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Advertising Messages and Children

The typical American child spends 30 percent of his waking hours in front of a television set (Anderson, 1990). For most children, this adds up to between 28 and 33 hours per week of TVwatching. Small wonder, then, that many people are concerned about the effects of television, particularly television commercials, on youngsters. Advertisers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their persuasive techniques in this age of deregulation, and children are still the easiest targets of all. In this paper we will examine the impact of TV commercials on children under 13, with special attention to current research, the discrimination between fantasy and reality, the desire for products, the effects on children's attention spans, styles of ad presentation, and some effects on family life.

Any lingering doubts that TV advertisements do in fact manipulate children can be easily dispelled by a brief look at some research on the subject. The consensus of the experimenters is clearly that children do pay attention to and learn from commercials: they remember slogans, jingles, and brand names, and they try to influence their parents to buy the advertised goods. Anderson (1990) demonstrated that kids begin to pay consistent attention to television around age two. This finding is borne out by a survey (Aronson, 1984) of mothers which determined that 90 percent of preschool-age children had asked their parents for food or toys they had seen advertised on TV but to which they had no other exposure. Similarly, almost two-thirds of the mothers surveyed reported hearing their kids singing commercial jingles learned from television by age three.

Bridgewater (1984) found that young children are more susceptible to advertised messages than are older children and adults because they are less able to tell the difference between a commercial and a regular program. Consequently, they tend to pay more attention to advertisements and be less aw...

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Advertising Messages and Children. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:25, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681864.html