Our culture is plagued by rampant consumerism. Today’s view of the ultimate reason for human existence is the purchasing and owning of stuff. The idea is that whoever has the most stuff is the best, and from that we form our base of what it means to be an American. As corporations are placing greater emphasis on brands and icons, children and teens are the easiest prey to target. The average American child spends more than five hours in a single day sitting in front of either the computer or television screen while being constantly bombarded with advertising. Promotional campaigns and commercial messages permeate most waking hours of a child’s or teenager’s life. The overwhelming underlying message that advertising sends to children and teens is that material things make a person, and it is not about whom you are but what you own. This is the message that children are being sent almost every second of everyday in America. This message will be the message that they will believe in when they reach adulthood and the affect of this will be grave. Kids are bombarded with advertisements from every possible source: billboards, posters, TV commercials, websites, movies, radio, and more. Today children are able to distinguish brands as young as preschool age. Studies have shown that six-month old babies can visualize corporate logos and mascots while the average three year old can recognize over one hundred different brand logos (Underhill 158). Toys have even begun to carry product placements; for example, Barbie dolls carrying Coca Cola sodas or Lay’s Chips in their hands. Marketers spend at least fifteen billion dollars a year targeting children alone (Underhill 157). Although children have no income they play a vital role in the marke... ... middle of paper ... ...he advertising world I will have to stoop rather low. Soon enough I will be using the above strategies to target young consumers. The only difference is that I will find other options to target them that will not have the same negative effects that today’s advertising strategies do. Even though I will be surrounded by corrupt advertising strategies I will refuse to be corrupted. Works Cited Ives, Nat. "Text Messaging Makes Magazine Ads Interactive." Advertising Age 79.23 (09 June 2008): 10-10. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. 28 Sep. 2009. Ozmete, Emine. "PARENT AND ADOLESCENT INTERACTION IN TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENTS AS CONSUMER SOCIALIZATION AGENTS." Education 129.3 (Spring2009 2009): 372-381. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. 29 Sep. 2009. Underhill, Paco. "Kids." Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1999. 151-64. Print.
Swimme, Brian. “How Do Our Kids Get So Caught Up in Consumerism”. The Human Experience: Who Am I?. 8th ed. Winthrop University: Rock Hill SC, 2012. 155-157. Print.
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.
“Formats include viral marketing- spreading brand-sponsored films and games by email; brand pusher – children hired by companies to recommend products to their friends; celebrity or character endorsement; product placement in films, TV shows, games and social networking sites; sponsored ‘advergames’ on children’s websites; movie tie-ins and brand mentions in pop songs” (as cited in Nairn & Fine, 2008, p.453) Advertising firms are pioneering the ways they entice children to continue to spend money. An “advergame” is simply when a child is on a website or game that includes an advertisement like a brand snack food, soft drink or toy. Advertising companies have included credit card ads into games and toys to include Barbie. Children see these and want to be “just like mommy and daddy.” Therefore, they need that credit
This helps widen the idea of just how many ways children and teens can be affected by advertisements not just by making them more accessible but making them a part of what this society is. By making their products a part of the child’s life they are allowing the product to become a norm in the life of a child.
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 ...
It is evident that today’s advertisements for teen clothing are neither healthy, nor ethical, to use as a way to attract teen consumers; however, companies are getting away with this behavior, because their effective and inappropriate advertisements are merely innuendos. The modern label placed on teens is said to be the primary contender for the cause of eating disorders, suicide, bullying, and depression. Fortunately, groups of teens are getting together to put an end to these unethical advertisements and the messages the ads give off to teens; because of their efforts, the amount of effect that advertisements have on teens now, may dramatically plummet sometime in the near future. In my opinion, it is crucial that us teens make a profound alteration to the way teen merchandise is advertised, which in turn will end the knavish behavior of ...
People may not agree on whether advertising has a negative or positive effect on teens, but they do agree that teens are targeted in the advertisement world. Teens see so much advertising that some do not even notice it because there is so much of it. Because of how easy it is to reach teens and the amount of money in the teen marketplace, advertisers will continue to focus on them. Advertisers try to discover early on teen’s likes and wants. They hope to influence the teens while the teens feel that they influence the marketplace and ultimately have the freedom of choice and buying power.
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.
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
Tellis, Gerard J., and Tim Ambler. The Sage Handbook of Advertising. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2007. Print.
“There are twelve billion dollars spent annually on ads directed at children” (Dittmann, 2004). These advertisements target young, impressionable minds, capture the attention of the child and imprint an ideal or message. While watching advertisements, a child develops a like or dislike for an activity or product. The strength of the desire is proportional to exposure. Desire creates action and action creates sales. I observed this principle with a sibling, my younger brother Eron. When a General Electric commercial came on television he, would turn and be mystified by the music and dancing of the actors. Around the age of eight, he expressed a very strong opinion that General Electric products are superior to other products. At this stage in his development, he did not have the cognitive ability to think abstractly to weigh all of the aspects associated with what makes a product of quality.
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.
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...
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. For instance, the method of using product placement and celebrity endorsement is common, and in spite of this, advertisements tend to be more memorable namely due to popularity. According to the traditional hierarchy-of-effects models of advertising state that advertising exposure leads to cognitions, such as memory about the advertisement, the brand; which in turn leads to attitudes, i.e. Product liking and attitude toward purchase; which in the end leads to behaviors, like buying the advertised product
Advertising plays a fundamental role in the development of a society. Over the years, advertising has evolved in different forms and types—from print to the Internet and the social media; yet it remained an important form of communication between someone who has something to sell and those needing it. However, defining advertising could be tricky with abundant meanings found in literature, although it can be correlated with communication, marketing, public relations and persuasion procedures (Arens, Schaefer, & Weigold, 2009). But advertising remains everywhere, as it can be seen at homes, in television and computer monitors, along the streets and even in the clothes a person wears.