#9550 - Media And Advertising Effects - Children & Youth Markets

• Advertising is an essential component of a thriving economy (Chaplin & Sturgess, 1981). Indeed, it can be argued that advertising is beneficial to the economy by encouraging informed consumers and by accelerating consumption and consequently production of goods to satisfy increased demand.

• However advertising is often seen as harmful; when paired with ‘the child’, the two put together evoke strong responses by both media and public, in part because of age-based limitations in how children understand persuasive messages.

What Is Advertising

• Advertising is paid for and as such is part of the economic arrangements that characterise most free market, capitalist societies in the world where goods and services are exchanged and consumption is encouraged.

• The first aspect of advertising is recognisable as economic or consumer socialisation or how children grow up to understand and behave in economic and political worlds.

• Secondly advertising has traditionally been broadcast to many rather than few and is in the tradition of mass communication.

• Finally advertising and other forms of promotional activity comprise a rather ill-defined category of persuasive or promotional communication where the source is attempting to change or influence the receiver using carefully designed messages that are attractive or seductive and maybe not completely truthful.

• Advertising imparts information and in this sense is similar to encyclopaedias, or instructions on how to install and programme a digital television. Advertising is designed to attract attention and engage the audience.

• Advertising, however, differs from other communication forms in that it provides information about goods and services where the area of discourse is commercial. Put simply, advertising has the intent to sell, to persuade consumers to purchase some brands rather than others.

• Because of this promotional purpose, advertising only tells consumers about the positive aspects of the brand that is advertised, never the negative qualities. To do so, advertising uses visual and verbal rhetoric in order to communicate propositions and positive feelings about their brands. Brands consist of identifiable symbols that refer to the particular good or service being promoted and are, according to Kumatoridani (1982), the topic of the advertisement; all the rest of the advertisement is considered comment. These concepts of topic and comment are used in the analysis of any discourse.

Our Uneasy Alliance with Advertising Economics

• Advertising and marketing fuel the economies of many cultures (Chaplin & Sturgess, 1981). That is, when consumers buy products, economies prosper. Moreover, the economics of television, especially in countries with no established tradition of a national public broadcasting service, necessitate the presence of advertising in programmes in order to fund them.

• While advertising is essential to the economies of many countries, the extent to which brands have a ubiquitous presence in the child’s life in most countries of the world varies. Some brands appear in contexts such as sports sponsorship where they can be seen as part of deliberate promotional activity.

• The ‘branded environment’, such as the McDonald’s large yellow M, is all around us and is part of the consumer ecology in many countries throughout the world. Other brands are more localized and specific to a culture.

• Young (1990) has argued that advertising to children is often seen as a malevolent influence because of its ambiguous relationship with ‘the truth’ and because of the combination of reason and emotion that it employs. In particular, advertising uses legitimate exaggeration called ‘puffery’ and uses rhetoric as a device to persuade potential consumers.

• There is a deeper concern that is evoked when advertising and the child are put together. The child is perceived as innocent – in need of protection – and the advertiser is viewed as seducer, subverting reason and seducing with rhetoric. This argument is firmly rooted within the sociological tradition of critical analysis and would suggest that public concern can erupt at regular intervals and that these waves of ‘moral panic’ (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 1994) are driven by the cultural anxieties that are endemic within the child-advertiser relationship.

• Television and the Internet, then, are perceived at times as intruders that transmit information from the market place into the home, as well as agents that are expected to alter the behaviour of consumers, including children.

Reaching The Child Audience

• Although much advertising and marketing can be found in small ads in newspapers and billboards and print, most of the research over the last 30 years or so has been devoted to the content of television advertising.

• Television advertising is still the major delivery system for marketing to children and youth in the early 21st century (IOM, 2006). Households with children in the developed world now have more than one TV set, often with one set in the child’s bedroom.

• Changes in the media landscape and children’s media use patterns have altered the reliance on TV spot advertising that characterised much of the promotional activities in the 1970s, the 1980s, and even much of the 1990s to include new venues such as the Internet, videogames, and cell phones (IOM, 2006).

• Children are early adopters of new technologies. Consequently, these changes in media access provide new avenues for reaching children with advertisements and marketing techniques.

Effects Of Advertisements On Children

• One view focuses on how children learn to cope with the communicative arm of economic and commercial reality and the other view focuses on the effects of exposure on children. These constitute two ways of talking about advertising to children – the child as active participant acquiring a literacy or understanding with this communicative genre, or the child as passive recipient of a constant stream of audiovisual media.

• The first approach suggests a growing literacy with advertising while the second implies that children learn norms and values and extract meaning from stimuli largely as a function of what they see and hear and how that has an effect on them.

• The first approach places the child firmly at the centre, immersed in an audio-visual culture of which promotional activity is a part. He or she will actively learn from infancy the rules of that culture and will gradually acquire an ability to decode, understand and collectively utilise the symbolic meanings in these experiences and share them with others.

• An effects approach, by contrast, suggests a gradual cultivation of habits and schemata that are based on past experience informing future predictions and behaviours. The flow is not necessarily one-way and certainly not ‘straight through,’ as mediational variables such as parents and peers are important in determining outcomes.

• Advertising is emotionally involving and attracts the child’s attention. Children under the age of five years like to watch moving objects with primary colours and sharp contrasts (Jaglom & Gardner, 1981). By three years of age they can become involved in television personalities and recognise them (Valkenburg, 2004; McNeal, 2007). Of course, these would include the celebrity endorsers or character endorsers that accompany advertisements.

• Kid features, such as the use of branded icons and characters, also influence children’s interest in specific products.

• Younger children, by contrast, identify with the characters associated with brands, rather than the brand itself.

• Ever since advertising to children became a matter of public concern in the early 1970s, the question of how much children understand about advertising has been central to the debate. If children do not comprehend advertising and perhaps do not see it as being persuasive, then there is a good case that advertising to children is inherently unfair. So legislators and those in charge of regulating advertising want to know at what age we can regard children as having a mature understanding of commercial intent.

• Although young children from infancy onwards are aware of brands and will recognise them in contexts such as TV advertising, they think that TV advertising is just there for fun and entertainment.

• From about 6 to 7 years of age, the beginnings of an understanding of the purpose of advertising emerge.

• By 10 to 11 years of age, practically all children are able to attribute persuasive intent to advertisements. Children of parents with higher educational levels tend to attribute persuasive intent to commercial advertisements at an earlier age than children of parents with lower educational levels.

• This body of research, then, demonstrates that children gradually come to understand that TV commercials have more than one function and, most importantly, that there is a difference between the essential aspects of advertising (that it is persuasive and that the ultimate goal is to sell) and the instrumental aspects of advertising.

• These latter features, that it is fun to watch for example, are probably accurate perceptions of the world inasmuch as a lot of TV advertising is designed to please the viewer. Therefore, children are not ‘wrong’. Nonetheless, the attention-grabbing or mood-enhancing qualities of the message are there to encourage the viewer to watch and to create a favourable attitude about the product.

• The ‘symbolic’ nature of commercials means that advertisements use devices such as idealised settings or dramatised character emotions and...