Stay Tuned: The Exploitation Of Children In Television Advertisements

Term Paper Title	Stay Tuned: The Exploitation Of Children In Television Advertisements
# of Words	4175
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	16.7

Stay Tuned:  The Exploitation Of Children In Television Advertisements

     Across America in the homes of the rich, the not-so-rich, and in
poverty-stricken homes and tenements, as well as in schools and businesses,
sits advertisers' mass marketing tool, the television, usurping freedoms from
children and their parents and changing American culture.  Virtually an entire
nation has surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for selling.  Advertisers,
within the constraints of the law, use their thirty-second commercials to
target America's youth to be the decision-makers, convincing their parents to
buy the advertised toys, foods, drinks, clothes, and other products.  Inherent
in this targeting, especially of the very young, are the advertisers;
fostering the youth's loyalty to brands, creating among the children a loss of
individuality and self-sufficiency, denying them the ability to explore and
create but instead often encouraging poor health habits.  The children
demanding advertiser's products are influencing economic hardships in many
families today. These children, targeted by advertisers, are so vulnerable to
trickery, are so mentally and emotionally unable to understand reality because
they lack the cognitive reasoning skills needed to be skeptical of
advertisements.  Children spend thousands of hours captivated by various
advertising tactics and do not understand their subtleties. Though advertisers
in America's free enterprise system are regulated because of societal pressures,
they also are protected in their rights under freedom of expression to unfairly
target America's youth in order to sell to their parents, regardless of the very
young's inability to recognize the art of persuasion.
     In the free enterprise system, the advertiser's role is to persuade
consumers to buy their products/services.  They are given a product/service and
are required to use their best creative effort to make this product desirable
to the intended audience (Krugman  37). Because of this calculated and what
many deem as manipulative way of enticing the target audience, the advertising
industry is charged with several ethical breeches, which focus on a lack of
societal responsibility (Treise  59).  Child Advocacy groups and concerned
parents, among others, question the  ethicality of advertising claims and
appeals that are directed towards vulnerable groups in particular, children
(Bush  31).
     The fundamental criticism  is that children are an unfair market.  The
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulates the advertising industry to ensure
consumers'  protection from false or misleading information.  The question many
assert is should the government be allowed to monitor what is legitimate simply
because some do not approve (Hernandez 34).  This question requires value
judgments that can only be answered through constructing public policy (Kunkel
58).  Most people in society  recognize that television advertising directed
towards children is excessive, manipulative and takes unfair advantage of
children (Kunkel  60).
     In a recent survey from the researcher, it was documented that 80% of
adults with children wanted governmental regulation to protect children from
television advertising (See Appendix 1). Research in the social science fields
such as psychology and communication documents how the child interprets a given
television advertisement. Findings indicate for one, the majority of children
up to age five "experience difficulty distinguishing perceptually between
programs and commercials" (Kunkel  62).   It is noted that children at this
young age tend to treat all television content as a unidimensional type of
message.  For instance, child viewers do not begin to discriminate between
fantasy or reality dimensions of television content at the most basic levels
until grade school. Advertisers  compound this issue  by using perceptual
similarities in program content and commercial content which adds to the
difficulty children already have in distinguishing between the two variables...

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