The Importance Of Advertising On Children

Advertising is a means of mass communication methods that provides information about a specific product or service to convince a targeted audience. Advertisements are persuasion techniques that help in introducing new launched products in order to increase its consumption. Also, commercials do help over educating people around a particular service or product, which widens their knowledge and helps them embrace new life habits. Advertisements are crucial for both merchants and buyers, but they are more important for sellers than buyers, since sellers need to push up their product consumption, which is quite achievable by item promotion. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the father of modern advertising, Albert Lasker described advertisements

With the presence of digital media, advertisers can substantially reach out to various segments of society such as children. Consequently, advertisers would mainly target young children and concerns have been raised about it. Children are not fully mature and they have the desire to try new products; thus, they are easily influenced by commercials. On the other hand, producers took advantage of children’s immaturity and pursue them. The increase in product persuasion through advertisement targeting children is a major concern to parents, policymakers, and the general public. According to the Advertising Educational Foundation (n.d.), children’s share in today’s market speaks to $500 billion, where $200 billion are primarily for food and entertainment. Therefore, the children’s market for food products is huge and advertisers are using it negatively to harm children. Advertisers use advertisements as a gate to hoodwink children into harmful behaviors such as, unhealthy eating, consumerism, and bad

Some organizations such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported that in 2005, children viewed less advertisements than they did three decades ago, while the number of overweight children has increased more than double since then (Jolly, 2011). This shows that various factors have an effect on the child’s health. Also, the American Advertising Federation (AAF) in 2005 claimed that the lack of exercise plays a major role in child obesity besides food related advertisements (Mayer, 2005). It is likely that the FTC and AAF might have correct conclusions regarding child obesity factors as not only calorie dense food advertisements can harmfully influence children. However, the government through establishing strict policies and controls regarding advertisements in television, radio, and social media platforms that children are intact with would, can prevent this type of commercials. According to Story and French (2004), “Sweden has the strictest controls in Europe and in 1991 instituted a ban on television and radio advertising targeted at children under the age of 12” (p. 13). Others also argue that the family’s environment play a role in children’s health in terms of heritability. In other words, how children’s genetics can sometimes negatively affect their own health. As an illustration, Boutin et al. (as cited in Walley, Blakemore, &