Sell me lies, sell me sweet little lies.

I’ve worked in the children’s media industry as a researcher and consultant for almost a decade and one of the most interesting lessons I've learned is people who advertise to kids don’t always care about kids. It’s not that people hate kids, I’m sure the CEO of Acme Toys would try to save a drowning eight-year-old but when it comes to things like advertising and accurate representations of a company’s product, then that CEO couldn’t give a fudge about sugar as to whether that eight-year-old is getting a fair deal. 

Unfortunately, when I’m part of project where I know that the product being advertised is an exaggerated version of what the real product is, I get super unhappy because I remember what it felt like to get ripped off and it sucked. The process went something like this:

1. Save up/beg for money
2. Wait for months.
3. Annoy parent/caregiver to the point of hatred as to when I could be driven to Toys R Us.
4. Make Oregon-Trail-like-journey to store.
5. Make Oregon-Trail-like-journey home (length of trip was doubled due to the anxiety brought on by mom not driving home fast enough).
6. Using product for first time.
7. Feelings of but no words for sensation of getting dicked over.
8. Begin saving money for next product.

I try to explain this experience to people who hire me and sometimes I’m effective in causing some type of change in their strategy and other times I’m not. It's uphill battle for sure but what keeps me inspired to fight on are those burning memories of getting super hosed by the ad man and wanting to prevent that for the next child. 




I would like to share with you now three of those childhood moments when the advertisers had me feeling the most hosed:


1. Virtual Boy

Oh boy! A video game console with the comfort of a periscope that also allows me see the game images well after I’m asleep. 

The common complaint about Nintendo’s Virtual Boy console is that the screen only displayed one color, and that color was burning red and that color was migraine inducing after about ten minutes, and the screen was less than an inch from your face. Luckily advertisers made sure to address all of this in their commercial:                  
                                          
Oh wait no they didn’t. They just showed the console doing things that it can’t do, like walking. This console never walked, it never talked, it never even tied up a woman with a cord for you. What would have been great was if the commercial about a game system showed the type of games it played or at least what you were going to look like while playing it. But I guess this image wasn’t about to move any units:

I spent $180 dollars on this and now it's just a homeless shelter for silverfish.

2. SuperScope 6                                         
If you asked any American boy of the 80’s/90’s how problems got solved, the word “bazooka” or “shoulder mounted rocket launcher” was probably their answer. To be fair it was all we knew; thank you Stallone and Schwarzenegger for implanting in us their “bazooka first, diplomacy later” approach to handling conflict. So the timing of the SuperScope 6 could not have been more perfect, kids were hyped and ready to virtually kill things with something that looked like it could actually kill things.  

The design was there, the only problem was the thing it was designed to do. Although the SuperScope6 looked cool, the gameplay was awful and did not allow you to do much more then point at the screen and shoot with limited range of motion i.e., you couldn’t really move around too much and shoot at the same time... isn’t that right spot I saw on TV that lead me to buy it?     

                                            
Yep! Nothing but barrel rolls and head shots from the top of the stairs! Ugh, sixty dollars of hard earned money from pretending to love relatives, gone. 

I tried to reach out to the marketing team that unveiled this accurate campaign for an explanation but I got a message saying they had all moved to Ogdenville.

The ad wizards over at Sterling Cooper Draper Awful owe me $60.

3. The Power Glove

The ripoff to rule them all. If you bought a power glove you know and if even if you didn't buy one somebody at some point has taken 20 minutes to tell you about the biggest let down in kid toy history. It advertised itself as being able to use full motion control to play a game on your NES. However actual virtual reality devices cost thousands of dollars, so the fact that this little doozy promised to do the same thing at a hundred bucks, in retrospect, was pretty suspicious. 

But since virtually reality was just starting to become a thing, no one was the wiser, no kid anyways. So when it came out people (me) freaked out, HARD. I remember my parents asking me if I wanted a puppy or a power glove for my 8th birthday and I said power glove. I chose this over one of the most cherished bonds between man and animal, because I wanted to be able punch not-real-people in the face with better accuracy. And why wouldn’t I want that? I mean look at what the commercial told me:

                                           


In case you’re on eBay right now ready to make a purchase, you should know a little secret, the glove did nothing you just saw. The Power Glove's movements were inaccurate and in many instances unresponsive, which is a very crucial/sole purpose of an input device for a computing system. Imagine using a keyboard to write a paper and almost always the vowel keys produced consonants, now imagine trying to type those vowels while Mike Tyson is punching you in the solar plexus.

And I thought the only problem with this game was naming it after a rapist.

And then there’s this asshole:                                                     
                                                
The Power Glove's biggest advertisement came in the form of a movie which was basically one giant advertisement. The Wizard was about an autistic kid who plays games so well he was able to hustle other gamers across the country. It was basically Rain Man for kids, with the product placement knob turned to a billion as it primarily featured Nintendo licensed products. One of them being the being the Power Glove worn by the protagonist’s bad boy rival, Lucas.

Lucas was easily the coolest person on earth in 1989. He looked like Paul Walker and played games like me, which made him seemingly unstoppable. I hated him as much as I wanted to be him. He wore a black trench coat, lived alone and had this magical  glove that let you play Rad Racer like you were actually driving a fucking car. He made the Power Glove look so cool that they actually wrote into the movie that watching the glove in action would turn on a 12 year old girl.

Gross.

Of all the false promises created by advertisers from my childhood, this one was for me easily the most disappointing: a device that promised to get a lady hot by watching you playing video games. Because of this, I still sleep with a Power Glove on my hand, hoping that when I wake up, a boob will be in the glove.

So the thing I take from all of this is that as children we make mistakes and often had to learn the hard way that there are people who will try to rip us off. But what makes us adults is how we learn from our mistakes and for that I guess I have to appreciate the lessons taught to me in buying all this crap.Now if you’ll excuse me I have to take a call using the latest iPhone about when my Brookstone massage hammock is expected to arrive.