Impact Of Television Advertising On Children example essay topic

The purpose of advertising systems in this capitalistic society is for consumers to believe that goods have the power to create happiness. Since advertisers have long realized that the objects most important to a person are actually immaterial and represent personal and social values such as love, friendship and self-esteem, they have gone to great lengths to associate products with these themes. The result is a "magic system" in which goods are completely transformed from inanimate objects into things that embody values, desires, and goals. (Jhally) Major corporations are using advertising to govern behaviour, mould attitudes, and construct and define children's identities for the sole purpose of making them early consumers. "We are strip-mining our children's minds and doing it for commercial profit".

(Al Gore) Most people agree that companies should not posses such power over children's minds, but nothing is being done about it. It is crucial to examine how advertising succeeds in transforming young people into consumers, and the negative effects that result from such an act. Advertising to children is effective because advertisements deal with illusions that appeal to the imagination of children. (Bajpai 162) The "magic" of advertising is more powerful when aimed at children, since they more readily believe and are enchanted by it.

In a study performed, 75% of the children interviewed said that they loved watching ads on television, and many actually preferred them to programs. (Bajpai 147) Advertisements have succeeded in seducing children by their visually stimulating, "thrilling" (Bajpai 150) content. Moreover, very young children perceive advertisements to be true to real life; they believe that products actually accomplish the things they do in commercials. "Children as viewers have neither the ability to understand the persuasive intent of advertising nor the level of conceptual and experiential maturity needed to evaluate commercial messages rationally". (Young 297) Children do not posses the background beliefs and information that is necessary to distinguish between truth and fiction; advertisers are delighted to take advantage of this fact. They want them to believe that products have amazing capabilities to change a person's life; even when children finally realize, with substantial disappointment (Bajpai 152), that this is not the case, that products are not as magical as they claim to be, the belief has nonetheless been instilled in their minds.

This belief is crucial to the survival of a commercial society. The repetitiveness of advertising and the image of the child in advertising are also effective in making them consumers. "Researchers often find that advertising brand X makes subsequent choice of this brand by the child more likely" (Young 306) Repetition of ideas makes them appear more real in one's mind, and this is especially true for children, who have very impressionable minds. Furthermore, children like the favourable way they are portrayed in advertisements.

"Children are characterized... as a sophisticated and demanding audience who are difficult to reach and satisfy". (Buckingham 148) This is a change from their daily lives, where they are used to being treated as inferior and without the respect they often feel they deserve. A negative effect on children that results from advertising is their inability to distinguish between actual programming and commercials. They perceive advertisements to be just as "real" as programs such as the news.

(Fox 56) "Since adults sanction and encourage the use of a product, kids believe the commercials to be the truth". (Bajpai 162) "Daniel Boor stein argued that most Americans seriously underestimate the effect of advertising. 'We think it means an increase in untruthfulness. In fact, it has meant a reshaping of our very concept of truth. ' " (web) An example of how advertisers take advantage of a child's inability to determine reality from fantasy is that they incorporate popular cartoon characters (and other characters from programs) into commercials, which serves in blurring the line between reality and fantasy even further. (Young 101) Commercials cause grave resentment in many young individuals when products do to live up to their expectations, thereby causing some to become cynical. (Bajpai 152) They believed strongly in them, and their belief system collapsed - this can have detrimental effects on the child's psyche.

People experience severe anxiety when a belief system has been proven wrong; this must be especially dreadful for children, who do not understand the full spectrum and implications of their feelings (actually, most adults do not know also), and therefore do not know how to deal with them. Advertising also forms hazardous views of gender roles and beauty. "The classic roles of gender with their associated stereotypes become well defined and clearly distinguished in the child who watches television advertising". (Young 304) For example, numerous advertisements of kitchen and bathroom (household) products feature women, and men are prominent in the more "masculine" car commercials. Advertising of beauty products can be particularly harmful for girls, since the women in these ads are unnaturally flawless and thin, and create impossible ideals of beauty, as well as giving beauty utmost importance in a girl's life; they create an unhealthy body image. For example, a young girl tried 'Finesse's ham poo, expecting her hair to resemble the model's in the commercial; she blamed herself when these results were not achieved.

Virtually all girls studied in an experiment agreed with the statements "beauty is personally desirable for me" and "beauty is important to be popular with me". Unquestionably, advertisements produce self-esteem issues in young people who feel they cannot live up to appearance of the actors. (Fox 142) Because they believe in the truth of advertisements so much, they are more likely to believe there is something wrong with them, rather than with the product itself. Advertisers definitely make children feel they need certain products, and therefore they feel deprived when their parents are not able to or will not buy them certain products. (Bajpai 152) They begin to associate self worth with the types of products they own. They will often feel inferior, even as adults, because it is virtually impossible to acquire all the things they have been told they need.

This leads to probably the most obvious negative effect of children being exposed to advertisements at a young age: they do not have a choice in possessing capitalist values. A child's mind is highly impressionable; if they are bombarded with such ideas, they will hold these beliefs perhaps their entire lifetime; these ideas would be firmly planted into their minds on a non-conscious level, whether they like it or not. Also, these ideas will be reinforced by the media and by society throughout their lives. Bajpai, Shailaja, and Unnikrishnan, Na mita.

The Impact of Television Advertising on Children. New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1996 Buckingham, David. Small Screens: Television for Children. London; New York: Leicester University Press, 2002 Center for Educational Priorities. "The problems with kids' TV" web Fox, Roy F. Harvesting Minds: How TV Commercials Control Kids.

Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2000 Young, Brian M. Television Advertising and Children. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990 Jhally, Sut. Advertising & the End of the World [videorecording]. Toronto, Ont. : Kinetic Inc., 1998.