Toddlers are now asking for brands as soon as they can talk, and advertisers use child psychologists to hone their message. Author Susan Linn tells Anna Mundow just how far companies will go.

Here's a nice idea. Your 10-year-old daughter receives a surprise package in the post from a giant marketing agency. "Slumber Party in a Box" contains cosmetics, accessories, sleepwear, snacks. The friendly agency urges your daughter to invite her playmates to an overnight party, videotape the fun they have and send the videotape back to their corporate headquarters. She is not to tell the other girls that she is a company "agent". It will be their little secret.

"Viral marketing", as this is called, is just one tactic being used in the race by giant corporations to imprint brand loyalty on the consumer group formerly known as children, and to cash in on the $600 billion worth of spending in the US that those mini-consumers now influence. Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids, calls it "the hostile takeover of childhood". And the stealth weapon in that takeover is child psychology.

"Psychologists are paid by advertising agencies and corporate marketing departments because they possess the tools to deliver the minds of children for ownership," Linn explains. "'Share of mind' is the phrase used in the industry to describe what corporations want from children." In a perverse twist, much of the research on early childhood development is now "being done by and for the corporate world".

As an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Linn exposes the long-standing corruption within her profession and predicts not only what kind of children this marketing onslaught creates - obese, sexualised, hyperactive, violent - but what kind of society it is producing. "Being a good citizen is not the same thing as being a good consumer," she observes. "On the contrary, the attributes corporate marketers want to instil in children are mostly antithetical to democracy."

Nobody could call Susan Linn a spoilsport. When she is not at her desk, she is usually on the floor, having fun with puppets, encouraging children to play and to talk. "I started out as a children's entertainer," she explains, "I was a ventriloquist practically from birth."

Having worked on Mister Roger's Neighbourhood, the highly acclaimed public television children's show, Linn produced educational videos for children and still uses puppet therapy in her work with patients at Boston Children's Hospital.

During those sessions, Linn noticed that when she used commercially produced puppets, such as Kermit for instance, rather than puppets she had made, the children talked in the voice of that TV character and mimicked the gestures seen on TV. "Their whole range of play and expression instantly shrank," she recalls, "and that worried me."

It was Teletubbies, however, that turned Susan Linn into the activist who co-founded coalition Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children. "The show was marketed here as educational, but the underlying idea of encouraging babies to watch television was so appalling to me that I had to do something." Millions of dollars are made from the marketing spin-off of Teletubbies. Hasbro toy company estimated in 2000 that the dolls alone produced between $30 million and $50 million in annual sales.

"Infants certainly can't ask for brands," Linn writes, "however toddlers are requesting brands as soon as they can speak. This would suggest that children may develop positive feelings about logos or licensed characters before they have words to ask for the products."

Advertisers are banking on that possibility, Linn discovered when she infiltrated the 2002 Advertising and Promoting to Kids conference in New York.

"Parents are telling us that kids are requesting brands and are brand-aware almost as soon as their verbal skills set in," Paul Kurnit, a specialist in marketing to children, observed.

Another advertising executive expressed the industry mantra. "We want kids to say, 'I need this product. I want this product. I love this product.'"

Because children are, in marketing parlance, "getting older younger" and more rapidly outgrowing their playthings, selling to younger children has intensified. Baby videos and computer games which claim to make baby smarter certainly affect brain function, Linn concedes, but not necessarily as advertised. "Babies are being wired not to think, but to respond emotionally to certain images; to react not to create."

Consuming Kids is not the first book to examine the effects of marketing on children, but Linn's bleak picture of the radically altered world of mass media is the most convincing to date and the most comprehensive in its conclusions. Rejecting the old argument that children are by now immune to most screen advertising, Linn cites the developments that have shaped the child's world today: deregulation of children's advertising in the US during the 1980s; the control of most children's broadcasting by three major corporations; the proliferation of advertising in schools; e-marketing via the Internet; viral and guerilla marketing.

"Comparing the advertising of two or three decades ago to the commercialism that permeates our children's world is like comparing a BB gun to a smart bomb," Linn writes. "The explosion of marketing aimed at kids today is precisely targeted, refined by scientific method, and honed by child psychologists - it is more pervasive and intrusive than ever before."

Consider this. The average American child lives in a home with three televisions, a video game console and a computer. Two-thirds of children between the ages of eight and 18 have televisions in their bedrooms, as do 32 per cent of two- to seven-year-olds and 26 per cent of children under two.

At a typical high school (and increasingly in kindergartens), students may choose from more than 150 soft drinks sold in over a dozen vending machines usually installed by Coca Cola or Pepsico, and spend hours of class time watching Channel One, a commercial television station currently wired into 12,000 schools serving eight million students.

Bombarded by brands from infancy, American "tweens", formerly known as adolescents, are currently the "hottest demographic" for advertisers and the one increasingly assailed with sexual messages. In 2002, Abercrombie and Fitch famously marketed thong underpants to 10-year-olds. These "thongs for tots" were decorated with messages such as "Wink Wink" and "Eye Candy". For Christmas that year, the upscale FAO Schwartz toy store in New York introduced "Lingerie Barbie" in stiletto heels, pink garters and bustier. The season's top selling video game was Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in which the hero kills a prostitute after having sex with her.

Referring to the "jolts per minute" rule that advertisers employ to hold our attention, Linn concludes, "The goal is to keep us in a state of arousal, and both sex and violence are effective ways of doing that."

Advertisers don't need psychologists to tell them this. They do need them, however, to identify the precise co-ordinates for those marketing "smart bombs" to hit their young, even infant, targets. The collateral damage is what worries Linn.

"Creativity is characterised by originality, the capacity for critical thinking, and the ability both to recognise the difficulty in a problem and to search for solutions. It's not in marketers' best interests for consumers to think too much, too well or too critically."

The phenomenon of all this creative, intellectual energy dedicated to neutralising intellectual activity has wider implications.

"In September 2002," Linn recalls, "when President Bush's chief of staff was asked why the administration waited until the fall to launch its campaign for a war with Iraq, his answer was 'From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.'"

That view of reality may now be hot-wired into the cradle.

INTERNATIONAL VIEW

Sweden, Norway, Austria and Luxembourg have all banned television advertising to children while school-based marketing is banned in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Portugal and Vietnam.

In Ireland, television commercials for sweets and fast foods are not banned but carry warnings that fast food should be eaten in moderation and that sugary foods cause tooth decay. In May 2004, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland completed the final phase of the Children's Advertising Code which applies to all broadcast media since the start of this year. Its recommendations include:

* Advertising breaks must be clearly distinguished from the programmes during which they appear.

* Advertising cannot be inserted into programmes watched by under 15s or programmes less than 30 minutes long.

* No Christmas advertising before November 1st.

In April 2004, the Children's Rights Alliance of Ireland proclaimed itself "severely disappointed" with the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland's draft of the code, demanding that "the code should prohibit commercial advertising to children under the age of 12 and ban the advertising of junk food and alcohol products".

Earlier this month the EU warned the food industry it has a year to stop advertising junk food to children and improve its product labelling, or it may face legislation. Markos Kyprianou, EU Health and Consumer Affairs Commissioner said urgent action was needed to tackle a growing obesity problem in Europe, particularly among the young.