We live in a world where spending never stops. Cherie? Cherie?

You’re going to need to be tannoying

this.

OVER TANOY : Ladies and gentlemen, can you please stop panicking?

But why DO we buy what we buy?

And how is our desire to spend manipulated?

Every other company on Earth is trying to get you to spend money

And they’re putting all their effort into getting you to spend your money on stuff all the time

I’m Jacques Peretti and, in this series I’m going to investigate the men who’ve made us spend.

I’ll look at how children were turned into consumerism’s greatest weapon, we had trained a generation
of kids to think “There’s got to be a product, there’s got to be toys” Good luck ..reveal how play become
a serious business when targeted at grown-ups

What was the money that was being generated for these games?

I mean , the money is astounding. Within a week, you’re talking about billions.

And how the techniques first used to sell to kids were used on adults, giving us licence to behave like
children. The trouble with adult consumers is they think too much. That’s the lasting that those who sell
to consumers want.

They’d much rather have adults go in and say “Oooh look at that” ‘I want it, I want it now!” like a child.

THE MEN WHO MADE US SPEND

In less than 50 years, children have become prized consumers, with British and American kids wort £700
billion a year. Open to selling and implusive when buying, children are valued for their own spending
power, as well as the unique access they give to the family purse, it is through these young consumers.
The business learned to sell using fun and play. Techniques that are now being used to sell billions of
pounds’ worth of products to all us- whether we need them or not.

And when it comes to the very young, the key lies in creating a character which, if sucsessful, will be
used to sell hundreds of different products. Peppa pig? All right, what’s your favourite thing to play,
jeremiah?

This looks like a play centre, but it isn’t. Here, Dr. Alison Bryant road tests new characxters for the toy
industry. PEPPA PUG SNORTS

THEY SNORT, LAUGHTER

They’re playing a Peppa Pig app, which they actually asked to play, and the I started the app.

They were actually singing the theme song. So they really love the character.

By then children can identify up to 400 brands, so it’s vital for industry to Target them very young. At
what age do children start to have these relationships
-whith characters?

-oh, it can start incredibly early, I mean we see children start to identify with characters, you know, at
one and two.

It’s different, though, at the age, because they’re sort of, “I like this character” as they get a little bit
older, it’s “I’m like this character”. If it’s a hit character will appear on everything. Form bedding to
biscuits, increasing the price tag by 50% this is known as licensing.

For adults, it’s just as lucrative. Peppa Pig Replaced by David Beckham or Kate Moss

-How valuable is licensing to selling product?

- I mean, licensing really can make or break a product at this point in time. I mean, if there’s no way to
create revenue outside of a TV Show. Or a movie or whatever it is that’s establishing the characters, it’s
very hard to make money in the kids’ media space. Now of course, we see it with Marvel, wich was just
purchased by Disney. And every kids, even if they haven’t seen the movies , it wasn’t always like this.

As late as the ‘60s, only a few toys were advertised directly to children. Barbie was one of the first to be
widely marketed.

There wasn’t the endless range of licensed products we see today. Few toymakers saw chidren as
spenders. It was the parents that held the purse srings, and it was THEY. The needed persuading to buy
new toys for their children. To change this mindset, the toy industry needed not just a new product, but
a cultural phenomenon that would change the way we were sold to. Great shot, kid, that was one in a
million!

- OBI-WAN KENOBI :

Remember, the force will be with you….always

Star wars was the singular vision of one man – George Lucas. A sci-fi trilogy, pitching Luke Skywalker in
an epic battle against the evil darth vader. Lucas may not have been a toymaker, but he was about to
turn children into voracious consumers.

I’ve come to California, where in 1977 the film maker was struggling to find a studio to back the
unpromising sci-fi project, he described to would-be investors as “cowboys and Indians in space”

To raise money, lucas wanted to do something unheard of create a toy franchise, not just for the hero,
but the entire world he’d invented

-steve

- hi, jaques . How are you?

- welcome to Rancho Obi-Wan

-Thank you for having me!

- you’re welcome.

Steve sansweet worked at lucasfilm for 15 years, marketing star wars.

-it’s phenomenal

- well this is Rancho OBI-wan

- That’s amazing

- I’m not often lost for word

- But I am today, so this Dart Vader… This is THE Darth Vader?

- lost of it are parts from the original movie costume from Stars Wars and The empire strikes Back.

- can I touch?

- yes, absolutely

- it’s like my generation’s equivalent, of the Turin Shroud or something

- you said it, id didn’t

When Star Wars opened in cinemas, its tale of good battling evil. Enthralled children around the world,
including me. The frandchise had been created and the world of selling to children and adults would
never be the same again.

-These are the action figures and these are the thing that really cemented fans appreciation for star wars
I think

- so, this luke skywalker was the first ever toy?

- There were 12 Toys that came out, and so you can see on the back of the package

But even predating that, there had never been a successfully merchandised movie, until Star Wars.

-For the next six years, star wars cemented itself, not as a movie or a toy, but an industry

- This is ridiculously fantastic

But when lucas took his idea to big toymakers, none spotted its potential

-When he first came up with the idea of star wars, did he approach any toy manufacturers?

- they passed on it, they weren’t interested, and in fact the two guys from fox and Lucasfilm who went
to Toy Fair International, got literally, thrown out of one of the toy showrooms of one of the largest toy
makers at the time

George Lucas’s idea was finally picked up by toy company Kenner. Together they came up with a simple
but revolutionary idea that would dramatically increase the voule of toys sold. At the time, figures were
either seven inches or the 12-inch GI Joe figures, but having fugures this size let you build environments,
play sets vehicles. That was really the key to star wars success. And whats clever is that, by selling these
small fugures cheaply

-you’re really creating rolling demand for much bigger purchases wich will be like the millennium Falcon
of the big, big, set pieces
-yeah absolutely because originally, these were prieced in the US at 1.97 and of course, the marketing
was all “Collect Them all”, star wars set the template, not only for the toys but for all kinds of
merchandise-apparel, bedding, you name it.

Profit increased as the range expanded, with star wars branding on everything, video games, clothing,
bubble bath. All of wich showed just how much money could be made through selling directly to kids,
business also earned that licensed product like this could be sold to adults

Since the lunch of the first film, £13 billion pounds’ worth of star wars branden products been sold
worldwide.

Star wars heralded a new era in selling to children, film and TV would combine with toy industry to
create brands that would stay with us forever. The 1970s saw a new conduit for selling- colour television
the perfect medium for marketers to drive home sales to a young audience.

Profesor Benjamin Barber has studied the politics of selling.

-the challenge for vendors, the challenge for producers, was how to get to the children. Because
between them and the children stood gatekeepers, parents , teachers, government regulatiors. So, how
to hypass them, how to get around them, was crucial and one of the thing that was very, very important
was television because those who controlled what was on the screens were in a position to market
directly to the children. Airtime quickly became cluttured with ads selling sugary foods and toys as
children were targeted increasingly aggressively. There was a backlash against this attempt to turn kids
into mini-consumers. As the children’s market began pening up in ways preciously undereamt on, in the
US, the federal trade commission began lobbying lawmakers to curb advertising to children. The fall-out
from this battle would change the way children accros the world were sold to. The FTC had been urged
into action by an unlike coalition of consumer lobbysists and traditional family-value groups. They
pointed research that showed children to be the consumer group most susceptible to TV advertising
because their ideas were still being formed.

Kids are being the biggest lie they will ever hear in their lives. A lie that says they should shove candy
into their mouths. A lie that says at 12, 20 and 30 toys work perfectly every time. That all the other kids
have them and that they too, must have them in order to be happy . but their attempt to protect kids
was doomed to failure at hearing Washington , industry fought back . the man defending big business
was Fred Furth. One of America’s loading lawyers, Furth represented Kellog’s.

A company that advertised heavily around children’s programming . in an American democratic

capitalistic society wili must learn top to bottom, to care for ourselves and what the last thing we need
in the next 20 years in a national nanny. The idea was to ban foods wich advertised to children that had
sugar in them and this was way beyond the authority of the FTC. I Mean the FTC had substantial
responsibilities , in regard to mergers and acquisitions and other matter but they’re not a social agency
that goes out on liberal crusades. The people who are supposed to keep this children from eating too
much sugar are called parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts.

With such powerful opponents, the government agency was soon in retreat , it was one of those ideas
that cost millions and millions of dollars to lots of people, cost the FTC a lot of time made them look
foolish and it went nowhere. But those opposing advertising to kids hadn’t just lost the battle.
And the ends of 1970s, the US economy was in recession and the proposed ban was portayed in
Washington as an attack on trade. The resulting backlash gave newly-elected president. Ronald Reagan,
a mandate for huge deregulation. As you know, I have never liked big government and I think you would
agree there’s no reason to substitute the judgment of Washington bureaucrats for that of professional
broadcasters. The government set about dismantling the rules that protected children from advertising.
Looking back now do you not have any qualms about preventing legislation going through that was
designed to protect children ?

I never prevented any legislation from going through , if this was such a grievous affair certainly the
congress of the United States would step forward to protect five year old children, if that was the great
issue. The way was clear for toy marketing to step up another gear. US television was now free to screen
programmes that were little more than advertising slots for toys. And these would be seen by children
acroos the world . for the childrens market, still in its infancy , it was gold rush .the world’s largest
toymakers Hasbro and Mattel, were the first companies to cash in . having seen the profits Lucas had
made they now wanted to use television in a new way to sell their toys . their cunning plan was to
create the toy and then invent a story . the first and most successful to use this strategy was
transformers. Paul kurnit was one of the team tasked with majing it happen. You flipped the star wars
model, didn’t you, in away?

Well, in a way because the product came first , we took it from this three-dimensional toy, thet didn’t
have a lot of meaning to a compelately unique storyline that kids could get excited about and wes had
trained a generation of kids to think “there’s go to be product there’s got to be toys”

The transformers back story was to be developed by ad agency griffin – bacal. My two partners, tom
griffin and joe bacal and the head of marketing for Hasbro , steve Schwartz were driving back to new
York that night. And we get in the car and just started talking.

There was an aggressive campaign behind the transformers launch , the TCV mini series a range of toys
and a marvel comic book .

That year toy sales in Britain rocketed by un unpredicted 25% .

It would be turbo-charged, thanks to a kids TV channel now familiar for its distinctive branding.

Nickelodeon the US kids network, launched in Britain in 1993 HEIDI DIAMOND WOULD HELP MAKE the
aggressively commercial new channel a success in the UK . SHE WAS THE EXECUTIVE VICE-president
tasked with winning over the many critics of its brash approach. ”Kids are cosumers, the same way
adults are consumers , they get pocket money, they do chores, the earn money , they want to go the the
newsagent, the want to buy their magazines”

An advertising campaign was launched to promote the new child –led design.

The children’s market had proved to be hugely lucrative, jkids are model consumers, with untold
influence and the power to change the fortunes of a product or brand.

We had to grow up when you was 18 and that was all there was to it, your bone’s hanging out. The
boundaries separating the adult and childrens’s markets are invisible here.
Increasingly, adults and children find pleasure in the same purchases. One can notice a gradual
transformation, a convergance of desires, last century. Children wanted games and toys and adults
wanted books and instruments that helped them live well and take care of their families. Today
everybody wants smartphones , everybody wants the new video games.

Today the gaming industry is worth £40 billion, and adults happily admit to owning a gaming console.

But in the 80’s playing games was something kids did, Sega and Nitendo led the market. With games
depiciting cartoon-style characters, like Mario and sonic. But everything was to change in the 90’s when
large multinationals saw the real cash possible in gaming if they could extend the market to everyone,
they’d create an entertainment industry to rival Hollywood. The hunt was now on for games that adults
would day. One of the man who pioneered this new multi-billion- pound market was peter molyneux.

No one of the world’s leading games developers. The point of this game is that you are going to become
a king. Among molyneux’s biggest selling games was fable which spawned two sequels.

-how successful was the game?

-this sold almost five million units

-how much did you make out that? A lot?

- well Microsoft made the money

When sonny introduced the play station in 1994 it goal was to create gaming or a mass market , this was
a revolutionary new console for adults . and it had a rival in microsoft’s Xbox. The console were powerful
enough that the guns sounded like guns and the blood looked like blood and so all of those things came
together to creat what is now an entire genre, the first person action genre we’re making games not for
kids. We’re making them for adults, and we’re making them for adults that like the horror and the
brutality of those moments. It was almost as if we took a gun and shoot Mario, the cute moustache , the
baggy pants , the plumbers , was as adult didn’t want to play that any more. We wanted to shoot things
and it was as if we blew Mario out of the park.

Suddenly men spend hours playing games like the all conquering, military shooter series call of duty with
violent action games, the industry had found a winner.

This was a new golden goose in the mid-‘90s and we had , Microsoft with halo, that was set in space we
had activisons they came out with call of duty which now got super super-successful. We had EA with
Medal of Honor they were all vying against each other

-what was the money that was being generated for these gamers

- I mean, the money;’s astounding. Whitin a week, you are talking about billions of dollars of revenue
and over the Christmas period , they were huge successes far more successful than almost every
Hollywood film the fantastic thing about this is this a renewable franchise.

For years I’ve lived a double life, in the day I do my job roll my sleeves with the hoi polloi but at night , I
live a life of exhilaration of missed heartbeats and adrenaline. Sony’s unconventional appeal to an adult
audience as seen in this dramatic PlayStation ad, had paid off and conquered worlds.
Games were incereasingly dystopian I’ve lived. A third of alla homes ow had a console but the market
was heavily skewed towards men. The problems we had was that we were making these games they
were becoming more and more dark , they were becoming more challenging were hard, the were
actually constraining the audience a little bit. And nintendo came out and they said “well, you’ve
forgotten about some one you’ve forgotten about the rest of the world”

Importantly it put console back in the living room this was gaming for all no matter what your age. Up
till that pont when any consumers especially women, funny enough. Picked up a game the same thing
would happen- they would use the thumb stick and their character would run against the wall they’d
feel stupid , they’d fell foolish at playing a game they‘d just put down the controller and say “the game’s
not for me” along came the will, they picked up the controller and they move this hand and the tennis
racket moved . you didn’t have to learn that x button did this and y button did that and press red and
press yellow and use the thumb stick whit that are moment we drew millions of new consumers into
this market and one segment of society could start playing games for the firs time. And what was
women.

The Wii was an instant success. 600.000 were sold within a week of its launch as supply struggled to
meet demand . playing games is now considered acceptable to all generations from children to
pensioners . and last year in the Uk, games outsold music, and video.

Now companies outside gaming gathered to exploit the opportunities it opened up to sell other
products and the people who would do that were two British students Adam and Dona Powel. The
couple created the online website, neopets which would sow the seeds .

Neopets was the stickiest site on web. By stickiest site, we mean was the site where the people spent, y
The longest periode of time on there we had people that were spending hours and hours a day and were
returning on a daily basis. And we had a lot of players, a lot of eyeballs we had 50 million accounts.

Stickiness was a game innovantion but business was about to exploit itu to get us to spend money but
business was about to exploit it to get us to spend money. Whitin two years global corporation.

Like McDonalds , Disney and colgate began to advertise on Neopets

-how important was it to these companies to get in on something like neopets

- it was hugely important for them they never had an opportunity before to reach such a captive
audience that they could present their brands to, in a completely new way , this was something that
people were going nuts for it’s the thing that marketers dream of.

Neopets offered big companies the chance to intergrate their branding into site’s content, often as part
of game in this very players engaged directly with the brand it was called “immersive advertising”

-what did they do, in terms of this immersive advertising ?

-basically we made tailored mini-games for them wich involved McDonalds’ productswhere you would
build a burger and things like that. At one point we had five developers working in sponsor games and
one developers working on our own content.
In 2005 , neopets was sold to global media corporation Viacom £100 million . people have accused
neopets of being quite cynical about creating , this stickness about people coaming back to the game
again and again.

- So was that deliberate when you designed the game?

- We didn’t deliberately decide to make something that would make people’s live hell if they
didn’t log on a daily basis, we just wanted to make something that people would

but this stickiness was something that ther people have picked up on and then have used cynically to
keep people going back again and again.

Business learned something profound from neopets consumers could be drawn back more frequently
play combined challenges whit reward . angry bird pit this into action. This led to games become
increasingly compulsive and involving. Achievements were fantastic there were little bizarre things that
you did in the game you got gold star for doing an achievement and that again encouraged you to keep
playing the game if you’re playing my game, you’re not playing someone else’s game.

Having tapped into our innate human drive to seek out easy rewards , gaming was turning into selling.
Which’s called intrinsic reinforcement. And how it works is anytime yopu challenge yourself to
something and then you achieve that thing, your brain secretes a little bit of this magical
neurotransmitter called dopamine and dopamine is sort little of a high. In the united states , that game
wich is played for one month a year, every year for the last ten years. Is responsible single handedly for
an increase of about 3% in same store sales in the US alone so, this game alone is worth , nearly three
quarters of a billion dollars in revenue to MCDonalds.

Every other company on earth is trying to get you to spend money and they’re putting all their effort
getting you to spend your money on stuff all the time and gamification is one of the tools that
companies might use accomplish their goals. Just like they in incorporated television advertising 50
years ago.

Make no mistake – the house always win and that’s a key for consumers to understand this thing that’s
fun and engaging and useful they’re paying for that one way o the other, whether that’s cash or time .

Business had learned from selling to children how the adult market could be turned into a game. But
there was another childish trait wich business needed to tease out of adults.

The trouble with adult consumers is they think they walk down there and say “I don’t think I really need
that” “I think I’ll put off that shoe purchase till next week” that’s the last thing that those who sell to
consumers want that kind of reflective.

The last 30 years of selling been about getting us to give in to this instant gratification , and the greatest
enabler of this credit . the costumer merchandisers came up with a magic bullet- the credit card.

Cards boomed following the deregulation of credit in the 1980’s they transformed our attitude to
spending by infantilisting us, we could now buy whatever we want without saving . the credit card
becomes the facilitator of impetuous , narcisstic buy now consumerism , because you don’t have to wait
a second. You’ve always got that credit card you can always make your purchase like that.
Evidence of this was provided by Drazen Prelec, he and fellow academic Duncan semester carried out an
experiment they set up an auction and student were asked to bid for tickets at a basket ball game.
student who were interested in basketball walking through the door, they received a bid sheet. Half of
the student were told that , if their bids won the auction they would have to pay with a credit card. The
other half were told they would pay for their winning bid in cash . the result was extraordinary. The bids
with the credit card condition up to 100, but the credit card bids went to 300 or 400.

Somehow with a credit card , your tendency to purchase is released and you’re more comfortable with
high figures. Tight conection is when you take out your wallet and pay in cash, because there is the
purchase and then there is the cash that you see that you don’t have any more , try to day for
everything in cash for a week and just watch how that feel.

By the late ‘90s, an entire shopping culture had been built around credit and the glamorous life it cold
buy creating a new syndrome.

For severeal years, avis cardella was the real version struggling to bring her own shooping habit
undercontrol. She wrote a book analyzing how credit cards have fed our compulsion to spend. Research
has found that credit cards play to our innate tendency to believe the future will be better so many of
us believe that, by the time the bill arrives we’ll be able pay it and is allowing us to behave like children
the credit card industry has become immensely profitable.

The adult might want a BMW, the child might want a video game but what’s now the same is that both
want it now neither deliberate, neither defer their gratification neither feel they have to earn it. Both
feel they can and should have it now and its that change attitude that I thinks has infantillised adults

The internet brought the shopping mall into our homes allowing use pick and choose whatever we
decire with no opening and closing times to delay our purchasing. Two of the men behind this new
multibillion dollar candy land were max levchin and peter thiel. This silicon valley pioneers recognized
that whoever created and speedy and secure way of transferring money on the internet would reinvent
shopping.

At paypal we securely store your payment opotions all in one place , their solution was paypal. There
would be no need to enter credit card numbers purchasing had become instantaneous. And with two
clicks , paypal had further disconnected the consumers from the cash transaction and pain of payment .

The big thingy about it is you just needed an e-mail address to create a paypal account and the funding
source behind it . everyone is marching in the same direction –quicker , simpler. Bussines trying to look
at it from their perspective of “how do I sell you more?” . we’re looking at it from a shopping
experience- “ how do we make it better?” and payment happens to be one of the parts of the equation.

The lure ofone click shopping is irresistible to Britons –the biggest onine shoopers in the world , our
annual spending soon likely to hit £100 billion. It’s a constant battle and constant war to tryn make
purchase as easy possible technology is moving on at a time that enables us to get more things more
quickly so that process is speeding up all the time. It’s the last attempt to perfect the machine that is
consumerism . as we’ve seen in this series , it began when industry developed the idea of planned
obsolescence deliberately designing items to break.
Well , planned obsolescence is an open secret. When I’m talking to professional management people
they all say “well , we all know this”

It’s an idea which has evolved into the world of almost instantaneous obsolescence we inhabit today
pushing us on to keep spending . the often irresistible urge to buy is further drive by fear. It’s hard wired
into us by training that begins almost from birth.

The British were once disparagingly described as a nation of shoppkepers, bjt now we’re nation of
shoppers and its though spending that we are able to express who we are and who we want to be.

But this entire world of consumerism was actually the result of cleverly – crafted strategies by the men
who made us spend. But what’s cleverest of all is that the desires they created can never be satisfied ,
whatever we own , there’ll always be something more, something better, and that’s what keeps us
spending.

What secret methods do shops use to make you buy? Take a ride on the university shopping carousel
and find out what influences you while you’re shopping.