Own This Child Kilbourne Summary

The world has begun to realize advertising to children results in failure, but America falls behind on these trends. According to Kilbourne, author of “Own This Child,” an essay focusing on advertisements targeting children, America stands as one of the last few industrialized nations that continues to legalize advertising to children. He writes about the myriad of attempts by companies to advertise to adolescents. Kilbourne mentions the effort made by big companies to be present in television commercials and even schools, so their products and brand names are wired into the child’s mind from an early age. However, companies are blind to the minimal movement they make in children’s lives. Business men in their fancy suits sitting in big offices

The brightly colored moving images, and the dramatic storylines thrill the young views for hours on end. Companies use these channels as ways to broadcast their products to children. In theory, this causes children to immediately beg for their product and create brand loyalty. Kilbourne states, “Most little children can’t tell the difference between the shows and the commercials.” However, these are false statements. Children are not completely mindless. They can clearly acknowledge when their favorite television show disappears from the screen and an unfamiliar woman comes on the screen with a bottle of shampoo in her hand. Children lose interest fast. Therefore, when their show leaves the screen, the child leaves the television. Their attention fails to be on whatever commercial appears next, but rather focus on how many advertisements are left, finding another channel with an interesting show, or finding a toy in the room to entertain them until their favorite part of television returns. I dreaded commercials. The commercials are by far the worst part of any channel. As a child, my solution worked out to be changing the channel. On days in which I failed to find any channel on the show and not commercials, I would go to Boomerang, a channel with little to no commercials dedicate to classic cartoons such as Loony Toons, or the Flintstones. Regardless if I

Kilbourne writes about the favored source by most advertisers, known as Channel One News. This new channel presents itself as a friendly resource for teachers to expose their students to current events and gives the instructors a short break in the back of the class before the torment of wild children begins once more. Kilbourne writes, “many children are a captive audience for the commercials on Channel One, a marketing program that gives video equipment to desperate schools in exchange for the right to broadcast a “news” program studded with commercials.” In middle school, I had a teacher that played this news source to the class every day. Occasionally, my class would watch this program, and the advertisements, twice due to multiple teachers using the resource. Kilbourne fails to mention a minor detail about these advertisements that changes the entire fact. All of these advertisements are the exact same. Every day, without fail, the same U.S. Navy advertisement would come on during the commercial breaks. Tangible products were never shown. Cruises, or vacation destinations were never advertised. Only the awareness commercial about the U.S. Navy appeared on the screen during eighth grade social studies. This advertisement became so repeated, the class began to recite the commercial as the battleships went across the screen. Did we gain