Throughout my media career, I have observed many industries where responsible marketers practice self-regulation or strictly adhere to government regulations. For what? Because marketers and the media understand that, for better or worse, what they do powerfully influences consumer behavior. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Walt Hickey wrote a book last year with a title that sums it up well: You Are What You Watch.
Smart marketers realize they must self-regulate, lest public fury or a government order put them out of business. For example, feeling the hot breath of the federal government on their necks, tobacco companies and broadcasters voluntarily removed cigarette advertisements from television in the 1970s. But in 1988, the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company introduced the mascot Joe Camel in the American market. Inspired by Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper, Joe aimed to capture the Americans. masculinity in a cartoon and regain the market share lost to Philip Morris’ Marlboro Man.
But that was not the effect: A 1991 study found that Joe was more recognizable to children than adults, and more closely associated with cigarettes than the Disney logo was with Mickey Mouse. Six years later, the percentage of children illegally smoking Camel cigarettes was higher than the percentage of adults legally purchasing the product.
Unfortunately, for every smart, savvy industry, there remain outliers. Think guns and social media. Where cartoon mascots fell out of favor, social media influencers took their place and the gun industry was quick to profit.
According to the UnTargeting Kids Report by Sandy Hook Promise, Social Media Has Become a Hotbed for Gun Marketing: Content Creators approve guns without including remuneration information. Instagram pages show underage influencers reviewing and promoting guns and gun accessories. Many manufacturers are building relationships with influencers and “sponsored shooters” to build stronger connections with younger audiences.
Like Big Tobacco, manufacturers use social media to target adolescents with hypermasculine messages, associating their products with sex and power.
If you haven’t seen this type of content, there’s a reason: guns don’t appear on television, streaming services, or in most magazines; these platforms self-regulate. But there’s a surprising gap in gun marketing policies when it comes to social media influencers, and companies are taking advantage of it:
Garrison Everest, an advertising agency specializing in gun marketing, claims in its pitch to influencers that brands will spend $69 billion on influencer marketing by 2029, and that influencer marketing produces “ Unprecedented results: 5x, 10x and 2000x return for a single video. » Leviathan Tribe, a “leading marketing and talent agency in the outdoor and tactical industry” that works primarily with firearms influencers, claims to reach “35 million ocular followers.” [sic] in the firearms, outdoors, gaming, lifestyle, fitness, equipment and apparel industries. Gun Owners of America sponsored the Gundie Awards (think Webby Awards, but only for gun influencers); vice-president Erich Pratt told USA Today“To say that we cannot promote a constitutional right for minors… is nonsense. » Two children, aged 9 and 11, were nominated for the Most Influential Woman of the Year award.
When tobacco companies reverted to their old ways and persisted in targeting children and teens with a scheme like Joe Camel’s, a furious coalition of attorneys general forced them to cough up $206 billion to compensate their victims. Could gun manufacturers be headed for a similar reckoning? Children are particularly sensitive to the marketing they encounter online: adolescents spend on average 3.5 hours per day on social networks, and 80% of them are lie about their age to create a profile that can display the content they want to see.
In the meantime, school shootings have increased from 20 incidents in 1970 to 251 in 2021, and two-thirds of mass shooters are under 17 years old. Ryan Busse, a former executive at the Kimber firearms company, writing in detail about how gun marketing plays on fears resulting from these tragedies and how shooters themselves rely on this marketing for their gun training.
Gun influencer content should be treated in exactly the same way as alcohol and tobacco content: age-based so that it doesn’t reach a market that is too easily influenced and doesn’t can’t even legally purchase the product. Especially today, when guns are the leading cause of death among American children and adolescents, media and marketing professionals have an obligation to adopt improved marketing guidelines that raise the bar for our industry and encourage bad actors to do better. We all spend money advertising with social media companies and have connections there that we can leverage.
And we have muscle memory: There used to be a standard in the firearms industry that content aimed at children had to be focused on safety and instruction. This can be reestablished by inviting gun marketers and influencers into the conversation. Some of the biggest gun influencers are parentsand inviting them to be part of the solution can make all of our children safer.
The very idea of school shootings horrifies me; I’m sure many share this sentiment. Harness the powerful opportunity you have to implement and influence change through responsible marketing. It’s not so much anti-gun sentiment as it is gun responsibility, and simply an age-old marketing principle of being responsible for what you sell and who you sell it to. We can play a vital role in protecting our children from harm.
