Buzz or Street Marketing

　　The challenge for marketers is to cut through the intense advertising clutter ( 雜亂) in young people’s lives. Many companies are using “buzz marketing” —a new twist on the tried-and-true “word of mouth” method. The idea is to find the coolest kids in a community and have them use or wear your product in order to create a buzz around it. Buzz, or “street marketing,” as it’s also called, can help a company to successfully connect with the elusive ( 難找的) teen market by using trendsetters to give them products “cool” status.

　　Buzz marketing is particularly well-suited to the Internet, where young “Net promoters” use chat rooms and blogs to spread the word about music, clothes and other products among unsuspecting users.

　　Commercialization in Education

　　School used to be a place where children were protected from the advertising and consumer messages that permeated their world—but not anymore. Budget shortfalls ( 虧空，差額) are forcing school boards to allow corporations access to students in exchange for badly needed cash, computers and educational materials.

　　Corporations realize the power of the school environment for promoting their name and products.A school setting delivers a captive youth audience and implies the endorsement of teachers and the educational system. Marketers are eagerly exploiting this medium in a number of ways, including:

　　● Sponsored educational materials.

　　● Supplying schools with technology in exchange for high company visibility.

　　● Advertising posted in classrooms, school buses, on computers in exchange for funds.

　　● Contests and incentive programs: for example, the Pizza Hut reading incentives program in which children receive certificates for free pizza if they achieve a monthly reading goal.

　　● Sponsoring school events.

　　The Internet

　　The Internet is an extremely desirable medium for marketers wanting to target children. It’s part of youth culture. This generation of young people is growing up with the Internet as a daily and routine part of their lives. Kids are often online alone, without parental supervision.

　　Unlike broadcasting media, which have codes regarding advertising to kids, the Internet is unregulated. Sophisticated technologies make it easy to collect information from young people for marketing research, and to target individual children with personalized advertising.

　　Marketing Adult Entertainment to Kids

　　Children are often aware of and want to see entertainment meant for older audiences because it is actively marketed to them. In a report released in 2000, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revealed how the movie, music and video games industries routinely market violent entertainment to young children.