Children and advertisements

Department Of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji

Bhavnagar University

Name: Bhatt Vidhi Rajeshkumar

Roll No.: 18

SEM: 04

Year: 2012-13

Subject: Mass Media and Communication

Assignment Topic: Children and advertisements

Submitted To: Dhvani Joshi

First, we have to know what is advertising.

ü Advertising is a form of communication for marketing and used to encourage, viewers, readers or listeners’; sometimes a specific group to continue or to take some new action.

ü When the advertiser makes the ads, they always think about the target audience and mostly y target audience is children.

How advertising affects on the mind of children?

The answer is that……..

ü At the age of five or six, children have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality and make believe from lying. They do not distinguish programs from ads, and may even prefer the ads. Between seven and ten years- old, children are most venerable to televised manipulation. At age of seven the child can usually distinguish reality from fantasy, and at nine, he or she might suspect deception in ads based on personal experience of products which turned out not to be as advertised but they cannot articulate this and still have “high hopes”. By ten, this has begun to turn into the cynical view that “ads always lie”. Around eleven or twelve, he child enculturation into a system of social hypocrisy.

The purpose of advertising

·       The purpose of advertising focusing on children

ü The main purpose of advertising is to attract people and make money.

ü Children are target because they are easy to manipulate. They think that they should have these particular things so that they attracted towards it that’s why they are targeted.

ü Advertising makes and impression on children, what children see and here they believe. For example: seeing the ads of Horlicks they think that only Horlicks is the energy drink for them and also they think that horlicks makes them taller, stronger and sharper.

ü Advertising to children has been a long successful way to build a solid consumer base that will win the minds of children in order to secure a life time of consumer purchasing.

ü “Advertising at its best is making people feel that they are without their product. You are a loser kinds are very sensitive to that”.

-         Nancy Shalek

Advertising food effects diet

§  Many of the advertisements that children are being exposed to are food advertisement.

§  These advertisements are mostly products of low nutrition value.

§  McDonalds spends roughly 570 million dollars a year on advertising.

§  These advertisements effects children because they will mostly like read to obesity.

§  Kids meal boxes advertise, shows characters etc. which is another way that children are attracted to fast food restaurants.

§  Now we can see every where there must be the restaurants of fast food.

Advertising encourages materialism

û  A recent national survey 95% of adults say that children are too focused on buying and consuming things and almost 80% agree that limits should be placed on advertising to children.

û  Advertising that encourage materialism can effect children’s self image and value.

û  Children beg their parents for the product advertised. They may insist on a particular pair of branded jeans only and be against the other brands of clothing in the store.

û  When children see these advertisements, it gives a wrong impression on their young minds and them starts giving a lot of importance to materialistic joys.

Advertising promotes violent games and videos

û  Children mostly boys are drawn to violence.

û  When ads promote violent video games it can lead it: aggression and loss of self control. For example: - the game named vice city. In this game, the player does whatever he likes to do and behaves in his condition of mind. The game is full of violence and these types of things are surely affects the minds of children.

Advertising encourages early drinking

û  Children who exposed to alcohol and tobacco advertising are more likely to have positive feelings about those substances and start using them at a young age.

û  Although most children don’t start drinking until the preteen or teen years, beliefs in media, less ages that drinking a positive or desirable activity is already developing by age six. It’s well established that alcohol use plays a substantial role in the three leading causes of death among teens and young.

û  Three factors affect the influence of alcohol advertising on pre-adolescents.

(a) The context in which the advertisements are viewed.

(b) The support of significant others

(c)  The extent to which alcohol is glamorized.

From another perspective, children are seen as living in an “age of innocence”-trusting, native, uncritical. Adults who act upon this stereotype are likely to regard television as unmitigated evil, seducing and Taking advantage of the innocent and defenseless.