We often believe that childhood is one of the most carefree and innocent times in our lives - a time where social hierarchies and brand names had no significance and value. We thought that kids didn’t have to worry about fitting in or being popular and they could use their imaginations to bring any old object to life. However, this view of childhood is idealistic and improbable. Children are often looked at as subjects who are passive and easily manipulated. However, it is important to recognize children as complex with the capacity to observe and reflect. Since the development of early forms of media, advertising became a popular way to make money and raise brand awareness. Marketers targeted their ads towards seemingly passive social groups like women and children. In the 1980s, the commercialization of youth culture was popularized. In this day and age, even toddlers are asking for name brand toys. Today, the children’s market is the most profitable market of any kind. Young people from this decade been exposed to more advertising than any other generation in history and this has left some ill effects on our youth. This essay will discuss the history of children’s advertising, the reasons behind the success of the kids market, marketing strategies used to attract children, and the effects of the commercialization of youth culture.
The American teen market was founded during the Second World War and the early postwar era (Quart, 2003). Marketers hoped teens would spend money on films, cosmetics and music. Clearly, the phrase “get ‘em while they’re still young” is hugely relevant today. When certain corporations started gearing ads towards children, it was because early understandings of human psychology explained that childr...
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...ds are surrounded by radio, print media, television and Internet every single day, it seems only natural, unfortunately. Technology has become a way of life – it is a part of our daily lives and this doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing. What is important is to understand the effects that technology has on a macro and micro level and to navigate carefully around such powerful forces. Businesses and technology are alike in the sense that they don’t care for individual psychological and emotional well-being. They serve for one purpose and that is to get the message across! It doesn’t matter how that happens, it just needs to be done. It is up to society as a whole to teach our youth that life is about more than fancy clothes and cars because they won’t get that message through the media. We are more than what we own and it’s important that our youth know that.
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.
The media influences so much of our society today. They control the trends in clothing and style, and influence they way we act. The people who they are affecting the most are children. Giroux comments “Children now inhabit a cultural landscape in which they can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market”(Giroux A136). Kids these days think they need to give in to the market to survive. One of the reasons for this mindset is because of the media corporations that are targeting young children. Companies are making strong marketing pushes toward children who are susceptible to persuasion. They are encouraging kids to buy the new IPhone or the new action figure. While it is not just products, children are also being influenced to act a certain way. TV and movie stars are teaching kids how to act based on characters they portray in movies and TV shows, which often times are not the right ways a child should act. Artists and other celebrities strongly affect the trends in clothing and ...
In the nonfiction book, Chew on This, they inform their readers on how advertisers are using familiar television characters to persuade kids to buy their product. My group’s opinion on the “Youngster Business” section of this book, is that this technique, although it is clever, is also scary. It’s surprising marketers and or advertisers have created this way of attracting kids, and can successfully manipulate kids in this way. For example, McDonald’s uses this approach with Ronald McDonald. They get to kids
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 ...
Teenvogue.com is a marketing website that targets adolescence. While looking through this website you will see ads of what the latest celebrities are selling or wearing, facial cleaner ads, along with direct tabs for fashion and beauty. Teen Vogue targets through mainly fashion designs of the latest styles and celebrities, along with the newest makeup and beauty products for adolescence. The website psychological targets teens by using relatable styles, colors, famous youth, and targeting what teens love to buy. Some companies may target age groups by using methods such as running emotional ideas, highlighting their flaws, repositioning their competition, promoting exclusivity, and lastly introducing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. (Cole, 2014)
“What do you call a consumer who wants to buy everything you have, doesn 't care what it costs and is less than five feet tall? A marketer 's dream? Nope. You call them kids.” (AdRelevance Intelligence Report, 2000). Nowadays, children (age 4-12) already have a sense of fashion and attitudes that we may not see in children back in 1980s-1990s. Based on the “Consuming Kids” (2008) and our daily experience we can see and learned that children tends to follows or try to imitate what they see, it can be from television, magazine, school, and sometimes what they see in the real life. In “Consuming Kids” documentary we learned that the total of money that children spend in a year is about $40 billion and the influence of the kids to adult spending
Teens are an easy reach for advertisers. “Teens are jaded, bombarded by tons of advertising messages”(Winsor 1). There are advertisements at movie theaters, on television, and in teen magazines. Advertisers also reach teens through social media such as the internet and websites. Teens are constantly on Facebook and YouTube, whi...
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.
Alcohol. Obesity. Violence. For kids today in the United States, these are only a few of the problems linked to the child-targeted mass media, especially the multi- million dollar business—television commercials in children’s programming. With the disappearance of a TV-free environment, a typical American kid sees about 40,000 television advertisements each year, most of which are for soda, candy, video games, fast food and their free toys. In order to collect some information, I sat down on a Saturday morning on July 16, 2004, and recorded several kids’ TV ads for further analysis. Needless to say, the results were quite shocking—aside from the obvious, I also noticed that most ads featured active and aggressive boys while the presence of girls was rarely to be seen. Being a girl myself, I felt the need to take a close look at such inequality. I began to wonder if commercialism has overlooked the importance of gender issues, which would then create negative impacts on children by sending out harmful hidden messages. For example, these ads can promote a polarization of gender roles that portray the sexes in stereotypical and traditional ways, which will unconsciously affect young viewers’ attitudes and values. In his article written in 1988, “What Are TV Ads Selling to Children,” John J. O’Connor asserts, “Things haven’t changed much in the television business of children’s merchandising, and some aspects of the scene are even more appalling.” Indeed, though not as prevalent as in earlier years, TV commercials aimed at kids still contain underlying themes such as sexism that’s extremely harmful to the development of the youth.
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
Source 1 (Scholar Article): Carol J. Auster and Claire S. Mansbach, sociologists of the Franklin and Marshall College, cite several sources and concludes that there is only little change in the marketing strategy to promote children’s toys. A research done in 1997 claimed that gendered children’s toys consumer culture perseverated and only
Advertisements and technology are relentless pushed in consumers’ faces, advertising for the newest and brightest pieces of technology and things to do with the new technology, yet as adults, parents understand that they cannot have it all or that there was a life before all of these apps and smartphones. However, these industries have began to attack the youth and promote the latest and greatest devices in an overwhelming fashion. A quote by Susan Linn and Sara Adelmann shows us that, “The market is flooded with tech products purporting to teach infants, toddlers and preschoolers everything from counting to social skills with no research to back up these claims” (Adelmann & Linn). If a shopper were to stroll through the toy aisle at Meijer or Target, they would expect to see dolls and trucks, and even though these items can be spotted with a few technological updates, there are also toy laptops and cellphones. These countless items do not even cover all of the apps that you can get for an iPod, smartphone, or tablet that have kids begging for their
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.
Technology is one of life’s most impressive and incredible phenomena’s. The main reason being the shockingly high degree to which our society uses technology in our everyday lives. It occupies every single realm, affecting people both positively and negatively. There are so many different forms of technology but the two most often used are cell phones, and the internet/computers in general. Today’s younger generation was raised alongside technological development. Kids now a days learn how to operate computers and cell phones at a very early age, whether it be through their own technological possessions, a friend’s, or their parents. They grow up knowing how easily accessible technology is, and the endless amount of ways in which it can be used. This paper will be largely focused on the effects of technology on the younger generation because your childhood is when these effects have the largest impact. I am very aware of the subject because I am the younger generation. Aside from major effects on study and communication skills, there also exist the media’s effects on teen’s self-esteem and mental health. Maybe more importantly, there is our world’s growing problem of over priced and unnecessary consumerism. Over time, our society has created a very unhealthy form of reliance and dependency on technology as a whole. People essentially live through their devices. Cell phones are always with people making it nearly impossible to not be able to reach someone at anytime, day or night. In 2011, there were 2.4 trillion text messages sent, and 28,641 cell phone towers were added across the US. 1 We use our phones and Internet for directions, communication, information, self-diagnosis, games, movies, music, schoolwork, work, photos, shoppi...