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The impact of advertising towards children
Advertising aimed at children
The impact of advertising towards children
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At an extremely young age many children become the target customers for today’s leading corporations. We live in a society that is flooded with advertisements for all different variations of services and products. When the main point of these ads is to attract children it brings upon the issue of exactly what is being advertised to these children. Although some companies believe that by advertising to children they will secure their brands futures, advertising to children needs to be regulated because children do not understand how to judge if a product is safe or harmful.
Advertising unhealthy food to children is causing a rise in childhood obesity. Children are exposed to over thirty thousand TV commercials in a year. Meredith Melnick announces that a study conducted by public health researchers from Yale University found that, “a whopping 40% of parents reported that their child asked to go to McDonald's at least once a week, and 15% of preschoolers' parents said they fielded such a request every day”. With constant requests for fast food parents eventually grow tired of feuding with their children and give in. Regulations need to be put in place to ensure that fast-food ads are not promoting unhealthy food to children. Not only do these advertisements urge children to visit their restaurants, but they encourage unhealthy eating habits at home. These findings have important implications for the broader domain of childhood obesity.
The time children are spending in front of the television is highly influential when they begin to form their own opinions. When children see the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street eating cookies at the age of two, it automatically gives them the idea that cookies are good. The Cookie Monster is ...
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... and ways these corporations are advertising needs to be strictly regulated. Corporations need to shift their focus to improve their products so that customers will want to establish a relationship with them, at an age where they can fairly judge the product. The corporations that are advertising to children need to revise the message they are relaying and transform their products in to something that is safe and not psychologically harmful.
Works Cited
Levin, Diane. "Advertising Is Harmful to Children". Ed. Opposing Viewpoints® Series. Greenhaven Press, 2010 Diane E. Levin. Web. 12 Oct. 2011.
Melinick, Meredith. “Study: Fast-Food Ads Target Kids with Unhealthy Food, and It Works.” Time Healthland. 8 Nov. 2010. Time Healthland. Web. Oct. 17 2011.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Print.
George Parker once said, “The only people who care about advertising are the people who work in advertising." Advertisers use many different techniques that target children and teens. Many people do not realize how harmful this can turn out to be. Advertising plays a harmful role in the lives of youth because it poses health risks, prevents children and teens from saving money, and exposes them to way too many ads.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.
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.
Almost everyone has eaten fast food at some point in their lives, but not everyone realizes the negative effects some fast food can have on our nutrition. My family especially is guilty of eating unhealthy fast food meals at least once a week because of our budget and very busy schedules. In Andrea Freeman’s article entitled, “Fast Food: Oppression through Poor Nutrition,” She argues that fast food has established itself as a main source of nutrition for families that live in average neighborhoods and have low-incomes. Freeman begins the article by explaining how the number of fast food outlets is beginning to grow in poor communities because of the cheap prices and quick service these restaurants are famous for. The overabundance of fast
Youth obesity is an escalating problem which causes harmful, unfavourable effects and can intensify and become fatal when it is carried on into adulthood (Chou, Rashad & Grossman, 2005). Such harmful effects of obesity include various cancers, cardiovascular, orthopaedic and metabolic diseases and several other disorders such as psychiatric complications (Lobstein and Dibb, 2005). From this, it is undeniable that identifying the relationship between the advertising of junk food and the increased rate in youth obesity is essential in order to generate suggestions or methods in which this may be prevented or reduced significantly. Advocates of health have been attentive towards the obesity epidemic and have been meticulously focusing on advertising as a causative factor as advertisements are consistently promoting junk food on television (Harris, Bargh and Bronwell, 2009). Suc...
Any agency that uses children for marketing schemes spend hundreds of billions dollars each year world wide 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 such 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. It contains dissatisfaction that leads to over consumption. Children are particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation, American Psychological Association article, “Youth Oriented Advertising” reveals the facts upon the statics on consumers in the food industries. The relationship that encourages young children to adapt towards food marketing schemes, make them more vulnerable to other schemes, such as, advertising towards clothing, toys and cars. Article writer of “The relationship between cartoon trade character recognition and attitude toward product category in young children”, Richard Mizerski, discusses a sample that was given to children ages three to six years old, about how advertising incurs young children that are attracted too certain objects or products on the market.
According to Mark Dolliver, “foods account for 39 percent of TV advertising seen by 2-7 year olds, 95 percent of that seen by 8-19s and 92 percent of that seen by 13-17s.On a typical day, the 2-7 year olds are exposed to 4:51 minutes of food commercials.” (Dolliver, 2007. p.1) Dolliver used statistics to show much how children are seeing these commercials. Throughout the rest of the article he talks about the increasing amounts of time that children spend watching television and the types of foods that are being advertised. Depending on the family dynamic in the household, children could be watching more television than the statistics that Dolliver presents in his study. This is what would be characterized as the advertisement of obesity in todays society. Before televisions were made, there were print advertisements that contributed to the purchasing of junk or fast foods like the 1956 Canada Dry Ginger Ale Print Ad. Although for 1956, there is not a lot of information about the obesity epidemic, it contributes to how powerful advertisements can be. These advertisements whether it is from the 1950s or if it is from today, largely influence the food quality that children are wanting or expecting. When children are exposed to television advertisements about unhealthy products in large quantities, they are more susceptible to the risk of obesity. Television
...f television advertisements for junk food versus nutritious food on children's food attitudes and preferences. Social science & medicine, 65, (7), pp. 1311-1323.
Fast food restaurants such as Burger King and McDonald’s, create advertisements where it urges people to consume their product. For example Mcdonald’s created a product where you can get two items such as a mcdouble and a medium fries for three dollars. According to “The battle against fast food begins at home”, by Daniel Weintraub, it shows how companies are intriguing their customers. “ The center blames the problem on the increasing consumption of fast food and soft drinks, larger portion sizes in restaurants and the amount of available on school campuses”(1).For the most part, the Center for Public Health believes that fast food companies are the problem for health
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.
Corporations only survive through profits. Therefore, they tend to market foods to an impressionable audience; children. By adulthood most people are set in their ways, they have decided what types of food they enjoy and typically stay within the realm. However, at young age children can suggest to parents what snacks they want, in an effort to make their children happy most parents purchase the items. While corporations are preying on our children overall it is the parents that are allowing children to eat the food.
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 ...
The findings in Dittman’s article fully support my findings as well as my own personal. beliefs that advertising to children is unethical because a lot of the children watching the TV are doing so without adult supervision. A lot of children watching TV are 8 or younger and they do not fully comprehend the importance of the subliminal messages that the companies are sending. out by using their cartoons and catchy songs to hook the child into buying their products. I believe that advertising is a modern example of brainwashing and that with no parental supervision or no parental limits, our nation’s youth will be so caught up in the power of advertising, that their youth and innocence will end much faster than the generation before.
Kravis, Anders. “Stop Advertising to Children.” Online video. Youtube. Youtube, 5 Mar. 2013. Web. 15 Jan. 2014.
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.