Advertising and Today’s Child

69% of Parents feel that their children see too many ads on TV.

The average American child sees around 3,000 advertisements a day on TV, the Internet, billboards, in magazines and, increasingly, in schools.  Over the course of a year children view 40,000 commercials on television alone. Industry spends an estimated $12 billion on advertising to children each year to ensure that from the minute they wake up in the morning to eat their sugar coated cereal straight until they’re tucked into bed between sheets featuring the smiling face of their favorite cartoon hero they see as many ads as possible.  With estimates that children 12 and younger influence the spending of over $600 billion dollars a year it’s no wonder that the amount of advertising targeting children is growing.

Of course many fine goods and services are out there, and corporations have a right to get the word out about their products, but advertising to children is different than advertising to adults in a number of ways.  The type of advertisements focused on the youth market generally take on different forms from standard advertising to adults. Young people are more vulnerable to certain forms of advertising and ad campaigns aimed at kids leverage these vulnerabilities with product placements and tie-ins. For example fast food restaurants routinely offer toys connected to popular movies and a number of action figure lines are created around successful television series. Coca-Cola Co. paid $150,000,000 for the global tie-in marketing rights to the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone film. Advertisers also attempt to disguise ads so that children will spend more time looking at them.  The Seventeen Magazine’s “Ask Loren” columns of the 1980s, supposed beauty advice columns, were really ads for Epilady brand products and magazines for younger children often contain games or puzzles which are really print ads.

If you saw the lovable cartoon mascot for Super-Sugar-Fruity-Flakes next to a word puzzle in a magazine you’d probably see right through the ad and keep flipping to the editorials.  Kids, on the other hand, don’t do this and scientists are now suggesting it may be because they can’t.  The American Psychological Association Task Force on Advertising and Children found that kids aged 8 and below were “prone to accept advertiser messages as truthful, accurate and unbiased.” They went on to describe how these young children lacked the ability to truly understand what advertising is.  If young kids are incapable of understanding the purpose or intent of advertising how can it be ethical to produce ads targeting them?

The American Academy of Pediatrics has echoed the concern of the APA and argued that the amount of advertising to children view contributes to youth weight issues, poor nutrition, and the use of cigarettes and alcohol. Their comprehensive report Children, Adolescents, and Advertising suggests restricting advertising to children by banning ads of unhealthy foods and legally reducing the amount of TV commercial time during children’s programming by 50%.

Given the number of current crises affecting American youth I’m not sure if that’s enough.  The child obesity and the ADHD epidemics are in full swing in America today.  In the United Kingdom, Denmark, Greece, and Belgium advertising to children is significantly restricted.  In Sweden and Norway all advertising to children under the age of 12 is illegal.  In America, however, the ads keep coming, why?

In the U.S. the Federal Trade Commission studied the issue of advertising to children and found that it was both unfair and highly deceptive but failed to act on the issue because they believed it would be difficult to enforce a ban.  That makes a whole lot of sense, we can’t get an A+ so lets settle for an F.  You would think the headway made overseas in the last 30 years would change their tune but with almost $22,000,000 flowing from the advertising lobby in to congressional pockets since 1990 it is clear to see who will call the shots on children’s rights.