Advertising Messages and Children

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

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s and regular programming, they also cannot adequately distinguish between TV and reality. Greenfield (1984) found that very young children take all of what they see on television, except cartoons, to be reality. Later they believe anything on TV that could happen in real life is real, and still later they believe that what they see on television represents something that probably happens in the real world. This conclusion is supported by another study (Aronson, 1984) which determined that 12 percent of sixth-graders believed that television commercials told the truth all or most of the time. Fortunately, by the tenth grade only four percent still believed that TV ads were truthful even most of the time. This effect may be partly due to the fact that as children get older, they also generally become more educated. Studies (Aronson, 1984) have shown that the more educated a person is, the more skeptical he is, although this skepticism does not make him immune to persuasion. He will still tend to buy a specific brand for no other reason than that it was heavily advertised. It has been proven that when dealing with very similar or identical products mere familiarity can make the crucial difference in which product is actual
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Approximate Word count = 2573
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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