With the growing prevalence of marketing directed towards kids through technology, Sideways Marketing wanted to see how susceptible young kids are. Sideways Marketing sent their man on the street, Riddles, to a local kindergarten to see if the effects are infecting six-year-olds.
Riddles was immediately assigned to recess duty. He had to make sure that kids were following the rules: no smart watches, no tackle football, no hitting, and no throwing sand. It turned out Riddles spent a lot of time keeping kids from throwing sand.
Riddles also tried to convince a couple of the kids to buy into a timeshare. The kids could own the slide for a week a year if they were willing to give up their juice boxes for the rest of their lives. None of the kids decided to bite on that one.
Then Riddles observed the following interaction.
A cool kid named Theo went up to a less cool kid named Timmy (Riddle’s words, not mine).
“Hey, you want to be my friend?” Theo said to Timmy.
“Sure,” Timmy said.
“Great!” Theo said. “Everyone who is my friend needs to commit $100 to my brand, Theo’s Threads. Can you go get your Apple Watch so you can Apple Pay me?”
Riddles observed as Timmy ran to get his Apple Watch from his backpack and walked back over.
“What kind of apparel do you sell?” Timmy asked.
“T-Shirts,” Theo said, holding up his own Apple Watch.
“I don’t want a T-shirt. I thought this might be a meme coin or something,” Timmy said. He pulled his Apple Watch back.
“You want to be friends or not?”
“What kind of friend is selling me T-shirts?” Timmy shot back.
At this point, the observation was rudely interrupted by the principal because Riddles did not enforce one of the rules of the playground—No Apple Watches.