McDisney Marketing:

Case study for an “integral media studies” approach

Jason Jay

January 11, 2003

Submitted for HT-500: Growing Up in a Media World

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Abstract

This paper highlights some ethical and public health questions about the ongoing co-marketing relationship between the McDonald’s and Disney Corporations, particularly in light of Disney’s recent expansion into educational television for preschool-aged children. I look at the “McDisney” partnership through several disciplinary lenses, acknowledging the complexity of studying and understanding the interweaving of such powerful cultural and economic icons. To organize my discussion I follow Ken Wilber’s four-quadrant epistemology as a conceptual framework. The result is a call for “integral media studies” scholarship that includes several threads of traditional research along with an introspective/meditative dimension excluded from mainstream discourse.

The partnership

In January, 2001, McDonald’s Corporation announced the opening of “Burger Invasion,” a McDonald’s restaurant within Disney’s California Adventure theme park. The event marked almost four years of a ten-year alliance between the multiple divisions of the two corporations that includes McDonald’s restaurants at all Disney theme parks. McDonald’s also has exclusive rights within the restaurant industry for Disney co-marketing; this most often takes the form of Happy Meals and soft drink cups emblazoned with characters from Disney films. Recent tie-ins include Lilo & Stitch, Treasure Planet, and a “100 Years of Magic” smorgasbord of toys from a century of Disney films.

There has, however, been great concern of late about the “Burger Invasion” not just at California Adventure but around the nation and the world. Eric Schlosser’s best-selling book Fast Food Nation (2002) documents the labor, public health, economic, legal, and children’s marketing abuses of the fast food industry. The latest edition’s jacket sports prominent book reviews that compare its thoroughness and relevance to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. McDonald’s is the primary and most incorrigible target of Schlosser’s extremely well-researched and multidimensional attack. He focuses on the incidence of obesity, particularly among children, and its relationship to fast food consumption. He also looks at the lack of proper food safety checks in the meat industry that supplies restaurants like McDonald’s and the threat of bacteria like E. coli 0157 H:7. His portrait of the corporation shows highly centralized control of restaurant procedure and a consistent and vigorous battle against worker unionization. McDonald’s comes of as an unethical company that is disrespectful of human dignity.

It is with some concern, then, that we see a close tie between an unethical producer of unhealthy food and arguably the strongest brand in contemporary children’s media and culture. Disney’s films, cable network, theme parks, retail stores, parades, and cruise lines give it extensive brand recognition and make it a symbol of all-American family life. Its characters loom large in children’s imaginations and are persuasive and attractive icons to use in marketing any product.

Disney promises to hold further sway over families with the recently launched Playhouse Disney station whose educational programs target children between the ages of two and five. To drive the shows’ content, the corporation has developed a “whole child curriculum” designed to promote healthy physical, social, ethical, emotional, and cognitive development (Cherow-O’Leary, 2002). This is quite a positive step towards educational programming in commercial children’s television, one that will no doubt win loyalty among parents eager to give children a head start on school.

My own criticism of the McDisney relationship comes from its contradictions with the stated principles of the “whole child curriculum.” I will not assume that Playhouse Disney characters will find their way onto a Happy Meal; characters restricted to television shows almost never do. Even so, exposing children to Playhouse Disney as early as age two creates deep familiarity with the Disney brand. If children enjoy the shows, a positive association or relationship will be formed. As they grow, children will request more Disney entertainment such as films and videos, and some of these will eventually be tied with McDonald’s Happy Meals; Disney is contractually bound to work with no other restaurant. When this happens, and children successfully plead with their parents for a trip to the restaurant, parents will have been deeply betrayed. They will have allowed their children to develop a brand loyalty designed to promote healthy physical and ethical development, but then will be paying for them to eat meals low in fiber, high in sugar and saturated fat, and produced by exploited teenage workers. The Disney toy for which they have come might have been produced by Vietnamese sweatshops where women’s ten-hour work days don’t even pay for a single meal (Hightower, 1997).

Barbara Meltz, a columnist for the Boston Globe, gives similar criticism of food-media co-marketing, drawing on psychologists and early childhood educators such as Susan Linn and Alvin Poussaint at the Judge Baker Children’s Center (Meltz, 2002). Her emphasis has been on general problems with associating food with entertainment and comfort (e.g., with familiar media characters). By so doing, she argues, children create an unhealthy emotional dependence on eating that could lead to obesity or other eating disorders. From another angle, attaching candy to toys might delude children that play should be rewarded and is not an end in itself.

I find myself concerned, however, with the lack of rigor in my own discussion and that of Barbara Meltz. This kind of writing relies on conjecture, intuition, and opinion; I could just as easily have focused on the colorful artistry of Disney films and their encouragement of fantasy and visual expression, or the importance of McDonald’s as a center of community. Without research that tests these conjectures and intuitions about the media, it is hard for me to derive any valid normative claims to drive activism, policy, or media education. The trouble lies in knowing what kind of research is appropriate to really understand mass marketing phenomena.

Disciplinary lenses

If we want to understand the ramifications of the Disney/McDonald’s partnership, there are several different kinds of inquiry and knowledge we can employ that derive from diverse academic disciplines. Likewise, any curriculum designed to temper the hybrid McDisney corporate messages must analyze and criticize them through multiple lenses.

Studying McDonald’s is in part about hard science: the nutritional value of the food and the health hazards associated with high sugar, salt, and fat content. It is also about social studies: the labor practices employed in the restaurants; the legal battles in the McLibel case; the economics of big agribusiness; and controversies over sweatshop labor in Asian toy factories.

Studying Disney is much more interpretive. It is about watching films and images with a critical eye. It might require written literary analysis of characters, themes, images, and visual grammar of the films. Creative endeavors like parody films or web sites may even shed light on the meaning and context of Disney cultural artifacts.

At the intersection between these corporations, the fantasy characters selling fast food, we conduct a kind of hybrid inquiry, because Ronald McDonald and a Treasure Planet Happy Meal require out both the literary and scientific analysis. On the one hand, there are characters and narratives in television commercials and on the Happy Meals themselves that can be approached as texts to be interpreted. On the other hand, there is a cause/effect relationship inherent in such advertising – messages are constructed in order to drive desire, purchase, and consumption behavior. Cause/effect relationships are the domain of scientific inquiry and knowledge, and such methods therefore have their place as well.

Some might argue that at this intersection point we find ourselves in the domain of psychology. We are looking at the study of how the individual child perceives an advertisement, what goes on in his or her mind as they process and understand the advertisement, and the kinds of attitudes and behavior that emerge out of the process. Even psychology, however, is not a homogenous discipline; under that umbrella there exists a microcosm of the split between the humanities and science. Psychology’s cognitive/behavioral tradition has roots in scientific positivism; scientific methods are employed even in social psychological studies on experimenter bias and the dynamics of persuasion that call into question the objectivity of scientific researchers. On the other side there is humanistic and motivational psychology, whose roots in William James touch on the subjective and introspective dimensions of human experience inaccessible to positivist science.

Clarifying the epistemology

In attempting to tease apart these different modes of inquiry, discourse, and education about media, I will apply the “four-quadrant” analytical framework of the contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber (1995). In studying human experience, Wilber argues, it is worthwhile to look at any phenomenon from both the interior (subjective) stance and exterior (objective) stance. If I stub my toe, there is the phenomenological experience of pain (interior) and the activation of pain neurons and reflex action (exterior). Only I can really know my subjective experience of pain, but activation of neurons can be observed objectively by another person with sufficient scientific instrumentation. Wilber calls the interior the “left-hand” knowledge and inquiry, and the exterior the “right-hand.”

Figure 1 – Four-quadrant epistemology, adapted from Wilber (1995)

It is also worthwhile to look at both the individual and collective dimensions (upper and lower in Figure 1) of any phenomenon. We can study how an individual’s stubbing his toe affects his attitudes, behavior, and life path, or we can look at the aggregate level – how toe-stubbing affects society. The sociological, economic measurements of stubbing frequency and associated medical costs are exterior, collective measurements (lower-right). “Lower-left,” or “interior collective” study looks at the language used to share pain and foster intersubjectivity, cultural images and icons associated with toe stubbing, and folk beliefs about bad luck and toe stubbing. This is the domain of cultural anthropology.

The argument I will develop is that no one of these quadrants is sufficient to really understand the nature and implications of the Disney/McDonald’s partnership. In order to develop a media literacy curriculum, activist campaign, or public policy initiative, we must bring all four different forms of knowledge and inquiry together into an integral understanding of children’s media and fast food consumption.

Biology and medicine

The most purely scientific lens relevant to the Disney/McDonald’s phenomenon is one of nutrition science and biology, a focus exclusively on the McDonald’s side of the equation. McDonald’s food can be analyzed for its caloric, fat, and sugar content. Meat coming through its production process can be screened for E. Coli and other harmful pathogens. When we begin looking at McDonald’s customers in this frame, we might do so through “upper-right” inquiry; this would involve looking longitudinally at individuals, observing correlations between McDonald’s consumption and fluctuations in body weight, body fat percentage, or other measures of physical fitness. We could also look at claims about the addictiveness of foods high in sugar, sodium, and fat (people’s developing “a taste” for junk food) by observing how inclusion of these foods in diet impacts food preferences over time.

More likely we will look at the “lower-right” quadrant, observing properties of large groups of people in a public health study. We might run survey studies to find correlations between McDonald’s consumption and medical conditions such as obesity, heart disease, colon cancer, and diabetes that have been linked to low fiber, high animal fat diets. Given McDonald’s expansion, we might even be able to gather pseudo-experimental data, comparing a community’s rates of diet-related illness before and after the arrival of a McDonald’s restaurant. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2002) highlights indicative correlations of this type, for example the fact that both the obesity rate and the number of fast food restaurants in Great Britain doubled between 1984 and 1993; a similar doubling of both occurred in the 1980’s in Japan.

The basic purpose of research and education in the biological sciences is to highlight the adverse effects of fast food consumption. In a sense this motivates the analysis of McDonald’s advertising – we want to understand how advertisers persuade children and adults to eat unhealthy food, and how marketing tie-ins with cartoon characters assist the process.

Cognitive and behavioral psychology

Ronald Slaby’s lectures on media at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the studies presented in Calvert (1999) and Singer & Singer (2001) have resided primarily in the upper-right quadrant, the domain of positivist psychology. Although there are “interior” cognitive mechanisms and mediators posited in the models and experiments, they are always assessed through externally observable behavior. Dialogue, which is the method of getting at the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of human existence, is employed to a limited extent; interviews are carefully structured and data coded for quantitative analysis.

To employ the most advanced, contemporary form of this scientific psychology in looking at Disney and McDonald’s, we would probably use the social cognitive learning paradigm whose roots lie in Albert Bandura’s work (Lecture, 10/21/2002). We would focus on the character of Ronald McDonald and his friends, who head to McDonald’s for a treat and to gather socially. Children, imitating Ronald and believing his teaching serves their interest, similarly desire to go to McDonald’s and enjoy a Happy Meal. When they see that Ronald enjoys himself at McDonald’s, children’s desire is strengthened through the process of vicarious reinforcement that has been demonstrated in the social learning paradigm research.

Social learning theory can generate testable hypotheses about the way McDonald’s advertising works. Advertisements can be shown to children that just show the McDonald’s logo and Ronald McDonald (the association case). Another would show Ronald taking children to McDonald’s (the travel imitation case). A third would show Ronald and other children eating the food and playing with the toys (the consumption imitation case). Social learning theory would predict an effect of advertisement form on children’s desire to visit and/or eat at McDonald’s, as measured through degree of positive perception, ordering of choices of dining possibilities, or frequency of request for McDonald’s.

When we bring Disney into the picture, however, the situation becomes more complicated. A Happy Meal employing the Treasure Planet characters does not create a role modeling situation the way a Ronald McDonald advertisement does. The characters from the Disney film are not depicted as attending (let alone frequently) a McDonald’s restaurant. Rather, McDonald’s is simply depicted as a place where children can interact with materials bearing the Disney characters’ images. Here an explanation based in the social learning paradigm starts to become rather complex. One way to apply the framework would be to say that the Treasure Planet characters’ appearance on a Happy Meal is a kind of metaphorical way that they are “going to McDonald’s.” Children are then imitating the Disney characters, “following” them to the restaurant. This hypothesis could be tested, perhaps by looking at the effects of animations that show a more or less explicit “journey” of Disney characters to McDonald’s. A content analysis of advertisements could look at how frequently this technique is employed.

It would be revealing to look at such differential effects developmentally. Younger children have a difficulty differentiating programming from advertising and do not understand the selling intent of advertisements (see Calvert, 1999 for review). It may be, for example, that younger children have a difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy and think of the Treasure Planet characters as actually “going to McDonald’s.” The hypothesis would be that younger children would be more strongly affected by the “journey” animations than older children. In such a study, you would have to be careful to control for children’s baseline enthusiasm about the characters, because characters may appeal differentially to children at different ages.

Still, I do not find the “imitation” or pure social learning explanation to be parsimonious. There is another kind of explanation that is based on a transfer of emotional reaction, one that Susan Linn and Diane Levin employ in their discussions and advocacy around children and the media (2002). Their emphasis is simply that advertising depicts food and eating as fun, and creates a close tie between entertainment and eating. They point to candy that works like a toy and the placement of food brands in commercial toys (e.g. Barbie’s McDonald’s drive-thru) in addition to food products and restaurants co-marketed with cartoon characters.

Looking at this phenomenon more closely and employing psychological language, we might say that children have developed an emotional response or connection to a Disney character through experiencing them in narrative form on television and in film. When this character appears on a Happy Meal, the same emotional reaction is tied to the Happy Meal. This would be a somewhat Pavlovian, sub-cognitive description of the process, but we could also employ cognitive language. We could say that children develop an expectation that their interaction with the Treasure Planet Happy Meal will be as fun (create the same emotional responses) as viewing the film itself. Again, this theory generates testable hypotheses. Here the focus would be on simply showing children images of Happy Meals without anybody eating them in order to eliminate social learning effects. The Happy Meals would be branded with Disney and other popular characters, and the measure would be a correlation between three variables: their degree of prior exposure to the characters in the media; their feeling about the characters (assessed through interview and scored); and their level of desire or preference for the Happy Meal over a simple display of the non-co-branded Happy Meal food contents. One would anticipate a general preference for Happy Meal packaging because of the games and colorful imagery on the box, but the degree of preference would be mediated by the transfer of emotion and expectation of fun with familiar characters.

In both the social learning paradigm and this emotional expectations paradigm, the emphasis is on determining the mechanism by which a co-marketed product stimulates desire and consumption behavior. In the former, a child imitates a character’s journey to McDonald’s, perhaps because of anticipated reward or because the child feels a sense of trust for Ronald McDonald or the characters from Treasure Planet. In the latter, a positive feeling about a co-branded character translates (through a two-step conditioning process or through cognitive expectations) into positive feeling and desire for a food product. These discussions beg the question, however, of how the trust or positive feeling about the characters developed in the first place.

Humanistic psychology

In looking at how children develop emotional connections or reactions to characters such as Spiderman or Disney heroes, we begin to tread from cognitive/behavioral psychology into humanistic and motivational psychology. What makes Buzz Lightyear, Disney’s hero from the Toy Story films who is used to market Betty Crocker fruit snacks, an appealing character? Do children yearn for excitement and pleasure and therefore want to live his life of adventure vicariously? Do they feel unsafe and vulnerable and want Buzz to protect them? Perhaps they feel that he is strong, dashing, and capable and hope to acquire these traits by playing with and imitating Buzz.

One way to systematize this kind of inquiry is to organize questions around Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (1970), a foundation of humanistic psychology. At the basic level, children have physiological needs that can be met by eating, sleeping, and (later in life) sexual activity. These motivations could draw children to McDonald’s food regardless of any Disney cross-promotion, but they could also play into sexually attractive characters’ appeal. The next level in Maslow’s scheme is that of safety and security needs. Here we might focus on Buzz as a strong, capable protector who will protect the universe from bad guys. Above safety there is a need for love, community, and companionship; it is at this level that we might focus on Ronald McDonald and the images of cheerful children hugging him, or his circle of friends enjoying McDonald’s together. Next come “esteem needs” that focus on desire for power and recognition in social circles. Here we could look at children’s desire to identify and be like Buzz Lightyear in order to attain a kind of hero status; at this level we might also place the classic “be the first one on your block to have it” advertising ploy. Finally, the highest level of need in Maslow’s scheme is that of self-actualization, an idealized desire to become a compassionate, meaningful, and morally strong contributor to society, in touch even with divine characteristics. This is the ideal level at which children might see Buzz as a hero, focusing on his magnanimity, his desire to serve and protect, and his ability to self-sacrifice for his friends in the Toy Story films.

It is possible to design empirical, behaviorally based experiments that draw on this humanistic framework. We might ask children to describe why they like Buzz Lightyear, and then come up with a coding system for categorizing their language in Maslow’s scheme. Then we could look at correlations between the types of motivation children exhibit and the strength of social learning and/or emotional expectation effects of co-branding. In particular, we could analyze why certain children might identify with particular styles of advertising and characters. For example, a child growing up in a neighborhood or household ridden with violence who feels a chronic lack of safety and security might focus on Buzz Lightyear as strong protector. We could test such a hypothesis through an experiment in which two advertisements are shown to children: one depicts Buzz Lightyear protecting a group of children from a monster and then taking them to McDonald’s; the other just shows Buzz taking the children to McDonald’s. The independent variable would be the amount of actual and perceived violence in the children’s lives. We would expect the children in violent environments to be more affected by the protection-focused advertisement than children from non-violent environments.

This would be, however, very soft science. First, we are making an assumption that Buzz Lightyear would be construed as “strong protector” by children. A child who suffers domestic abuse by a man, or a person of color who has been a victim of white men’s racism, might not see him as such. Second, it is very difficult to disentangle the layers of motivation. The action of Buzz protecting children treads across safety, community, esteem, and self-actualization levels depending on a child’s own focus and disposition. Furthermore, there would likely be deep effects of context in such a study – the child’s comfort with the race and gender of the experimenters, the décor and setting of the experiment, and the particular experiences a child had in the day and week leading up to the experiment.

The reality is that motivation and emotion are highly subjective and personal phenomena. As we start to widen our lens to look at the myriad personal and cultural contributions to a child’s feelings about a media character, it becomes impractical, infeasible, and even disrespectful or unethical to scientifically “control” all the relevant variables. To do such research as correlation we would have to gather absurdly large numbers of subjects and interview them beyond their point of tolerance. If instead we went for an experimental approach, we would have to impose bizarre and unethical conditions such as lack of safety and security in the laboratory. We also run up against limits in scientific objectivity – studying children’s emotional connection to media opens the researcher to subtle effects of his/her own mood, attitude, and behavior in the laboratory. In essence we are running into a friction point between the subjective and the objective, between the “left quadrants” and “right quadrants” in Wilber’s epistemological scheme. Rather than continuing to push the limits and inability of “upper right” forms of scientific inquiry to study subjective experience and interpretation, I would argue that at a certain point we make a phase shift to “left-hand” inquiry.

Literary and introspective approaches

To step into the “left hand” of Wilber’s diagram is to acknowledge the interior, subjective, personal aspects of people’s experience with media. It means respecting people’s perspectives, interpretations, creativity, and subject-hood rather than constantly objectifying them as research “subjects” (an ironic term). It means embracing complexity rather than trying to control it, and thereby moving into a critical, literary, or cultural studies mode of discourse and inquiry. A media scholar in this humanities mode might look at individual texts such as a television commercial or Disney film and try to tease out the various meanings and devices of character and plot that are employed. Here the scholar acknowledges his or her own perspective and experience, and depicts personal and emotional connections to the text. Readers who share common experiences and style might uncover similar feelings about the media in themselves, while others will feel friction with the scholar’s account. In either case the goal is to draw out people’s subjective experiences, reflection, and interpretation – both the critic and reader engage in “left-hand” inquiry.

To truly get at a child’s subjective experience of media, the meaning of Buzz Lightyear for him or her, would require that we look at drawings and journal writing, imaginative play, the ways he or she decorates her room with Buzz Lightyear merchandise, and other private modes of self-expression. We might capture the reflections of an obese child who dreams of being strong and agile like Buzz Lightyear, but struggles with his craving for unhealthy foods that worsen his condition. In discussing younger children, this use of their intra-personal communication may not, in fact, be as easy as running a behavioral experiment. To truly respect and acknowledge children as people, however, I believe it is scholars’ responsibility to try. It is in people’s personal expression that we see strength, inner struggle, complexity, and triumph rather than just their victimhood before the muscle of multinational corporations as assessed by the “effects” of advertising.

In looking at this upper-left quadrant, the subjective individual, we also tread into a domain of experience and educational practice central to Ken Wilber’s writing but often excluded from mainstream discourse – introspection, reflection, and meditation. These modes of what could be called spiritual inquiry allow the individual media researcher to glance into his or her own values, beliefs, and feelings. Such inquiry does not find its way into much western academic discourse because it can not be studied through “objective” means, remaining as it does completely internal. It is, however, supremely relevant in understanding and assisting people’s interactions with advertising in a consumer culture.

Vipassana, a style of insight meditation taught in Buddhist traditions, is an example of “upper-left” inquiry. The technique is designed to develop one’s awareness of subtle sensations, emotions, and thoughts in the body-mind. Sustaining mental balance and acuity through the process is supposed to allow the Vipassana student to observe cravings and aversions without reaction, thus remaining free and non-attached to such impulses as they come and go. My own experience with Vipassana has confirmed for me the traditional claims about the practice: that it helps people emerge from cycles of addiction and conflict that result from acting on cravings and aversions rather than letting them pass.

Why is Vipassana relevant to the present discussion? We live in a world in which advertisers quite successfully design their messages to generate aversions (for example disgust with dirt and mildew in order to sell chemical cleansers) and cravings (for sweet, greasy foods at McDonald’s). The ability to be introspective and gain mastery over such impulses is critical to survival and health in consumer culture. That inner knowledge and mastery can fortunately be taught, and has been through lineages of Buddhist and yogic teachers for thousands of years. Carried out by media researchers themselves and encouraged among media literacy students, such introspective discipline could provide another critical lens in understanding people’s interactions with advertising and consumer culture.

Anthropology and cultural studies

We can also hold to a humanistic methodology but widen the lens from individual to shared, cultural experiences and interpretations of media texts. Doing so (and thereby treading into the “lower-left quadrant”) requires a step into cultural anthropology and the use of ethnography and portraiture methods. Here a scholar who might be trained as an anthropologist could work as participant-observer and interviewer in communities of children as they work and play in school and community. They might observe the language that is used to describe characters like Buzz Lightyear, see how that character emerges in children’s fantasy play, and observe children’s patterns of media use in the home. As questions arise, interviews with children and caregivers would give deeper insight into the individual and shared interpretations of Buzz Lightyear narratives.

The end product of such ethnographic inquiry would be a portrait of a community, its culture and systems of meaning, and the role that characters like Buzz Lightyear and Ronald McDonald might play in children’s lives and imagination. The portrait would also bring to light the mix of joyful and conflicted relationships that people form around shared experiences in consumer culture: a family’s ritual enjoyment of Disney videos on the couch together; a mother’s loss of temper with a nagging child at the mall; a cafeteria full of children arguing about who has collected more Yu-Gi-Oh cards from Happy Meals.

Sociology and economics

Leaving aside the biological inquiry that ignored media, we have looked at behavioral psychology (upper-right), humanistic psychology and literary approaches (upper-left), and socio-cultural inquiry (lower-left). The final remaining quadrant is the lower-right, the collective external. Studying Disney and McDonald’s in this mode requires looking at aggregate variables such as the correlation between Disney movie attendance and Happy Meal sales during shared promotions. It requires looking at broad statistical correlations about demographic groups who might be more or less affected by a media campaign. The lower-right scholar sees the behavior of an individual child as assessed by the upper-right psychologist and asks what happens when an aggregate of such stimulus responses patterns occur. Lower-left inquiry’s results, the patterns of cultural use and appropriation of Ronald and Buzz, get translated and integrated with measures of popularity, consumption, and economic success of the two corporations.

It is in this mode of inquiry that we can also ask questions about competition. How much extra revenue does the Disney partnership bring McDonald’s relative to Burger King or to locally owned restaurants who do not have the leverage to forge such co-marketing contracts? Is the barrier to competition in the restaurant created by mass-media ties comparable to historical relationships that drove government anti-trust action? What economies of scale is McDonald’s able to achieve because of its stature in the market? Is the scale of agricultural production required to supply McDonald’s sustainable and healthy for the environment?

Integral media studies

Having perused the “four quadrants,” we have done a reasonably thorough survey of ways to study partnerships between children’s media and food companies. We can see that there is a vast body of research that could be conducted, touching on several academic disciplines, in order to truly understand the implications of Disney and McDonald’s intertwining their products. Just getting funding for all these studies would be a daunting task.

Unfortunately, it is quite likely that the Disney’s and McDonald’s marketing departments have already conducted most of the research described above or purchased it from advertising industry reports. Nutritional research and disclosure is, thankfully, required by the FDA and regularly performed. Ronald McDonald campaigns and advertisement design has no doubt drawn on social learning theory and both in-house and academic research. Motivational research on message presentation and purchase decisions are likely to drive the design of television commercials, packaging, and choices about which media characters to emphasize in co-marketed products. Sociological and economic analyses of competitive advantage played into the financial decision to forge the McDisney partnership in the first place. Some anthropological methods, in the form of localized focus groups, drive the targeting of corporate marketing to specific sub-populations in America and abroad. Even personal, introspective accounts of experiences with McDonald’s arrive at the corporate headquarters in the form of fan mail and testimonials.

What we have, then, is a tremendous imbalance of power between these two corporations and the average consumer. A child who is unaware even of the difference between commercials and regular programming will know little to nothing about nutrition, biology, cognitive psychology, humanistic psychology, literary criticism, introspective practice and writing, anthropology, sociology, or economics. Applied sciences of persuasion and manipulation can push their cravings, feelings, and decisions without their consent or control.

One answer to this dilemma is to simply ban advertising to children under a certain age the way Sweden has (Schlosser, 2002). Another, less extreme solution has been proposed by Naomi Greenfield (2002); she calls for a legally mandated nutritional standard for all food products using television icons to market to children, thereby pressuring both food and media companies to drive a healthier consumer culture.

The trouble is that I would question the viability of such regulatory legislation in today’s political climate. Are the American people aware of the physiological, psychological, cultural, economic, and sociological impacts of our consumerism? Do we engage in deep introspection about the motives for our purchases and diet choices, about the reasons we find television programs and films appealing? Do we feel concerned and knowledgeable enough about the health of our minds, bodies, culture, and society to vote on appropriate advertising regulations? Even if children were to pass through vulnerable years protected by Greenfield’s legislation, would they vote for similar restrictions as adults in emerging media? Would they be equipped with the insight, understanding, and knowledge to see through marketing campaigns and avoid their undue influence? What would it take for them to be informed consumers and citizens?

In my opinion, if we want to be a reflective, informed, and media literate society we will need widespread media literacy education that gives us the same tools that corporations have in constructing their marketing campaigns. We must become scientists of body and behavior, literary critics of the media texts that surround us, anthropologists of our popular culture, and economically informed sociologists of our communities. To accomplish this, an acknowledgement and study of mass media must be integrated into science, language arts, social studies, and economics curriculum from preschool through graduate study and beyond. As daunting as it may sound, the methods of psychological study, literary analysis, ethnography, and social science data analysis must become part of citizens’ intellectual repertoire if they are to make informed decisions about purchase and policy. Such schooling would begin to put the general population on equal footing with corporate marketers, at least in the research phase of their campaigns.

We can surpass advertisers and regain insurmountable power as consumers and citizens, however, by tapping into the one form of knowledge they can not have about their target markets – the knowledge we gain through introspection, reflection, and meditation, inquiry in the “upper-left quadrant.” In the Indian traditions, in Western poetry, and in esoteric Western religious doctrine, it is believed that self-knowledge is the key to liberation and the knowledge of the divine. To know our own cravings and aversions is to transcend them regardless of how vigorously advertisers attempt to strengthen their hold on us. To know our dreams, desires, hopes, and visions of the future is to keep them sacrosanct from the homogenization of consumer culture. By thus holding onto our souls and exercising the creativity that we have otherwise abdicated to corporations, we can generate our own ideas, our own narratives, and our own connections among healthy food, community, art, and livelihood. Thus armed with a truly integral understanding of media, we may give our voices a fighting chance in beating back the Burger Invasion.

Bibliography

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Cherow-O’Leary, R. (2002). Playhouse Disney developers guide: The whole child curriculum. Internal communication from Disney Corporation accompanying presentation by Anne Sweeney, 11/20/2002.

Greenfield, N. (2002). Action for Children’s Television: A model for children’s advocacy; a stepping stone to the future. In press.

Hightower

Linn, S. & Levin, D.E. (2002, June 20). Stop marketing ‘yummy food’ to children. Christian Science Monitor.

Maslow, A. (1970). Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper & Row.

Meltz, B. (2002, Nov 14). Just say phooey to the food/fun link. Boston Globe.

Schlosser, E. (2002). Fast Food Nation. New York: Perennial (HarperCollins).

Singer, D.G. & Singer, J.L. (2001). Handbook of Children and the Media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Wilber, K. (1995). A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala.