I work in the marketing department at Cricket Media, so naturally it is my job to get the word out about how great our magazines and products are. CRICKET magazine has been entertaining children since 1973 and like many of the people who work here, I distinctly remember racing to the mailbox every month when I was a child to see if my new issue had arrived. If it had, many hours of reading (and imagining) would follow.
As a marketer, I’m lucky to be able to represent a product that I really believe in and still enjoy reading to this day. If you’ve read any of our 11 award-winning magazines you know that they are filled with well-written and meticulously researched stories and articles (see, there’s the marketing side of me coming out…). And you also know that there is no outside advertising in our magazines. This has always been the case since the magazines began more than 40 years ago and it is something that the marketing department at Cricket Media believes in and takes very seriously to this day. We do not market outside products to children. Period. When your child flips open one of our magazines, you can be assured that only high-quality, age-appropriate reading material will be inside. No ads. No stories made to look like ads. No peer pressure. No fooling.
While advertising directly to children is certainly not uncommon (just watch any show on Nickelodeon or take a walk down the cereal aisle of your local supermarket), the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood has documented how marketing directly to children contributes to many problems facing children today including:
- increasing childhood obesity
- encouraging eating disorders
- and promoting violence.
And that’s why commercial free entertainment zones are so important for kids. I’ve personally cancelled subscriptions to other children’s magazines after flipping open to an ad instead of real content, and I hope you do the same for your kids. Children simply do not have the experience or the knowledge necessary to be able to distinguish things they need from things they want or things that are good for them vs. things that may be harmful. As parents, we must guard their hearts and their minds and work to preserve their childhoods as long as possible.
So that’s why there are no ads in our magazines and why as both marketers and parents, the marketing team here at Cricket Media will work to keep it that way. Your children and ours deserve to grow up reading our magazines without having to worry about being marketed to. We vow to be a “commercial free entertainment zone” you can count on for many years to come.
