The Corporation and No Logo Response

Advertisers and marketers today are not just targeting consumers, but the consumers children. As discussed in the film "The Corporation", toy ads are made to sell toys directly to the child. They make the child believe they need the toy because "all the cool kids have one", so that the child will nag their parents until they buy them the toy. But what these children, and even some of their parents, don't realize is that there are children their own age half way across the world in Third World countries making the toy, for two or three cents an hour, under horrible working conditions. This point is also pointed out by Klein in her book "No Logo". Klein talks about the billboards that are placed in poor neighborhoods that give children of the ghetto the idea that if they buy their product they will be buying an escape from there lives. So even before a child can do simple math problems, they are being brainwashed by the adverting industry into thinking they need their product to be happy.

Another idea discussed both in the movie and the book is that advertisements are everywhere. As stated in the movie, it is a fact that every person sees eight to nine undercover advertisements a day. This could include people just walking down the street talking loudly about a certain product. As a passerby, you don't know they are being paid to do this. Klein points out that in the late nineties, advertisements were even added into one of our most private places, the bathroom. So no matter where you go, corporations are always one step ahead of you, trying to sell you there product, and sometimes you may not even realize it.

Both "No Logo" and "The Corporation" also show how far corporations like IBM will go to make a profit. Klein talks about a seventeen-year-old girl she met in Manila who assembles CD-ROM drives for IBM, who is probably only paid a few cents an hour. IBM also made the machines that kept track of concentration camp prisoners, as shown in the movie. And instead of IBM standing up for the young children workers or the concentration camp prisoners, they just collect their profits and keep their mouths shut. It is like the movie points out: a corporation can be given the rights of a moral person, but they have no conscience, no soul to save and no body to incinerate.