Marketers Wanted a New Generation to Target, Hence Alphas

Ryan ToysReview, a YouTube channel helmed by a spritely 7-year-old, does product placement better than Michael Bay. Every moment of every video is a candy-colored consumerist confection, a parade of products for your preschooler to crave: board games, Nerf guns, dunk tanks, plushies of Ryan himself. It’s what made Ryan and his family $22 million last year. It’s also what got them slapped with an FTC complaint last week.

Watchdog Truth in Advertising is accusing the toy review channel of failing to disclose brand deals to its very young viewers, fooling them into watching advertisements under the guise of entertainment. (The FTC confirmed the complaint, but the regulator declined to comment on whether it has opened an investigation.) Ryan’s father, Shion Kaji, takes the allegations seriously, but feels the family has done nothing wrong. “We strictly follow all platforms’ terms of service and all existing laws and regulations,” he told WIRED in a statement, “including advertising disclosure requirements.”

Kaji is almost assuredly right. Platforms’ service terms as well as existing laws and regulations do allow semi-disguised constant advertising, in part because they can’t (or won’t) keep up with the innovations of social media. Failing to explicitly disclose brand deals is almost an industry norm. “Advertisers and influencers are very hesitant to include advertising disclosures because they think it will negatively affect them,” says Steffi De Jans, who researches children’s advertising literacy at Ghent University in Belgium. That’s misleading and frustrating for adults, but it’s downright deceptive for the people many brands are hoping to appeal to through influencers like Ryan ToysReview—the very youngest of consumers, the age group seemingly named for the purpose of marketing to them, Generation Alpha.

Generation Alpha represents the children of millennials, tykes born between 2011 and 2025. The phrase was coined by social researcher Mark McCrindle, founder of marketing and trend forecasting firm, McCrindle. Some people, like researchers Ádám Nagy and Attila Kölcsey, balk at McCrindle’s generation-naming efforts. Nagy, who studies youth and society at Pallasz Athéné University in Hungary, and Kölcsey, a researcher at Excenter Research Center in Hungary, made a sociological investigation of Generation Alpha, and came out unimpressed.

“Generation Alpha is only a fiction. By definition, an age group will become a generation if they have common experiences, concepts, and language or vocabulary that differs from the previous generations,” Nagy says. “We still have no representative data on the characteristics of ‘Alphas,’ only speculations about what their common, cohesive force might be.” As far as Nagy and Kölcsey are concerned, naming Generation Alpha was merely marketing, or, as Kölcsey says, “something akin to an astronomer naming a star after themselves, before even finding said star.”

Now, of course, McCrindle has demographers who disagree with Nagy and Kölcsey’s findings. (In fact, Mark McCrindle is one, but was unavailable for comment). Even Nagy and Kölcsey admit that Generation Alpha may well become scientifically “real” in the future. Regardless of McCrindle’s motivations, though, it’s hard to miss the dollar signs in people’s eyes as they talk and write about Generation Alpha. According to Forbes’ “complete guide” to the generation, every tech company wants a piece, but Google put it most bluntly: “If Generation Alpha possesses similar behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs to that of their parents, then to win with a certain segment of millennial consumers (millennial parents), we must target Generation Alpha.”

In other words, Alphas are the surest path to their millennial parents’ wallets. Most coverage of the generation strikes that same tone—marketing recommendations, tales of brand’s social media advertising successes, “lessons from the Generation Alpha consumer.” It’s like Generation Alpha was born to be sold to. “Children are more susceptible to advertising than adults,” De Jans says. “This may translate to children having more positive attitudes toward brands and products, and even nagging their parents to buy specific products, which is called ‘pester power.’”

Outside of marketing meetings, conversations about young children and online advertising are anxious, and also familiar. If conversation about Generation Alpha and YouTube resembles anything, it’s the debate about baby Gen Xers and television commercials, which were, like many other things, deregulated by President Ronald Reagan—ushering in an age of more and longer commercials and TV shows made with selling action figures in mind. According to Reagan, doing otherwise would be counter to free expression. According to critics, the impacts of being able to both watch and buy Optimus Prime weren’t great. “We correlated the rise of materialism with the amount of the United States’ overall GDP spent on advertising,” says Tim Kasser, a psychologist at Knox College, who sits on the board of directors of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. “This is pretty problematic, and the internet is even more effective at inculcating those ideas, especially for people still in the process of forming their value systems.” The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, he notes, has filed many an FTC complaint against kid-focused YouTube channels in the vein of Ryan ToysReview.

Most people don’t think an ad-free childhood is practical or necessary, not even children’s advertising experts like De Jans. “I believe that we shouldn’t completely shield children from advertising, but that we should also empower children to cope with it,” she says. Right now, De Jans doesn’t think most kids are able to parse advertisement from entertainment. In part, that’s due to the new, embedded formats that adverting takes online today. It’s not just product placement and TV commercials anymore, it’s sponsored vlogs and brand-funded hauls and product-centric “advergames” or brand billboards within videogames. “Current regulations often overlook these embedded and hybrid advertising formats, especially online, even though they stretch legal boundaries to their limits,” De Jans adds. “Videos such as those posted on the channel of Ryan ToysReview are pure advertising. For example, they posted an 8-minute video in which they have a family dinner at Carl’s Jr. and the whole video revolves around the brand.” Technically, the family was just having dinner … at a restaurant owned by a brand that happened to also sponsor them, so it slips through regulatory cracks.

Ryan ToysReview is just a product of its somewhat lawless time, and its creators know it. “As the streaming space continues to quickly grow and evolve,” Shion Kaji says, “we support efforts by lawmakers, industry representatives, and regulators such as the FTC to continuously evaluate and update existing guidelines and lay new ground rules.” In the past, new regulations for advertising to children have been slapped down by concerned food, candy, and toy industry lobbyists eyeing their bank accounts, but De Jans thinks companies actually needn’t worry. Brands fret that disclosing their advertisements will hurt them with consumers, but De Jans’ research has shown that, once kids know what advertising is, the opposite may be true.

“When influencers clearly disclose their advertising, children may perceive the influencer and brand as being honest and sincere,” she says. “The children will have the feeling that the brand and influencer are not trying to manipulate them.”

De Jans just proved something every parent and older sibling already knew to be true: Little kids like those in Generation Alpha are obsessed with fairness and justice. Once they know they’re being conned, they become pint-sized crusaders for truth and equal-sized scoops of ice cream for all. Who knows, that “cohesive force” that Alphas must have to qualify as a generation could end up being a shared distrust of online advertising—or an ingrained, unexamined need to consume.