Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood

Marketing to children is a huge business. Companies spend approximately $17 billion annually marketing to children. Correspondingly, children below 14 years spend about roughly $40 billion and teens about $159 billion annually on consumer products. Marketing directly to children and adolescents, however, contributes to many of the problems they face, including obesity, eating disorders, precocious sexuality, youth violence, family stress, and children’s diminished capability to play creatively. In recent years, marketers have used pervasive, sophisticated, and portable technologies to directly target children and adolescents. Unfortunately, key policies and agencies created to protect the rights of children have been weakened. As a result, a commercialized culture has emerged. Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) is a national organization devoted to limiting commercial marketing to children and ...