Effects of Advertising on Children Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Effects of Advertising on Children - Essay ExampleAnd the results flip been studied by various researchers with Harris, Bargh and Brownell (2009) concluding that advertizements that directly mark children leads to increased preference and purchase of the case products. Thus, advertisements targeted on children do more harm than good to the children. In as much as firms achieve their objectives done advertising to children, a lot of concerns have been raised on the ethical implications based on what Mason (2012) argues as the lack of understanding the basis of advertisement among the children. Such children would be unaware of the meanings attached to the advertisements. The ability of a child to understand an advertisement would be described on the ability of such a child to distinguish between advertisements and non-advertisements and secondly, in understanding that advertisements aim at persuading the target audience. It has been noted that at age 6, children have the capacity to differentiate TV programmes from advertisements. Nonetheless, such children still do not understand the persuasive intent of the advertisements. ... In the United States, Mason (2012) indicates that children under 12 years old would authorize over $13 billion annually on direct food purchases as a result of the popular advertisements which in turn influences a greater $250 billion on family spending. In the UK, an average child has been found to view an estimated 18,000 television advertisements annually compared to 40,000 and 16,000 in the US and China. Similarly, the growth in print media advertisements targeting children has been fearsome with Jones, Gregory and Kervin (2012) giving the example of Disney which now markets Disney Adventures and Disney Girl respectively targeting children over 6 and girls between 6 and 13 known to spend their money on toys, back talk glosses, clothing and accessories. The Internet has been widely used as an emergent mode of advertisement amon g children riding on the findings that children spent a lot of their time on the Internet (Asadollahi & Tanha, 2011). Through online marketing, the frequently visited sites would have pop-up advertisements or sponsored advertisements which open up the children to a myriad of advertised products and services. Positive impact There are scholars who have argued on the positive aspect of advertising on children. Social advertising has been cited by Asadollahi and Tanha (2011) as a form of positive advertising where the objective would be to change the behaviour and attitude of the public and stimulate positive change. For example, the November 2002 to February 2003 advertisement on polio immunization in the US saw over 6 million children immunised. A research that was commissioned by UNICEF found out that over 94% of the respondents