Children and Advertising
Children are the most susceptible to advertising. They are the most susceptible because their minds are immature and are unable to distinguish good advertising versus bad advertising. For that reason, there are laws and established organizations to protect children from advertising. Commercials, the effects of advertising on children, laws and organizations on television, and laws and organizations on the internet that help protect children are important in understanding how advertising affects children. Television commercials have a huge impact on how it affects children. Commercials are the biggest form of advertisement geared toward children. Children between the ages of two and eleven view well over 20,000 television commercials yearly, and that breaks down to 150 to 200 hours (National Institute on Media and the Family, 1998). Television advertisements geared towards children have the biggest market by far. The advertising market in 1997 showed that children under twelve years of age spent well over twenty-four millions dollars of their own money on products they saw on television. Advertising also influenced the spending of over one hundred and eighty-eight billion dollars more (Kanner &
In the last fifteen years or so, there have been a few laws passed about advertising to children on television. Advertisers should be careful not to exploit children's imagination to create unrealistic expectations for a product. The Center for Media Education (CME) is an organization that is dedicated to protecting children online by visiting websites to make sure that the COPPA rules are being enforced. In addition, advertisers have become sneaky about the way they convey their product (Shelov, S. Some child advertisers boldly admit that the commercials they use exploit children and create conflicts within the family (Kanner & Kasser, 1998). Commercials that had boys often showed them in a non-home setting, showed them engaging in anti-social behavior, and showed them using more products in different activities than girls. Over the years, CME has been the leading force in expanding both children's educational television programming and fostering television and Internet safeguard for children and teens (Center for Media Education, 2001). These studied revealed that nearly one third of three-year-old children, and almost all of the children over the age of six could identify the Joe Camel logo. They work closely with advertisers to promote educational messages to children that are consistent with the Children's Television Act of 1990. The American Academy of Pediatrics continues to say that children under the age of eight cannot distinguish commercial advertisements from regular television programming. There is no end is sight for the finely tuned advertising child market. In addition, advertisers favor using boys in their commercials, even when the commercial is showing a gender-neutral product (1998). Gender role stereotyping in commercials often times influence children in a negative way.
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