Cyber seducers?

• Author: DeFalco, Julie

The latest on-line outrage

If you thought the croaking Budweiser frogs were a bad influence on children, and Joe the smoking camel was even worse, prepare yourself for...Tony the Tiger? In cyberspace, no less.

The World Wide Web has been an enormous boon for scaremongers, offering a continual array of frightening firsts that allegedly create unprecedented threats to our safety - and especially our children's safety. A report released this spring fingers yet another Internet threat: big, hairy spiders of advertising lurk on the World Wide Web, threatening all the Miss (and Master) Muffets out there. The report, from the Center for Media Education, accuses Internet sites sponsored by various manufacturers of kid-oriented products such as breakfast cereal and toys of being not just new places to advertise goods but "highly manipulative forms of advertising, often disguised as information or entertainment, [which] could intrude into every corner of the lives of children."

The CME is a Washington-based group "founded in 1991 to promote the democratic potential of the electronic media." Its report, titled "Web of Deception," is a petition to the Federal Trade Commission. Since the Internet is still in its development stage, the CME wants the FTC to take advantage of this "window of opportunity to develop safeguards to protect children."

The CME is offering "guiding principles for regulation" to ensure that "a complete ban on children's advertising in cyberspace is not necessary." But its alternative doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for advertisers. Among other things, the CME suggests that "advertising should not be disguised as content" on companies' Web sites; no promotion or advertising should be allowed on children's content areas, or "play pages"; and there should be no links between these play pages and company pages, although "discrete underwriting should be allowed." No direct interaction between product spokescharacters (such as Kellogg's Tony the Tiger) and kids should be permitted, and marketers would not be permitted to tailor ads to - or "microtarget" - individual children.

Complaints about the dangers of advertising to children might seem familiar. The CME is the designated successor to Action for Children's Television, a group of crusaders experienced in decrying the evils of advertising. ACT was well known in the '70s and '80s for lobbying against ads for pretty much everything targeted at children, including children's vitamins and games of chance in specially marked packages of sugary cereal...