Megan and Riley were watching Bob the Builder this morning (Riley's favorite show), when a commercial came on. It was for Space Bags, featuring a woman squishing lots of clothes into tiny spaces with giant ziploc bags and a vacuum cleaner. Megan turned to Maura and said "Mommy, can we have a space bag?" When Maura asked her why, she replied, "Because they fit anywhere!"
We have a ReplayTV, our equivalent of sliced bread for the television. One of the best features it has is that it automatically skips commercials. It works about 80% of the time, and another 18% or so we manually skip through. So the kids wind up being exposed to only about 2% of the commercial content a normal watcher might experience, something we've always felt good about. But this interaction makes me wonder, are we instead setting them up to be easy targets for marketers later on? Do other kids build up some sort of natural immunity to advertisements by being exposed to them at a time when they don't have control over their finances? Part of me thinks we need an experiment to answer this, and coincidentally enough we have another test subject on the way that could serve as a control...
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