We Pay Them

Children’s books are increasingly using advertisements for children’s food products as the basis of the books. For example, a new book from Simon and Schuster is called The Oreo Cookie Counting Book. The book teaches young children to count, as in: “one little Oreo . . . too tasty to resist.” Other recent titles include The Sun Maid Raisins Play Book, The Kellogg’s Fruit Loops! Counting Fun Book, The Cheerios Play Book, Reese’s Pieces: Counting by Fives, The Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar Fractions Book, and Skiddles Math Riddles. Some of the most popular books make direct use of the foods themselves. In The Kellogg’s Fruit Loops! Counting Fun Book, for example, young learners are taught to insert pieces of Fruit Loops cereal into small cut-out holes in the book’s cardboard pages.

These books are big hits with many children, teachers, and parents. The Cheerios Play Book alone has sold more than 1.2 million copies in the last two years. The basic idea behind the books is that children are more interested in learning when learning is connected to brand names that they recognize from advertisements.

But all of that is introduction. The truly revealing aspect of this trend is which way the money flows. Do you assume that these companies are paying authors and publishers to create books that look like advertisements for their products? Actually, it’s the reverse. The authors and publishers pay the snack-food companies. Typically, a company receives an upfront advance from the publisher, then splits all royalty payments with the author on a 50-50 basis. 

What does this trend tell us? At least with respect to teaching young children to read and count, the circle has been closed. Not only are advertising, education, and entertainment all slowly blending into more or less the same thing, but we now have a generation of young children so tuned in to advertising, so intellectually and aesthetically captured by it, that some companies no longer find it necessary to pay for their advertisements aimed at our children. Instead, we pay them. 

Sources: David D. Kirkpatrick, “Snack Foods Become Stars of Books for Children,” New York Times, September 22, 2000.

First published Winter 2001.