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Impact of advertising on children
Advertising aimed at children
Impact of advertising on children
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Recommended: Impact of advertising on children
THE ‘OTHER’ CHILD PREDATORS,
ADVERTISERS WANT YOUR KIDS
“What do you call a consumer who wants to buy everything you have, doesn't care what it costs and is less than five feet tall? A marketer's dream? Nope. You call them kids,” declared a report titled ‘The ABC’s of Advertising to Kids Online’ . Some techniques used by advertisers’ have proven to be harmful to the psychological and physical well-being of the viewer, specifically children. Children under the age of five are most vulnerable because they do not understand the concept of advertising. Adolescents are also vulnerable to these harmful effects because they are often self-conscious and insecure during the transition into adulthood. Advertisers work on a cradle to grave system, influencing children as young as possible. Are your children safe?
Advertisers recognize that consumers are loyal to brands and so, by targeting children, they can have loyal customers for longer. Children under the age of five are an easy target because they are yet to understand the concept of advertising and so watch their TV programmes and advertisements with equal attention unaware that they are being influenced by commercials. In 1991, a study titled ‘Brand Logo Recognition by Children Aged 3 to 6 years: Mickey Mouse and Old Joe the Camel’ was conducted to explore brand recognition in children. This study found that, before they could read, 52% of 3 year-olds and 74% of 4 year-olds were asking after specific brands. Mike Searles, Kids ‘R’ Us president, says, “If you own this child at an early age… you can own this child for years to come.”
The average child will watch 10, 000 advertisements in a single year and 98% of these are for food with a low nutritional value . This influen...
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...www.campaignforrealbeauty.com.au/dove-self-esteem-fund/be-inspired.asp (collected 03/04/2011)
All About Medical Sales, ‘Effective Marketing with Humour’ (2005) http://www.allaboutmedicalsales.com/ontarget/4-8_marketing_with_humour.html (collected 03/05/2011)
You Tube, ‘Pepsi MAX ® - Love Hurts – Crash the Superbowl 2011 Winner’ (2011) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVQrH0aHGAc (collected 12/05/2011)
You Tube ‘No Pun Intended – Doritos Ad’ (2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFSLhBecnNQ (collected 12/05/2011)
Business Knowledge Source, ‘The Importance of Repetition in Advertising’ (2011), http://www.businessknowledgesource.com/marketing/the_importance_of_repetition_in_advertising_021569.html (collected 10/05/2011)
You Tube, ‘Argentinian Coca-Cola Ad – For Everyone Long Version’ (2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMuqw03jjgY (collected 12/05/2011)
This leads to all the issues involving advertising. In an article titled, “Facts About Marketing to Children,” it states, “Advertising directed at children is estimated at over $15 billion annually…” In fact an average youth is exposed to an estimated 5,000 ads annually. This shows that advertisers know that it is easier to convince a child to want their product rather than an adult, and this is why they target children and teens. Also in the article, “$211 Billion and So Much to Buy American Youths, the New Big Spenders,” it talks about how much time youths spend on the internet. 76% of 8-9 year olds spend more than one hour on the internet per day and 91% of 16-17 year olds spend more than one hour on the internet each day. Since the average amount of ads seen per day is 500 ads, in just one hour there are about 20 ads seen by children. This comes down to that the more ads that youths see, the higher the risk of all the problems ads
This survey was born out of concern that there are few statistics on the effects of marketing industry’s impact on our youth. Just as the article on “Consuming Kids” raises awareness about children being lured into believing they can’t live without things and the problems rising out of it. This survey makes us aware of how this market is willing to sacrifice the sanctity of family life by undermining the parents via their television while children watch mega hours of uninterrupted commercials aimed at them. These surveys were compared with a couple of sparsely completed other ones. The respondents felt that problems such as: aggressiveness, materialism, obesity, lack of creativity, overly sexualized behavior and self-esteem, were detrimentally influenced by the youth marketing industry.
advertising is becoming a bigger role in the lives of youth. Since deregulation in 1984, the money advertisers make off of kids has been increasing by millions each year. kids who don't even have the brain function to make a good choice on what they buy are being targeted as young as 5. As young kids become more accustomed to certain products young, they continue buying them over their whole life. This is what advertisers are causing by targeting the youth. Advertisers are finding that marketing to kids makes a lot of money, the youth believe everything they hear, and the advertising techniques they do today are almost sure to work.
Obesity in the United States, which the media has labeled a national crisis, has also been connected to poverty rates. Big fast food industry’s target poor communities, and spend millions of dollars each year to create advertising that appeals to these specific areas. These industry’s also target naïve children when advertising because they know that eating habits developed in childhood are usually carried into adulthood. Children who are exposed to television advertisements for unhealthy food and who are not educated well enough on good nutrition will grow up and feed their families the same unhealthy foods they ate as kids. A big way fast food giants are able to make certain young people have access to unhealthy food is by strategically placing franchises in close proximity to schools. They will often place three times as many outlets within walking distance of schools than in areas where there are no schools nearby. The way fast food advertising is targeted towards children is very alarming considering how important good nutrition is for young people and how a child’s eating habits can affect their growth and
Any agency that uses children for marketing schemes spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year worldwide persuading and manipulating consumer’s lifestyles that lead to overindulgence and squandering. Three articles uncover a social problem that advertising companies need to report about. In his research piece “Kid Kustomers” Eric Schlosser considers the reasons for the number of parents that allow their children to consume harmful foods such as ‘McDonalds’. McDonalds is food that is meant to be fast and not meant to be a regular diet. Advertising exploits children’s needs for the wealth of their enterprise, creating false solutions, covering facts about their food and deceiving children’s insecurities.
The land of the free, brave and consumerism is what the United States has become today. The marketing industry is exploiting children through advertisement, which is ridiculously unfair to children. We are around advertisement and marketing where ever we go; at times, we don't even notice that we are being targeted to spend our money. As a matter of fact, we live to buy; we need and want things constantly, and it will never stop. The film, Consuming Kids , written by Adriana Barbaro and directed by Jeremy Earp, highlights children as this powerful demographic, with billions of dollars in buying power, but the lack of understanding of marketers’ aggressive strategies. Children are easily influenced and taken advantage of, which is why commercialization of children needs to stop. Commercialization to children leads to problems that parents do not even know are happening such as social, future, and rewired childhood problems. Government regulations need to put a stop to corporations that live, breathe and sell the idea of consumerism to children and instead show that genuine relationships and values are what are important.
Commercials make the viewer think about the product being advertised. Because of the amount of television children watch throughout the week, it allows the children to be exposed to the information over and over again. Per year, children are known to view thousands of fast food commercials. On a daily basis, a teen will usually view five advertisements and a child aged six to eleven will see around four advertisements (Burger Battles 4). Businesses use this strategy to “speak directly to children” (Ruskin 3). Although the big businesses in the fast ...
This gives the advertising business money. Parents spend 7,000,000 dollars every years. Kids are what give the advertising business money and most people know about this. When kids watch an ad promoting unhealthy food or any ad kids want it.
Teens are an easy reach for advertisers. “Teens are jaded, bombarded by tons of advertising messages”(Winsor 1). There are advertisements at movie theaters, on television, and in teen magazines. Advertisers also reach teens through social media such as the internet and websites. Teens are constantly on Facebook and YouTube, whi...
Across America in homes, schools, and businesses, sits advertisers' mass marketing tool, the television, usurping freedoms from children and their parents and changing American culture. Virtually an entire nation has surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for selling. Advertisers, within the constraints of the law, use their thirty-second commercials to target America's youth to be the decision-makers, convincing their parents to buy the advertised toys, foods, drinks, clothes, and other products. Inherent in this targeting, especially of the very young, are the advertisers; fostering the youth's loyalty to brands, creating among the children a loss of individuality and self-sufficiency, denying them the ability to explore and create but instead often encouraging poor health habits. The children demanding advertiser's products are influencing economic hardships in many families today. These children, targeted by advertisers, are so vulnerable to trickery, are so mentally and emotionally unable to understand reality because they lack the cognitive reasoning skills needed to be skeptical of advertisements. Children spend thousands of hours captivated by various advertising tactics and do not understand their subtleties.
It attracts children as a main target audience using numerous mediums and themes that feature food advertising contents. These mediums include television channels, internet, films, videogames, and supermarket promotions. Currently, advertising through television is the most prominent medium that advertisers use to promote food products to children, because it is the platform that many children spend much of their time on watching their entertaining channels. While watching the TV, children are exposed to a lot of embedded advertisements that contain animations, pictures, appealing statements, music, colors, cartoon characters, and celebrities. All of these are some themes that advertisers use to grab the attention of children while watching TV. According to Nassar & Zien (2012) who analyzed the effects of TV ads on children in the middle east, “children pay more attention to what they see rather than to what they only hear” (p.268). Hence, fast food advertisers take this opportunity to their advantage by designing advertisements with many visual triggers along with a nice food packaging and a great displaying of the product. A study about the effects of food ads on children and parents found that the majority of children in a sample size of 75 favored to have the unhealthy advertised food item they saw on TV than a healthy
A study was done by NCBI about food advertisements that are targeted at adolescents. In an article by Mary Story and Simone French, it states, “Food is the most frequently advertised product category on US children's television and food ads account for over 50% of all ads targeting children. [...] On average, 11 of 19 commercials per hour were for food. Of these ads, 246 (44%) promoted food from the fats and sweets group, such as candy, soft drinks, chips, cakes, cookies and pastries. Fast-food restaurant advertising was also prevalent, comprising 11% of total food advertisements.
Children between four and eight don’t recognize that ads are paid commercials intended to convince them into buying something. Children see about 6,000 advertis...
Advertising has had a powerful impact on today’s children. From songs, to logos. to characters, advertisers keep in mind their audiences. Competition is the force which causes advertisers to target children. Children are targeted through the catch phrases. animated characters, and toys in these competitive advertisements.
The societal culture of advertising plays a crucial role in the way teenagers interact with one another and how they make decisions. Goodman (1997) asserts the average young person views more than 3000 ads per day on television (TV), on the Internet, on billboards, and in magazines. At this rate, teenagers are exposed to a vast range of advertisements that create awareness and knowledge of products and services in the market. Moreover, the objective of advertisements is to increase sales and grow profits. Though advertisers are not psychologists, they are aware of strategic techniques that will cause teenagers to be convinced to buy their product.