Will someone please think of the children!

I realised I was unfairly harsh on Shell the other day when I said they spend “billions on advertising each year”.

That should have been millions, with an m. Only 6 zeros. Officially, they spent “under $100 million” in the past year (so probably 7 zeroes).

It turns out one of the big strategies they spend their millions on is marketing to kids, like through a festival called Generation Discover in the Netherlands.

Through it, they do fun stuff like demo solar powered gizmos, sell and give away Shell-co-branded toys and merch, and sponsor school prizes. It’s one of the strategies they’ve employed for several decades to build early loyalty – the CEO has said as much in interviews.

There was a similar scenario painted by author Scott Pape in his book The Barefoot Investor, where he called out Commonwealth Bank for their underhanded strategy to target kids through schools with Dollarmite accounts, so they could then offer them credit cards on their 18th birthday.

These would be great things if Shell and Commbank actually had the kids’ futures and best interests at heart, but it’s clearly about money.

I’m not sure how to tune your radar to things like this unless someone points them out.

You could take the cynical approach, question every philanthropic thing a company does and ask “what’s in it for them?” – that’s heavy handed even for a cynic like me.

Or you could roll with the festivals and the bank accounts, explain to your kids what’s going on, and let them make their own choices.

I honestly don’t know ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

What I do know is these are not companies I choose to mix with – as a customer or a service provider… And that’s one way to clean up a supply chain. Mine has been filtered of at least those two for the reasons listed above, as well as many others.