuff door-to-door for her school?
By Bob Whitby
[02/29/00]

What kind of mother are you?
Marketing mavens dissect moms for eager advertisers.
By Lisa Moskowitz
[02/28/00]

Shrinks and con men
An unholy alliance of psychologists and advertisers targets kiddie consumers.
By Arthur Allen
[02/28/00]

The series: An introduction
We ponder the family as a marketing bonanza.
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney
[02/28/00]

The swimsuit issue is here!
Wimpy, artsy, dishonest porn delivered to your door -- now in 3D!
By Lee Quarnstrom
[02/25/00]

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Also Today The family for sale We take a week to examine the ravenous commercial forces that prey on us each day.   Babes in Willie Loman-land Why does my kid have to sell stuff door-to-door for her school? By Bob Whitby   Hooked on tutoring After-school programs bleed Mom and Dad while dissing Junior's teachers. By Catherine Davis

And it was on the strength of these lively magazines that Scholastic built its popular book clubs, characterized by the brightly colored four-page ads that now, quite possibly, outnumber head lice in our nation's classrooms.

Eighty years after the founding of Scholastic Inc., the empire is headquartered in New York in a luxe SoHo office building. It's staffed by smart grads of top colleges and run by president, chairman and CEO Richard Robinson, the son of founder M.R. Robinson.

This giant, publicly traded company produces (or licenses) TV shows, software, book clubs, books, magazines, videos and online sites. It has lately been axing the very magazines that used to give its book clubs such credibility with teachers -- academically challenging classroom magazines like Agenda, Superscience Red and Math Power. Like everyone else in the big wide world of media, it is moving away from education and toward entertainment. But it's doing it in the classroom, where our kids are a captive audience.

Scholastic Inc., the publishing juggernaut that has bought up rival book clubs like Bantam Doubleday Dell's Trumpet, is currently the merchandising king of Goosebumps, the Baby-Sitters Club, Animorphs, Pokémon, Jedi-Aprentice, Dear America -- many of the same serialized lite chapter books its book clubs sell.

Say you forgive Scholastic's heavy-handed promotion of candy-pop supergroups or spanking-new computer software. Even those characters that start off in books get spun off. At its height, the Goosebumps series had 33 licensees producing over 1,000 Goosebumps products. As Robinson said in a 1995 interview, "It starts with a book, and you have to drive it out from the book." So while the book clubs appear to be selling books, the books themselves end up as mere advertisements for toys, pajamas and lunchboxes.

It would be naive to imply that this kind of merchandising, or "synergy" as they call it in the industry, is new or at all unique. It's not. As fewer corporations control entertainment and publishing, it becomes inevitable that everybody has fingers in one another's pies -- if there's anything out there that isn't just part of the same fantastic, totally nonnutritious infotainment pie.

With Scholastic-owned titles like "Animorphs" on Nickelodeon, "Dear America" on HBO and "Goosebumps" on Fox, it's hard to keep your eye on the ball. Who's zoomin' who?

But here's what's different, and what distinguishes the marketing tactics of Scholastic book clubs. It's the use of classrooms, of hardworking teachers, of scarce and much-needed parent volunteers and of cash-strapped school districts to shill for a major corporation. Surely, this ought to raise some eyebrows.

High school kids can perhaps distinguish between editorial and advertising, but certainly we can't expect elementary and junior high kids to make the same call. And it gets harder and harder for anyone to distinguish them as the lines blur. It's all "advertorial," anyway. What's next? A Disney store at the end of the lunch line? Skip the milk and go for Mickey.

How on earth did we get here?

Here's how: Money. The grinding poverty in which most of our schools operate is the nasty little secret behind the success of fund-raising gimmicks like Scholastic book clubs. Our nation's school boards, principals and teachers, hardworking and dedicated though they may be, are reduced to shilling for a major corporation because they're too poor to buy the stuff they need. They're desperate enough to sell their credibility for a mess of measly giveaway paperbacks.

But there are alternatives. Why not buy kids books at the local bookstore, which really needs your money to stay alive. Or borrow them from the library, where the children's rooms are looking a whole lot emptier than they used to. How about persuading your kids to donate some of their Pokémon key chain money to the library, to buy real, hardcover books, books that other kids then get to read, for free?

Because the single biggest problem about this approach to selling books is this: Kids are taught, early, to see books as just one part of a media-advertising continuum, perhaps less interesting than, but somehow vaguely related to, the TV shows, the toys, the CDs, the movies, the sneakers, the stickers, the games. And nowhere in there is there any respect for the book as, well, a book.

Our kids come to us already systematically ripped off by mall culture, by chain video stores, by fast-food calories, by endless TV. And as all kids secretly do, they long for our help in sorting it all out. They come, loud and awkward and demanding, to their parents, to their teachers, to all of adult culture, looking for wisdom and guidance.

And we pat them on the head and hand them the computer version of "Wheel of Fortune," a copy of "Merry Christmas, Rugrats," an interactive photo friendship poster, three watermelon-scented erasers and a free inflatable minibackpack.
salon.com | Feb. 29, 2000

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