Pearson Education, the educational publishing brand, is under fire following a botched series of standardized exam questions now roiling public schools across New York State — and it's only year one of a five-year, $32 million contract between the publisher and the state.

As Gail Collins opined in Sunday's New York Times, it wasn't just the weirdness of the questions — more on that in a moment — but the debate over the commercialization of education and the control of a single brand, in this case Pearson, over kids' futures. Collins wrote, "We have turned school testing into a huge corporate profit center, led by Pearson, for whom $32 million is actually pretty small potatoes. Pearson has a five-year testing contract with Texas that’s costing the state taxpayers nearly half-a-billion dollars."Continue reading...

The American Beverage Association is keeping busy these days as cities and states threaten to put extra taxes on sugary drinks and other entities try to reduce consumption of the organization members’ products.

The latest battle for ABA is to dispute a study that was released Monday by Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity that shows that “U.S. children and teenagers are seeing far more soda advertising than before, with blacks and Hispanics the major targets, as marketers have expanded online,” according to Reuters.

"This report is another attack by known critics in an ongoing attempt to single out one product as the cause of obesity when both common sense and widely accepted science have shown that the reality is far more complicated," said ABA CEO Susan Neely in a statement.

Neely’s main weapon in response to the Yale Rudd Center's Sugary Drink F.A.C.T.S. (short for Food Advertising to Children and Teens Score) report is opposing research by Georgetown Economic Services for the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Association of National Advertisers that “showed that between 2004 and 2010, advertisements for soft drinks decreased by 96 percent, while those for fruit and vegetable juices increased by 199 percent,” Reuters reports.Continue reading...

If you’ve got luggage that is extra heavy, you’ve got to pay extra bucks, right? Starting in March of next year, if you’ve got extra weight on your body, you’ll need to pay out some extra bucks, too.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that AirTran will ask “customers of size” to buy a second seat starting in March. AirTran — whose slogan ("Go. There's Nothing Stopping You") might need updating — was purchased earlier this year by Southwest Airlines, which has such a policy in place.

Who is too big for just one seat? That distinction will be at "the carrier's sole discretion," AJC reports, so be sure to wear something that makes you look slim when you get to the airport.

AirTran parent Southwest defines customers that need more than one seat as “those who encroach upon any part of the neighboring seat[s],” the Journal-Constitution reports. (Have they flown economy lately?)

For those who have been affected by the rule on Southwest – fewer than one half of 1 percent of the airline’s customers – they are given the option of a refund on the second ticket if the flight isn’t full.

Southwest, of course, is famous for hassling the likes of director Kevin Smith about his size, a PR black eye that doesn't seem to have deterred them from eyeing passengers' girth. At least they're no longer threatening to eject customers from "too narrow" seats — just make them pay for another.Continue reading...

This week we learned that Brits have a soft spot for Scooby Doo, naming the voracious mutt the healthiest cartoon for kids because he's always on the run (from ghosts and to hamburgers, but still...)

Now it's SpongeBob SquarePants' turn in the docket. The Nickelodeon staple has stuck around for a lot longer than most cartoons ever do. Its pilot episode hit television screens in May of 1999 and the franchise is stronger than ever. But even though it’s been around for (seemingly) forever, it’s now being accused of shortening the attention spans of the kids that are watching it.

Now, a University of Virginia study “claims to have found evidence that the TV show moves too fast for little kids, and thus erodes their ability to pay attention,” Bloomberg reports. This complaint, by, has been floating around about children’s television since at least the late ‘70s.Continue reading...

Proving, once again, they've got a sense of humor, the marketing wags at Ben & Jerry's are rolling out a limited edition ice-cream flavor in the US: Schweddy Balls, named for a punning 2007 Saturday Night Live skit featuring Alec Baldwin as Pete Schweddy, a guest on a fictitious NPR radio show called "Delicious Dish."Continue reading...

Chex Quest, from General Mills, was the first video game to ever be included in cereal boxes as a prize back in 1996. Fast forward 15 years to Create a Comic, General Mills' latest digital advergame designed to engage kids with the Honey Nut Cheerios cereal brand. 

In that brief span of 15 years, the playbook on marketing to children has been rewritten by all things digital, and marketers are increasingly using games, quizzes and mobile apps to woo kids into a social web where they essentially act as marketers themselves.Continue reading...

It’s becoming apparent that childhood-obesity watchdogs aren’t going to be happy until Ronald McDonald is in a different set of vertical stripes — more like the black and white ones found on the Hamburglar.

A group of activist physicians (including Patch Adams and Andrew Weil) and health advocates have stepped up a pressure campaign against McDonald's to bench the 43-year-old iconic mascot – and oh yes, by the way, to stop marketing its nutritionally suspect fare to children.

A group calling itself Corporate Accountability International took out full-page advertisements in several major US newspapers today including the text of an open letter to McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner under the headline, “Doctors’ Orders: Stop Marketing Junk Food to Kids."

The group also planned to send representatives to McDonalds’ annual shareholder meeting tomorrow (where a group of Philadelphia nuns will also be lobbying to oust Ronald) to make an in-person plea for his retirement.Continue reading...

The United Way of Greater Milwaukee had a great message – teenage pregnancy is no fairy tale – but a flawed messenger in an edgy bus-shelter advertising campaign that the not-for-profit abandoned this week, after worries about running afoul of one of the most iconic brands in all the land: Disney.

Cartoon princesses were supposed to deliver an incongruous-seeming message that was to serve as a wake-up call to young girls, who more and more frequently are becoming impregnated by older men.

“One day the man of my dreams will sweep me off my feet and rape me,” the ads were to say, with hearts and flowers sprinkled about in a cartoonish backdrop. “An older man who sleeps with an underage girl isn’t a prince,” the ads were to conclude. “He’s a rapist.”

That's right: goodbye, Prince Charming; watch out for Prince Harming.Continue reading...