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Effects of advertising on consumer behaviour
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The Exploitation Of Children In Television Advertisements
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.
Though advertisers in America's free enterprise system are regulated because of societal
pressures, they also are protected in their rights under freedom of expression to unfairly target America's youth in order to sell to their parents, regardless of the very young's inability to recognize the art of persuasion.
In the free enterprise system, the advertiser's role is to persuade consumers to buy
their products/services. They are given a product/service and are required to use their best creative effort to make this product desirable to the intended audience (Krugman 37).
Because of this calculated and what many deem as manipulative way of enticing the target
audience, the advertising industry is charged with several ethical breeches, which focus on a lack of societal responsibility (Treise 59). Child Advocacy groups and concerned parents, among others, question the ethicality of advertising claims and appeals that are directed towards vulnerable groups in particular, children (Bush 31).
The fundamental criticism is that children are an unfair market. The Federal ...
... middle of paper ...
...ng?
80% answered Yes
10% answered No
10% had no opinion
Works Cited
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(1994)31-41.
Carlson-Paige, Nancy and Diane E. Lerin. "Saturday Morning Pushers." Utne Reader
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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.
In the article, Every Nook and Cranny: The Dangerous Spread of Commercialized Culture by Gary Ruskin and Juliet Schor (Ackley 361). Since the early 90s is when Commercialism has bombarded the society. Ruskin and Schor provide examples why advertising has an effect on people’s health. Marketing related diseases afflicting people in the United States, and especially children, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and smoking-related illnesses. “Each day, about 2,000 U.S. children begin to smoke, and about one-third of them will die from tobacco-related illnesses” (Ackley 366). Children are inundated with advertising for high calorie junk food and fast food, and, predictably, 15 percent of U.S. children aged 6 to 19 are now overweight (Ackley 366). Commercialism promotes future negative effects and consumers don’t realize it.
Michael R. Hyman; Richard Tansey; James W. Clark (1994). Research on Advertising Ethics: Past, Present, and Future: Journal of Advertising, Vol. 23, No. 3, Ethics in Advertising pp. 5-15.: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
“Consuming Kids” is a documentary produced by Media Education Foundation in 2008, on how corporations are taking over our childhood. Kids are becoming targets to the marketplace. Major advertisement corporations are using their marketing on children in a harmful way. Some of these harmful ways include medical issues, the influence on body image, and lack of desire to play outside. This matters, because of our future youth. Advertisements are a domino effect on society.
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.
“Few public opinion polls exist concerning the burgeoning youth marketing industry. We therefore conducted an online survey of 978 U.S. residents in the Spring of 2004. Results suggest that a large majority of respondents believe: a) that the youth marketing industry is harmful to children and has questionable ethical practices: b) that the industry contributes to a variety of problems common in youth: c) that most of the marketing which takes place in schools is unacceptable: and d) that marketing directed at children under 8 years of age should be prohibited”, (Kasser and Linn).
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.
Consumerism is the idea that influences people to purchase items in great amounts. Consumerism makes trying to live the life of a “perfect American” rather difficult. It interferes with society by replacing the normal necessities for life with the desire for things with not much concern for the true value of the desired object. Children are always easily influenced by what they watch on television. Swimme suggests in his work “How Do Kids Get So Caught Up in Consumerism” that although an advertiser’s objective is to make money, the younger generation is being manipulated when seeing these advertisements. Before getting a good understanding of a religion, a child will have seen and absorbed at least 30,000 advertisements. The amount of time teenagers spend in high school is lesser than the amount of advertisement that they have seen (155). The huge amount of advertisements exposed to the younger generation is becomi...
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.
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 ...
Protect Children from Targeted Advertising stated one good postive fact about ads that I feel esstential for our economy to continue to grow and suceed. In paragragh one Protect Children from Targeted Adversting states the follwoing; "American businesses are vital to a successful economy. So, they are allowed to advertise to the young as well as the old. In fact, businesses spend around twelve billion dollars each year on ads directed at children." This statement shows the without ads we wouldn 't have a succesful economy. Ads help persuade many indivuals to not only buy their products and help our economy grow fincially but also can persuade many chidren to do greats things. Protect Children from Targeted Advertising also states in paragraph two; "Advertisers make big impressions on little minds. The Amerian Psychological Association (APA) reports that children younger than eight years do not understand that ads are designed to persuade. But kids remember the ads extremly well, and they see thousands each year. Making them easy prey. Children being easy prey
Introduction In order to generate sales, marketers often promote aggressively and uniquely, unfortunately, not all marketing advertisements are done ethically. Companies around the globe spend billions of dollars to promote new products and services and advertising is one of the key tools to communicate with consumers. Conversely, some methods that marketers use to produce advertisements and to generate sales is deceptive and unethical. Ethical issues concern in marketing has always been noted in marketing practice.
Advertisements are found everywhere in today’s world. They have a big impact on what the consumer buys. Commercials are often aimed towards children and teens because they will ask their parents to buy the product. Another reason teens are targeted by advertisers is because they have money to spend and are willing to buy unnecessary products, especially if it is the latest and greatest. Teens feel that they need the newest electronics, clothing, and other luxury items.
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.
Advertising is the paid, impersonal, one-way marketing of persuasive information from an identified sponsor circulated through channels of mass communication to promote the adoption of goods, services or ideas. (“What is Advertising?”) Chuck Blore, a partner in the advertising firm Chuck Blore & Don Ruchman, Inc. once said that “advertising is the art of arresting the human intelligence just long enough to get money from it.” (Shah, Anup.). Children are targeted and manipulated everyday by corporations like McDonalds, Burger King, and General Mills and don’t even know it. Child Psychologist Allen Kanner reported in 2000 that three-year-old American children typically recognize one hundred company logos. ("Advertising.")