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Piper Leypoldt, 11, of Durham, North Carolina, likes to watch cooking videos on YouTube. Recently, she learned that the site collects users’ data, such as search history and location­. She’s not concerned. “Other websites I use at home and school…

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The public school district of Seattle, Washington, is suing the companies that own Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. It claims that social-media platforms are a major cause of a mental health crisis affecting kids. The lawsuit was filed…

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How Teens Actually Feel About Social Media Ads

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Advertising is everywhere for teenagers on Snapchat or YouTube, and some of it is welcomed.

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According to the 2008 YTV Kids and Tweens Report, kids influence:

Breakfast choices (97% of the time) and lunch choices (95% of the time).

Where to go for casual family meals (98% of the time) (with 34% of kids always having a say on the choice of casual restaurant).

Clothing purchases (95% of the time).

Software purchases (76% of the time) and computer purchases (60% of the time).

Family entertainment choices (98% of the time) and family trips and excursions (94% of the time). [1]

As a result, industry spending on advertising to children has exploded over the past two decades. In the United States alone, companies spent over $17 billion doing this in 2009 - more than double what was spent in 1992.

Parents today are willing to buy more for their kids because trends such as smaller family size, dual incomes and postponing having children until later in life mean that families have more disposable income. As well, guilt can play a role in spending decisions as time-stressed parents substitute material goods for time spent with their kids.

Here are some of the strategies marketers employ to target children and teens:

Pester power

"We're relying on the kid to pester the mom to buy the product, rather than going straight to the mom."
Barbara A. Martino, Advertising Executive

Today's kids have more autonomy and decision-making power within the family than in previous generations, so it follows that kids are vocal about what they want their parents to buy. "Pester power" refers to children's ability to nag their parents into purchasing items they may not otherwise buy. Marketing to children is all about creating pester power, because advertisers know what a powerful force it can be.

According to the marketing industry book Kidfluence, pestering or nagging can be divided into two categories-"persistence" and "importance." Persistence nagging (a plea, that is repeated over and over again) is not as effective as the more sophisticated "importance nagging." This latter method appeals to parents' desire to provide the best for their children, and plays on any guilt they may have about not having enough time for their kids.

The marriage of psychology and marketing

To effectively market to children, advertisers need to know what makes kids tick. With the help of well-paid researchers and psychologists, advertisers now have access to in-depth knowledge about children's developmental, emotional and social needs at different ages. Using research that analyzes children's behaviour, fantasy lives, artwork, even their dreams, companies are able to craft sophisticated marketing strategies to reach young people. For example, in the late 1990s the advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi hired cultural anthropologists to study children engaging with digital technology at home in order to figure out how best to engage them with brands and products. [2]

The issue of using child psychologists to help marketers target kids gained widespread public attention in 1999, when a group of U.S. mental health professionals issued a public letter to the American Psychological Association (APA) urging them to declare the practice unethical. Although the APA did not outright ban psychologists from engaging in this practice, as a result, the recommendations of their final report in 2004 included that the APA "undertake efforts to help psychologists weigh the potential ethical challenges involved in professional efforts to more effectively advertise to children, particularly those children who are too young to comprehend the persuasive intent of television commercials." [3]

Building brand name loyalty

Canadian author Naomi Klein tracked the birth of "brand" marketing in her 2000 book No Logo. According to Klein, the mid-1980s saw the birth of a new kind of corporation-Nike, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, to name a few-which changed their primary corporate focus from producing products to creating an image for their brand name. By moving their manufacturing operations to countries with cheap labour, they freed up money to create their powerful marketing messages. It has been a tremendously profitable formula, and has led to the creation of some of the most wealthy and powerful multi-national corporations the world has seen.

Marketers plant the seeds of brand recognition in very young children, in the hopes that the seeds will grow into lifetime relationships. According to the Center for a New American Dream, babies as young as six months of age can form mental images of corporate logos and mascots. Brand loyalties can be established as early as age two, and by the time children head off to school most can recognize hundreds of brand logos.

While fast food, toy and clothing companies have been cultivating brand recognition in children for years, adult-oriented businesses such as banks and automakers are now getting in on the act.

Magazines such as Time, Sports Illustrated, Vogue and People have all launched kid and teen editions-which boast ads for adult related products such as minivans, hotels and airlines.

Buzz or street marketing

The challenge for marketers is to cut through the intense advertising clutter in young people's lives. Many companies are using "buzz marketing"-a new twist on the tried-and-true "word of mouth" method. The idea is to find the coolest kids in a community and have them use or wear your product in order to create a buzz around it. Buzz, or "street marketing," as it's also called, can help a company to successfully connect with the savvy and elusive teen market by using trendsetters to give their products "cool" status.

Buzz marketing is particularly well-suited to the Internet, where young people in particular use social networking platforms to spread the word about music, clothes and other products. It should come as no surprise that the top ten viral marketing campaigns (as of 2008) relied heavily on YouTube, Hotmail and Facebook to reach hundreds of millions of viewers-and this was before Twitter became a mainstay of social media. For example, when Burger King re-launched its 'Subservient Chicken' TV commercial online in 2004, it attracted 15 million hits within the first five days and more than 450 million hits over the next few years. [4]

Commercialization in education

School used to be a place where children were protected from the advertising and consumer messages that permeated their world-but not any more. Budget shortfalls are forcing school boards to allow corporations access to students in exchange for badly needed cash, computers and educational materials.

Corporations realize the power of the school environment for promoting their name and products. A school setting delivers a captive youth audience and implies the endorsement of teachers and the educational system. Marketers are eagerly exploiting this medium in a number of ways, including:

Sponsored educational materials: for example, a Kraft "healthy eating" kit to teach about Canada's Food Guide (using Kraft products); or forestry company Canfor's primary lesson plans that make its business focus seem like environmental management rather than logging.

Supplying schools with technology in exchange for high company visibility.

Exclusive deals with fast food or soft drink companies to offer their products in a school or district.

Advertising posted in classrooms, school buses, on computers, etc. in exchange for funds.

Contests and incentive programs: for example, the Pizza Hut reading incentives program Book It! in which children receive certificates for free pizza if they achieve a monthly reading goal; or Campbell's Labels for Education project, in which Campbell provides educational resources for schools in exchange for soup labels collected by students.

Sponsoring school events: The Canadian company ShowBiz brings moveable video dance parties into schools to showcase various sponsors' products.

In addition, companies are also recognizing the advantages of developing positive brand associations through facilitating school field trips. In the U.S., the highly successful company Field Trip Factory delivers children to companies for "real-world lessons on everything from nutrition to health care." For example, students may visit a car dealership to learn about car safety. This is seen as a win-win situation by many educators and retailers because it lets children have hands-on experiences outside their classrooms, while building positive associations between companies, students and their parents and teachers. [5]

The Internet

The Internet is an extremely desirable medium for marketers wanting to target children:

It's part of youth culture. This generation of young people is growing up with the Internet as a daily and routine part of their lives.

Parents generally do not understand the extent to which kids are being marketed to online.

Kids are often online alone, without parental supervision.

Unlike broadcasting media, which have codes regarding advertising to kids, the Internet is unregulated.

Sophisticated technologies make it easy to collect information from young people for marketing research, and to target individual children with personalized advertising.

By creating engaging, interactive environments based on products and brand names, companies can build brand loyalties from an early age.

The main ways that companies market to young people online include:

Relationship building through ads that attempt to connect with consumers by building personal relationships between them and the brand.

Viral ads that are designed to be passed along to friends.

Behavioural targeting, where ads are sent to individuals based on personal information that has been posted or collected.

Endorsements by online "influencers" who are paid to recommend a product in what looks like a genuine way.

For more information on how marketers are targeting kids online, check out the Online Marketing section.

Marketing adult entertainment to kids

In 2008, an estimated 17 million children watched the Superbowl with their families. Alongside the football, they also watched a number of highly creative and engaging ads for beer and alcohol.

The marketing of adult entertainment to children has been, and continues to be, an ongoing issue between government regulators and various media industries. In a report released in 2000, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took movie, music and video games industries to task for routinely marketing violent entertainment to young children. Subsequent reports since then have shown that although advances have been made - particularly within the video game industry - there are still many outstanding concerns relating to the frequency that adult-oriented entertainment is marketed to children and the ease with which many under-age youth are able to access adult-rated games, movies and music. [6] Specific areas where the FTC is calling on entertainment media to improve on include restricting the marketing of mature-rated products to children, clearly and prominently disclosing rating information and restricting children's access to mature-rated products at retail. [7]

In its latest, 2009 report, the FTC particularly noted the challenges presented by emerging technologies in facilitating easy access by children to adult-rated entertainment.

The real challenge is that promotion of adult-oriented entertainment does not necessarily fall within the parameters outlined by regulatory agencies such as the FTC. For example, Nickelodeon's 2011 Kids Choice Awards were hosted by hip-hop artist Snoop Dog, who, in addition to producing music that is not rated for children, is also a spokesperson for the fruity alcoholic beverage, Blast. Alcohol companies also use social networking platforms like Facebook to humanize their brands and make it easy for customers to 'connect' with their products.

[1] Poulton, Terry. " 'Kidfulence' on family spending strong: YTV Report." Media in Canada. February 22, 2008.
[2] Russakoff, D. Marketers following youth trends to the bank, The Washington Post, April 19, 1999.
[3] Wilcox, B., Cantor, J., Dowrick, P., Kunkel, D., Linn, S., & Palmer, E. (2004). Report of the APA Task Force on Advertising and Children: Recommendations. http://www.apa.org/releases/childrenads_recommendations.pdf
[4] Inc.Com. http://www.inc.com/ss/7-successful-viral-marketing-campaigns#6
[5] ABC News. More Companies Market Directly to Kids. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130347&page=1#.T6PQ_NnNkYK
[6] Federal Trade Commission (2009). FTC Renews Call to Entertainment Industry to Curb Marketing of Violent Entertainment to Children. http://www.narm.com/PDF/FTCReport_1209.pdf
[7] Ibid.

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According to the 2008 YTV Kids and Tweens Report, kids influence: Breakfast choices (97% of the time) and lunch choices (95% of the time). Where to go for casual family meals (98% of the time) (with 34% of kids always having a say on the choice of casual restaurant).

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Today's children grow up in world saturated with technology and advertising. Pictures of mothers' bellies on Facebook begin a child's social media profile. Coupons for diapers arrive before the baby comes home from the hospital.

Today's children grow up in world saturated with technology and advertising. Pictures of mothers' bellies on Facebook begin a child's social media profile. Coupons for diapers arrive before the baby comes home from the hospital.

More than 90% of children under two have a digital footprint - an online presence such as photos and other personal identifiable information. This may begin before they are even born, according to research by AVG Technologies, a global security software company that sponsors the Child Internet Safety Summit in London.

"The younger children are, the more vulnerable they are," said Dr Allen Kanner, a family and child psychologist and co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "It's becoming almost impossible to function as a child without a constant barrage of advertising."

Children are learning to use computers and smartphones before they learn basic life skills. An AVG study of children ages three to five found that 66% of children know how to play an online game and 62% can turn on a computer, but only 14% can tie their shoes, said Tony Anscombe, AVG's senior security evangelist.

Kids can get online or use apps before they are "cognitively capable of understanding what is advertising and what is truth", said Kanner. This is also true of teenagers who may recognise advertising, but are still not as cognitively sophisticated as adults. They may experiment via social media without understanding the consequences, uploading pictures that may haunt them for years to come.

Kids and creativity

But it's not all doom and gloom. Kids are teaching their parents a thing or two about technology, and using social media in new and creative ways. "Teens are experimenting with tools that most of us haven't even tried," said Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center. "They just jump right in and I love that. That's the positive use of social media."

YouTube channels such as Kids React and Teens React give youngsters a forum to express their opinions about pop culture, politics and brands. Younger children find ideas for offline play on fun, imaginative websites such those created by Lego and Hasbro's Play-doh, where kids can upload photos of their creations.

Kids go barefoot for Toms

Toms, a US shoe company popular with young people, gives away one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair of shoes purchased. The company started a yearly event called One Day Without Shoes, which encourages adults and kids to go without shoes for a day and find out what it's like to go barefoot, building awareness about global children's issues of poverty, health and education.

Kids of all ages - from elementary to college - posted videos of students walking to classes barefoot on YouTube, tweeted their thoughts about childhood poverty on Twitter and uploaded pictures of their bare soles to Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.

As kids get smarter about being manipulated, the trend towards "branded experiences" and "advertising that turns into content" will continue to grow, said Rutledge.

Minors on Facebook

Although Facebook's user policy does not allow minors under 13 to set up profiles, Facebook has about 20 million minors and 7.5 million of them are under 13, according to a 2011 survey of Consumer Reports. Earlier this month, Facebook settled a class action lawsuit by parents and children's privacy groups for allowing kids' pictures in sponsored ads without parental consent. A number of parties denounced the settlement and are appealing.

Millions of mobile apps

Parents have more choices than ever before. Both Apple's iTunes App Store and Google Play host over 1m apps. One highly rated app for kids aged 9-11, NFL Play 60, was released before the Superbowl. The app is part of a campaign to make kids more active and was co-created by the National Football League (NFL) and American Heart Association. The game interacts with the player; when the child runs or jumps, the character on the screen also runs or jumps. Kanner points out that it would be better if kids went outside to play and made up games on their own.

On mobile devices, there can be a blurred line between what is advertising and what is not. Labelling advertising on mobile apps is much more difficult than labelling ads online due to size and screen real estate, said Parry Aftab, cyberlaw expert and founder of Wired Safety.

Children are also purchasing apps or costly add-ons unintentionally or without parental permissions. In January, Apple reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and will refund parents $32.5m for unauthorised purchases.

New challenges for parents continue to arise as huge amounts of data, including geolocation data, are being collected by advertisers online and on mobile devices. Geolocation data can show where parents commute, where kids go to school and where they go to piano practice after school, said Aftab.

"We have laws in the United States now for kids under 13 for geo-data, but a lot of the big data companies are violating those right and left."

Educating kids and their parents

Most agree that more education is needed. The ad industry is working to raise media literacy, said Alex Scott, public policy manager of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK. IAB recently released an animated film for youths called What Does That Ad Say?" in conjunction with Media Smart, for Safer Internet Day.

Scott also points to self-regulation of the advertising industry through the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) and the EU Framework for Online Behavioural Advertising. In the US, advertisers must comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

"Of course the ad industry takes its responsibilities to children seriously," she said.
Rachael Post is a writer, digital strategist and professor of social media in Los Angeles. Join the community of sustainability professionals and experts. Become a GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox Topics

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Friend or foe? The rise of online advertising aimed at kids

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Today's children grow up in world saturated with technology and advertising. Pictures of mothers' bellies on Facebook begin a child's social media profile. Coupons for diapers arrive before the baby comes home from the hospital. Today's children grow up in world saturated with technology and advertising.

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​Kids don't often know the difference between games and ads; they don't know about advertisers' persuasive intent until 8 years old. Why, then, is it ethical to advertise in games meant for preschoolers?​​

When Michael Robb's two kids, 4 and 6, play games on the family tablet, the games are occasionally interrupted by ads. Although they sometimes forget what to do, Robb trained them to look for a red X when ads pop up-short of that, they'll turn the device face down until the ad ends.

This isn't how most kids interact with ads on apps: Developmentally, children don't know where games end and ads begin until they're 8 years old, according to the American Psychological Association. Robb says that kids don't understand persuasive intent, the fact that advertisers are trying to sell them something.

Robb has a Ph.D. in psychology and works as the senior director of research at Common Sense Media, an advocacy and education nonprofit supporting safe use of media and technology for children. He's spent the last 15 years researching media's effect on children and says that apps have made for a vastly different media landscape. Robb recalls how Saturday morning cartoon ads in the early 1970s would blend in with TV programming, which gave way later in the decade to clear demarcations that an ad break was coming ("After these messages, we'll be right back!"). These show-bumpers were a mandate from the Federal Communications Commission's 1974 Policy Statement, a compromise struck after advocacy group Action for Children's Television requested in 1970 that no commercials air during programming for kids. But there's no such bumper between ads and gameplay in free apps; Robb says that there should be, as kids playing free apps often think that ads are just another part of the game.

There's risk of children clicking an ad and making an erroneous purchase. In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission responded to these purchases by filing federal lawsuits against Apple, Google and Amazon for allowing children to spend millions of dollars on in-app purchases. Apple and Google each settled that year; Google refunded at least $19 million to customers and Apple refunded at least $32.5 million. Amazon battled the lawsuit in court until 2017, when it dropped its appeal. Now, Amazon must refund customers approximately $70 million.

The FTC can't decide what is and isn't ethical, only what's unfair or deceptive. Mary Koelbel Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC, says that the organization has a policy statement on what constitutes deceptive or unfair practices. If something is deceptive or unfair, they can file a federal lawsuit or an administrative cease-and-desist order. The main question of deception: Is this practice likely to mislead reasonable consumers about something important? The question of unfairness: Will the practice cause injury to consumers that they can't avoid?

"When you're talking about advertising to children, you look at it from the standpoint of an ordinary child and understanding that kids obviously are less sophisticated than adults," Engle says.

But if young children are less sophisticated consumers, not knowing where games end and ads begin, it may not be ethical to advertise to them on apps at all.
A Brief History of Tiny Targeting
It's always been considered ethically murky to target young children with ads. In 1984, Lynda Sharp Paine wrote in Business & Professional Ethics Journal that advertising is justified if it helps consumers make wise decisions in the marketplace, but she argued that young children don't yet have the capacity to make wise decisions. In the 2000s, many studies concluded that childhood obesity was tied in part to ads for snacks, sodas and sugary cereals-most companies cut down on advertising sugary cereals, and later cut down on the sugar content of the products themselves. But as the media landscape changed, so did advertising to children.

On smaller screens, parental oversight became tougher and apps took advantage. In 2017, researchers wrote in the journal Pediatrics that online ads are more aggressive in engaging with children through gaming platforms and more aggressive about telling children to reach out to their friends about advertised products. A 2018 study led by University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and published in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics found that 95% of apps marketed to or commonly played by children younger than 5 contain at least one type of advertising. Another 2018 study, published in the journal Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies​, examined thousands of free apps targeting children and found that the majority were in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law passed in 1998 to protect the online privacy of children 13 years old and younger. Most of the apps targeting young children don't allow users to easily shut off tracking and behavioral advertising, the study found. Worse, 19% of these apps collect personally identifiable information, leaving children's data at risk.

"It's hard to enforce the law, but again: These are apps for kids where they're clearly trying to better target advertisements to these kids," Robb says. "In doing so, they're hoovering up lots of information that they shouldn't be collecting, parents probably aren't aware that they're collecting and kids certainly aren't aware that they're collecting."

Many free apps also offer in-app purchases for digital items to be used in the game. The "Strawberry Shortcake Bake Shop" app, for example, is listed as appropriate for ages 4 and older, but features $45 worth of in-app purchases. Robb says that the game asks kids to help the character bake a cake, but it can't be completed until they buy a special utensil. In the meantime, he says that the app's character makes a frowny face and looks pleadingly at the screen.

"That, to me, is emotionally manipulative," Robb says. "Trying to extract that stuff from games will be a step forward."
What's Fair?
"The question is, how ethical is it to take advantage of young children's limited cognitive abilities while they're playing an app they enjoy in order to sell them something?" Robb said during a November 2018 press conference held by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. During the press conference, Blumenthal said that parents who allow their children to play with these apps are opening their homes to "a Trojan horse." In a letter to the FTC, Blumenthal and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., asked the FTC to investigate how children are targeted by free apps. Specifically, the senators want to know to what extent developers, advertisers and app stores comply with COPPA.

"I think that the FTC letter was a really good first step," Robb says two days after speaking at the press conference. "There probably needs to be more discussion between industry and the child development experts about what kids know and at what ages [they know it]."

Robb also believes that new research should examine what's fair for kids in advertising. Should it be easier for kids to take app gameplay offline, away from the reach of advertisers and data collectors? Do ads in apps need to be clearly marked, just as ads during Saturday morning cartoon commercials were? Perhaps there can be an agreed-upon framework by the advertising industry, app stores and childhood development experts, Robb says. This way, everyone can know what kids' rights are when it comes to online and mobile experiences.

"A lot of people who make games or experiences for children aren't necessarily child development experts, so they may not even realize that they are unfairly manipulating or preying on a child's psychological vulnerabilities," Robb says. "And then there's probably a lot of game designers who don't care. It's their business and maybe they don't think it's particularly harmful or it's just what the bottom line is."

Until advertisers and game developers address the problem, it falls to parents. Robb says that parents should try to play on the apps with their kids, teaching them what ads are when they pop up; he says that the most important learning happens between the child and their caregiver. Parents may also consider avoiding free apps for their children-those most ad-ridden-and instead pay a buck or two for the app's uninterrupted premium version.

Changes to app-based advertising to kids will likely come with time, whether from within the app and advertising industries or from pressure outside. But the industry is still adjusting to the changes wreaked by easy access, shrinking screens and advancing technology. FTC's Engle, who has worked in her role since 2001, says that the business is much different than it was when she was sending her teenage daughter into a TV- and computer-free bedroom. Now, kids almost always have a tiny screen within reach, an open window to the world. For now, what floats into those windows is largely up to app stores, game developers and advertisers.

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Game Apps Are the Latest Battleground in Child Advertising

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When Michael Robb's two kids, 4 and 6, play games on the family tablet, the games are occasionally interrupted by ads. Although they sometimes forget what to do, Robb trained them to look for a red X when ads pop up-short of that, they'll turn the device face down until the ad ends.

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The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has many laws regarding advertising and marketing. As you can imagine, when it comes to minors, those laws get enforced severely. In fact, every violation can result in civil penalties of up to $16,000 per incident.

What's more, the content and style of the ad are more closely scrutinized. For instance, the kind of exaggeration and "over the top" ads that are fine to show to adults, are not viewed the same way when it comes to children. Depending on the age of the child, he or she may not be able to distinguish the fantasy of the advert from the reality of the product.

If the ad shows a bicycle with sounds dubbed over it of a motorbike, that bicycle had better make those sounds in real life. Otherwise, the child will have been lied to by the ad.

But even if advertisers follow the rules to the letter, it doesn't stop them from finding creative, and legal, ways to bend them from time to time.

There are plenty of celebrities out there on social media, and they are more than happy to push out paid tweets and Instagram posts that children will see. It may take just a few seconds to write the post (and in many cases, it's simply given to the celebrity verbatim), but they can earn up to $75,000 for an Instagram post and $30,000 for a tweet. While that's a staggering sum of money, it's peanuts compared to the cost of a TV spot, and will probably have a much bigger impact. What's more, the posts don't even have to be labeled as ads, which means a lot of gullible kids and teens think the celebs they adore are genuinely into that product.

Kids and teens love animation. Think back to your younger days, and you'll remember that most of your favorite shows growing up were animated. These days, it's easier than ever to create animation digitally, and that means advertisers and brands are able to crowbar fun, friendly, and cool animated characters into their ads. From cereal and toys to candy and clothing, if the children are the targets of the ads, cartoons and kid-friendly images will be front and center.

Following on from the animation mentioned previously, some advertisers go even further and produce series or "webisodes" featuring characters connected to the brand. This series of webisodes by Lucky Charms follows the exploits of Lucky the Leprechaun. The whole series is to devised to make Lucky a hit with the kids, who then spot the character on the cereal box in the store and ask for it. And let's not forget the series that were created specifically to sell toys, like Transformers, He-Man, and many others since.

A close relation to branded content, this aims to advertise to children on a much more subconscious level. Perhaps the greatest example of this is "E.T.-The Extra-Terrestrial," which showed the cute alien being lured into the house by a trail of Reese's Pieces. There were boxes of Cheerios front and center in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," a huge McDonald's logo in "Richie Rich," and cans of Pepsi in "Home Alone." Product placement is a multi-million dollar investment for brands, and if the film is successful, it can have a huge impact on sales. While adults know what's going on, children are not as perceptive. After the movie, they will not realize why they want a certain product; they just do.

Children want what their friends what. They also want what other kids are enjoying. It's no surprise then that so many ads aimed at children feature kids of a similar age loving the product like it was the greatest thing ever invented. From amazingly delicious junk food to toys and games that have about ten minutes of playability. This is, of course, just par for the course in advertising. However, when adults see people just ecstatic about a product, we take it with a grain of salt. Children, they're not as skeptical; especially children under ten years old. They see their peers just laughing it up, crazy about a toy, and they want it. The nag factor kicks in, and sure enough, that toy is unwrapped on his or her birthday.

Most scholars and experts agree that children should not be targeted in ads and that there should be stricter rules around it. Adults make the purchasing decisions, children are not armed with enough life experience to know they are being manipulated. But, for the time being, ads will still target children because they are worth billions in sales.

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How Advertisers Target Children to Increase Sales

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The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has many laws regarding advertising and marketing. As you can imagine, when it comes to minors, those laws get enforced severely. In fact, every violation can result in civil penalties of up to $16,000 per incident. What's more, the content and style of the ad are more closely scrutinized.

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Another issue she raised is that ads on phones are something that kids generally encounter on their own, without any parental guidance. "There are plenty of parents that use the TV as a babysitter as well, but there was at least the option to sit down with your kid and say, 'Well, what do you think about that?'" Einstein says. Little faces staring into little screens, though, are usually unsupervised, which "doesn't give a whole lot of opportunity for the parent to look at this with the kid and know what's going on."

The Federal Communications Commission regulates ads that run on TV during children's shows, but it has no such rules for ads directed toward children online or within apps. One practice that's banned by the FCC in TV ads is "host selling," which happens when a character from a show pitches a product during that show's commercial breaks. The researchers noted that some of what they'd seen in children's apps was very similar to host selling: Some characters steered players toward making in-app purchases or buying the paid version of an app, occasionally making emotional pleas or expressing disapproval through the screen. (In one app for kids as young as 6, an onscreen character can shake his head and cry when a child declines to purchase a mini game for $1.99.)

These negative reactions from characters can pressure children to spend, and the underlying concern, says Amy Jordan, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, is that many kids aren't yet capable of fully understanding other people's motives for making certain requests. She told me that it isn't until around age 6 or 7, give or take a year in either direction, that kids develop the ability to think critically about what an advertiser might want from them.

The FCC does have regulations, but much of the policing of advertisers comes, Jordan says, when there's public outcry or after a particularly damning research report comes out. Many other countries regulate advertisers more tightly. "On balance, there is probably a greater recognition [in the U.S.] of the free-speech rights of the commercial broadcasters and an unwillingness to interfere with those rights," she says. "In other countries, there's more of a sense of the obligations of people who make media to recognize the sensitivities and the vulnerabilities of children." Jordan notes that in Denmark, ads can't be aired in the middle of children's programming, but instead can only bookend it.

I asked her what her dream regulations for children's advertisements would look like. "If I were queen," she said, "I would ban advertising to very young children-that would be children ages about 6 and under. And I would be careful about the kinds of products that are advertised to children between 6 and 12, so that unhealthy products aren't advertised to them, and at the same time, throughout the childhood years, I would invest as a policy maker in initiatives to provide more media literacy."

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Children Are Getting Great Practice at Being Sold to All the Time

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Another issue she raised is that ads on phones are something that kids generally encounter on their own, without any parental guidance. "There are plenty of parents that use the TV as a babysitter as well, but there was at least the option to sit down with your kid and say, 'Well, what do you think about that?'" Einstein says.

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Fast-Food TV Advertising Aimed at Kids Infographic

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Fast-food companies emphasize toy giveaways and movie tie-ins when marketing to kids on television, which suggests the industry is not abiding by its own pledges regarding child-directed marketing.

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Young children are vulnerable to marketing messages as research has shown that children under age six simply don't understand the idea of advertising, and by the time they have developed the capability to recognize marketing messages they will already be accustomed to a world made up of mascots and logos.

Like all advertisers, marketers need to go to where their audience is and to this end the Internet has been a godsend because it brings their audience to them.

Fun and Games in a Digital World

For young people the Internet is an overwhelmingly commercial environment. Exposure to this online world begins at an early age - as young as age two in some cases - and children are quickly immersed in a constant bath of commercials and branded images: 95 per cent of young people's favourite websites contain commercial content. [2]

The Internet is an especially desirable medium for marketers who want to target children. This is because:

It's part of youth culture. This generation of young people is growing up with the Internet as a daily and routine part of their lives.

Parents generally do not understand the extent to which kids are being marketed to online.

Kids are often online alone, without parental supervision.

Unlike broadcasting media, which have codes regarding advertising to kids, the Internet is unregulated.

Sophisticated technologies make it easy to collect information from young people for marketing research, and to target individual children with personalized advertising.

By creating engaging, interactive environments based on products and brand names, companies can easily build brand loyalties from an early age.

The main ways that companies market to young people online include:

1. Relationship-building through ads that attempt to connect with consumers by building personal relationships between them and the brand.

2. Viral ads that are designed to be passed along to friends.

3. Behavioural targeting, where ads are sent to individuals based on personal information that has been posted or collected.

1. Relationship Building

Online games that are built around brands, products or brand-related characters - commonly known as advergames - are the perfect vehicle for building relationships between children and brands. Generally, young people don't identify advergames as online commercials: most think they are "just games". Fun, fast-paced and interactive, it is easy to see the huge advantage advergames have over ordinary advertisements. These immersive ads provide advertisers with what they call "sticky traffic": users staying involved for extended periods of time. It's difficult to imagine anyone staring at a magazine or banner ad for three to eight minutes, but kids will happily play brand-focused games for long periods of time.

Social networking sites like Facebook help marketers humanize their brands and mascots and engage people in their advertising campaigns through branded profile pages. These pages, which mimic real profiles, let marketers connect with consumers and form personal relationships as "friends". Does it work?: as of May 2012, Barbie's profile page had 4,477,345 'likes' and "Captain Morgan" - of Captain Morgan rum - had 1,063,521 'likes'.

Highly social virtual worlds also provide tremendous marketing opportunities. Popular destinations for younger kids include Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Stardoll. For teens, it's all about socializing and experimenting with identity in places such as Habbo Hotel, Second Life and There.com. In these immersive environments, marketers blend socializing with selling by: embedding their brands into the electronic landscape or chat features; offering virtual merchandise; or sponsoring virtual events. In effect, the brand becomes part of the role-playing that users engage in. For example, at Stardoll, girls use "stardollars" to dress up their MeDoll or celebrity doll in virtual fashions, make-up and accessories that include real-world brands. When girls first join, they are given 25 stardollars to get them started. But if they want more clothes or decorations for their virtual suites, additional stardollars must be purchased with real cash.

Like social networks, the companies behind virtual worlds actively court advertisers. In its promotional materials, Habbo Hotel describes itself as an online environment that provides companies and brands "with a completely new and exciting way of building their brand value among teenagers."

There's no doubt that these advertising strategies are effective at building relationships: as of 2010 Stardoll boasted 70 million members worldwide, while in 2011 Habbo Hotel touted 200 million registrations. They're also incredibly lucrative: in 2007 Club Penguin was bought by Disney for $350 million.

2. Viral Ads

In the words of Mark Zuckerberg, "A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising" and marketers have been quick to capitalize on the capacity of the Internet - and social networking sites - for viral marketing, which has been described as "word of mouth on steroids". On the Internet, it's easy to pass along information to friends and young people are actively encouraged to do this. For example, when girls complete the " What should you splurge on at the makeup counter?" quiz on the seventeen.com website, they're encouraged to share the survey with friends through social networking - as well as buy specific brands of makeup.

The engines that drive viral marketing are social networking platforms. For example, on its page for potential advertisers, Facebook touts the advantage that its unique environment provides to companies to reach their "exact audience" and connect with "real customers" through targeted ads, integrated content, social actions and connecting with friends of their "friends".

Whether it's sharing the latest viral video on YouTube or passing around the latest cool app or game, marketers are counting on friends influencing friends to buy and/or use their products. They are also very good at pairing their products with specific individuals - and by association their friends - on social networking sites through ad placement on home screens, newsfeeds and logout pages.

3. Behavioural Targeting

Behavioral targeting is the practice where marketers build profiles of individual users by tracking their behaviours online and then combining that data with information from a variety of other sources such as IP addresses, search histories, and online registration forms, in order to deliver tailored advertisements to those users.

Younger children and youth, who may lack the ability to recognize when they are being targeted in this manner, are particularly vulnerable, On the Internet, kids will happily volunteer information that marketers once had to pay for. For example, on the Neopets website - which is considered one of the fastest growing youth communities in the world (approximately 40 per cent of members are under 13 years old) [3] and one of the top ten 'stickiest' sites on the Web - young people spend hours completing quizzes, filling out market surveys, and doing activities to earn Neopoints to buy things for their pets. In addition, as young players interact with various branded features of the website, Neopets is taking note:

The company owns a huge set of research data on children 12 and under, a difficult demographic to get because marketers must comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and obtain parental permission. Neopets claims more than 50,000 kids in their marketing database. Neopets sells market research (not personal data) to other companies, trading on Neopets' "unparalleled access to young people," as the company press kit phrases it. [4]

Social networking platforms, where youth post detailed personal information, are also a boon for this sort of marketing. Many young people don't realize that when they add a corporate page as a friend, or add an advergame to their profile, they are allowing companies complete access to their personal information.

[1] Alberta Teachers' Federation. "Beyond the Bake Sale: Exposing Schoolhouse Commercialism." ATA Magazine: Volume 87 2006-7, Number 2.
[2] Media Awareness Network (2005). Young Canadians in a Wired World: Phase II Student Survey. http://www.mediasmarts.ca/sites/default/files/pdfs/publication-report/full/YCWWII-student-survey.pdf
[3] Google AdSense Case Study. https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/NeoPets.html
[4] Grabianowski, E. How NeoPets.com Works. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/neopet3.htm

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There is little doubt that marketers love kids. With a collective spending power of over three billion dollars, and the potential to influence billions more in family spending, [1] marketers are keen to establish brand recognition and brand loyalty with children at increasingly younger ages.

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Advertising to Kids isn't just Good. . . .its GRRRREAT!

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Advertising to Kids isn't just Good. . . .its GRRRREAT!

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Advertising works even when we know someone is trying to manipulate us into buying commemorative coins, banana slicers, and anything ever sold in an inflight magazine. And it works even better on kids, who may not understand they're being pitched.

In perhaps the best proof yet that advertising has frightening power over children, researchers have shown that a little marketing can convince kids to eat their vegetables. A new study, out of Cornell, found that 239 percent more students chose salad in a lunchroom when the salad bar was covered with pictures of vegetable cartoon-characters and nearby TVs played videos with those same characters - you know Brian Broccoli, Suzy Sweetpea, and the rest of the Super Sprowtz - extolling the virtues of veggies.

"The results of this study highlight how the persuasiveness of marketing media can be leveraged in a positive way by encouraging children to make more nutritious choices," said Drew Hanks, the study's lead author and a professor at Ohio State University, in a statement.

Yes, it's a bit creepy that advertisements - even good ones - can hack the minds of children, but the sooner we get over the idea that we always act rationally the better. Once we accept that our environments influence our actions we can use that knowledge to encourage the good influences and shut down the bad, like marketing junk food to toddlers.

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Advertising to kids isn't good, it's grrreat!

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Advertising works even when we know someone is trying to manipulate us into buying commemorative coins, banana slicers, and anything ever sold in an inflight magazine. And it works even better on kids, who may not understand they're being pitched.

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Companies are Good at Advertising to Kids

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Companies are Good at Advertising to Kids

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And this is increasing constantly.

I've got some alarming facts and stats that I've provided in this concise little guide that only takes a few minutes to read. The goal is to spread awareness.

How Kids Influence Purchases

Why is so much of this advertising being directed towards kids? There are three primary reasons:

1. Kids are vulnerable

2. The companies want to build brand loyalty early on

3. As mentioned above, kids are a major influence on family purchases

Kids are broken down into three markets by advertisers:

1. Primary Market - Kids consuming with their own money

2. Influence Market - Kids affecting parents' purchases

3. Future Market - The things kids will buy when they grow up

The influence market may go deeper than you think. There's actually a thing called "pester power," which refers to a kid's ability to pester their parents into buying things, whether for them or for the family.

"We're relying on the kid to pester the mom to buy the product, rather than going straight to the mom"
-Barbara A. Martino, Advertising Executive

This pestering comes in the forms of:

Persistence Nagging - A persistent plea that is repeated by the children until the parents give in

Importance Nagging - Guilting the parents into providing what's "best" for their kids (according to the advertising firms)

Kids influence more purchases than we may like to admit...

"The minivan was created, for example, because children demanded more room. Then they decided the three-door behemoth was uncool, helping give rise to the SUV. Every auto manufacturer has a strategy to target children, [James McNeal, a market researcher who specializes in the children's market] adds." -Kim Campbell and Kent Davis-Packard

How much do your kids influence your purchases?

It doesn't stop there. Advertisers market directly to kids because they know children are future potential customers. And they know that brand loyalty starts at a young age.

Kids and Brand Loyalty

Barbies don't specifically carry Visa cards to be "realistic." Visa endorses those products strategically.

Advertisers don't start with your barbie-loving 7-year-old. The messages start much earlier.

Babies can start forming mental images of logos they've seen, which leads to subconscious brand loyalty early on - as young as two years old, according to New Dream (formerly The Center for a New American Dream).

Source: Fast Food FACTS

"As children reach the age of 4-5 years, they typically perceive a categorical distinction between commercials and programming, but primarily on the basis of affective ("commercials are funnier") or perceptual ("commercials are shorter") cues only." -American Psychological Association

The advertising companies think this practice is perfectly fine.

It's obvious that we can't rely on others to protect our kids from advertising, just like how we can't rely on others to teach our child about finances. But what can we actually do?

As with so many other things, intentional parenting busts in the side door to fight the good fight. It's our best defense mechanism.

Before we go into exactly how you can protect your kids, one more thing must be addressed: the dangers of unmonitored media consumption.

It's Not Just About the Ads

It wouldn't be reasonable, helpful, or even possible to shelter your kids from all forms of advertising (unless you live in a commune), but you can do your best to be intentional about what your children are viewing.

Be intentional about what your kid sees, because you can't take it back after they've seen it. Especially look out for websites like YouTube. I have no problems with YouTube as a whole. It's a legitimate company, and I've spent some of the best unexpected 4-hour blocks of my life scrolling through their endless "related videos." But you must know what you're subjecting your kids to, if you allow them free rein.

It's not just ads you have to worry about on YouTube. There have actually been scary accounts of videos created specifically for children with inappropriate themes and images.

As far as marketing goes, extended sessions on TV or YouTube will guarantee hundreds of ads in front of your kid's face. We've got to monitor what they're watching. This isn't just about "adult content," it's about indoctrination by all of these companies.

How to Protect Your Kids

There is one way you can help your kids, and it's really the only way to have an impact: teach them how advertising works. Teach your kids why they may want the toys, products, and food they think they want.

Show them some examples of advertising - especially when it's right in front of you. When they see an ad and want a product because of it, use that as a teachable moment to explain how marketing companies are targeting them.

It's perfectly fine for your children to want toys or other things they see in advertising. I'd be more concerned if they didn't. But it's important to help your kid make their own decision, without the help of some multi-billion-dollar advertising company.

To get a jump start on educating your kids about the media, advertising, and marketing, there's a great resource. Media Smarts created a short workbook that explains advertising and marketing to kids interactively. You can check it out here.

Further Book Reading

Over to You!

How has advertising affected your children?

Do you think it's ethical to market directly to kids?

What's the most shocking study or fact in this article?

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Alarming Studies That Show How Advertising Affects Your Kids (And How to Protect Them)

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Kids have the largest influence in what and where your family eats, entertainment choices, family vacations, and many other aspects of your life, according to a study on homes in Canada. Advertisers not only know this, they exploit it.

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Advertising Targets Our Children Very Well

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Advertising Targets Our Children Very Well

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I always wanted somewhat cynical children, at least where advertising and proselytizing are concerned. That is, I wanted my children to grow up alert to the silken, studied salesmanship of those who want your trust but are not really your friends.

I grew up in the era of unfettered television advertisements for tobacco. I remember all the jingles - but I also remember the welcome cynicism of Mad Magazine parodies in which gravestones discussed the great taste of cigarettes and Hitler endorsed them as terrific mass murderers.

In serious discussions of advertising today, I sometimes miss that harsh humor. Researchers have long focused on the effects of cigarette and alcohol ads on children - and more recently, on the effects of subtler marketing through product placement in movies and TV shows. Studies show that advertising does help push children and adolescents toward unhealthy behaviors, but also that it is increasingly difficult to shield them as marketers exploit the Internet and social media.

In a study published last month in the journal Pediatrics, Jerry L. Grenard, a health researcher at Claremont Graduate University, and his colleagues followed almost 4,000 students from seventh through 10th grades, assessing their exposure to alcohol advertising on television and asking about their alcohol use.

A large body of literature shows that advertising does increase the odds of underage drinking, Dr. Grenard noted. But his new results take the concerns a step further. "This study linked exposure to alcohol advertising to an increase in alcohol use among adolescents and then that in turn is associated with higher level of problems with drinking alcohol, getting drunk, missing school, getting into fights," he said.

Adolescents who see alcohol advertising are being sold something that we would prefer them not to consume in any amount. Food advertising raises different issues, since children will certainly eat and will certainly have - and express - food preferences.

Jennifer Harris, the director of marketing initiatives at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, told me that television advertising remains very important in the ways that foods are marketed to children. According to the center's data, every day on average in the United States, children and teenagers see 12 to 14 food ads on television.

But parents may not realize that their children are also subjected to messages from advertisers coming in from other directions.

"They have Web sites with reward programs. They're advertising on other Web sites, social media - Facebook is huge - Twitter, mobile marketing, mobile apps," Dr. Harris said. Many children are playing "advergames" online, for example, intended to promote products. Parents may be completely unaware, she said.

And what are they marketing to children? According to Dr. Harris, the top four products are fast foods, sugared cereals, sugary drinks and candy.

Thomas Robinson, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, has studied childhood obesity and its links to screen time. In experiments with preschoolers, he told me, "even a 30-second exposure to a novel product, one that you've never seen before, changes their preferences for brand."

In another study, researchers looked at the effects of branding by giving 3- to 5-year-olds two portions of identical foods, one set out on a McDonald's wrapper. The children were asked to point to which foods tasted better and, Dr. Robinson said, "overwhelmingly, for hamburgers, French fries, baby carrots, milk or juice in a cup, kids would say the one on the McDonald's wrapper tastes better."

Up to the age of 7 or 8, children are thought to be unable to understand the nature of advertising - developmentally, they can't identify the underlying persuasive intent.

Older children may have a better understanding of commercials, but they are vulnerable in other ways.

"Coke is the most popular brand on Facebook," Dr. Harris said. "It has 58 million fans." When adolescents "like" Coke, they receive posts every day, which they may then "share" with friends.

"That whole tapping into the peer relationship that kids of that age have is, we think, very deceptive," Dr. Harris said. "They don't necessarily recognize that it's advertising and also very manipulative."

What can parents do? With young children, the most important strategy is probably to reduce screen time, and the number of messages, and to keep track of what they're seeing when they do watch TV.

And when a child asks for something, parents should not simply refuse. "Respond, 'Well, why do you want that? Where did you hear about it?' " said Dr. Robinson. And if the answer is that the child saw it on TV or on the Internet, "Say, 'Well, they want you to want it, they're trying to sell you that.' And then have a discussion."

And what about my aspirations of nurturing young cynics? Though teaching critical viewing skills does enhance children's awareness, Dr. Robinson told me that relying too much on notions of media literacy can actually play into the hands of the advertisers.

"That takes the responsibility away from them and puts it on the kids to be educated consumers," he said.

Know what your children are watching. Watch with them. Talk about what you see - the images on billboards or on touchscreens, the Super Bowl commercials, the Web sites they visit.

In an information-rich world, we need to know the messages children are receiving, and help them decode and understand what the world is trying to sell them.

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I always wanted somewhat cynical children, at least where advertising and proselytizing are concerned. That is, I wanted my children to grow up alert to the silken, studied salesmanship of those who want your trust but are not really your friends. I grew up in the era of unfettered television advertisements for tobacco.

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Advertising: how it influences children and teenagers

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The ability to spot advertising and understand how adverts work is an important life skill for kids and teens. You can help your child develop this skill.

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Picture this: You're searching the Internet and come across a website with interesting articles. Some are news stories. Their goal is to share information. Others only look like news stories. They're actually advertisements, or ads. The goal of an ad is to get you to buy something. How do you, the reader, tell the difference between a news story and an ad?

Back when I was growing up, it was easier. We got most of our information from newspapers. Big news stories appeared on the front page, and ads were boxed off and clearly labeled. But on the Internet, the two are often presented together. It can be hard to tell which is which.

That's why the research group I direct conducted a study. (MediaWise is a collaboration, funded by Google, between the Stanford History Education Group, the Poynter Institute, and the Local Media Association to address issues of digital literacy × digital literacy SIDEKICK-GETTY IMAGES a person's ability to use digital technology to find, evaluate, and express information (noun) By using the Internet to do research for your homework, you are improving your digital literacy. .) My research team showed kids like you the home page of a popular digital magazine. We asked them to tell us what was a news story and what was an ad.

Most were great at identifying certain types of ads. "It has a coupon code, a big company logo, and the words limited time offer," one student wrote about an ad on the site. So where did kids get stumped?

Some ads seem identical to real news stories. They have headlines and contain information. But they may also include the words sponsored content. Sponsored means "paid for," and content refers to the information in the story. "Sponsored content" is a way of saying that something is an ad. Most kids in our study, even if they used the Internet often, didn't know this.

Just because something is sponsored doesn't necessarily mean it's false. It means someone paid money for it to appear. Companies pay so that readers will see their stories, buy their products, and like what the company stands for.

As a reader, you have a right to know who's behind the information you're consuming. So look for the phrase sponsored content. (And look carefully. Sometimes, it will be written in tiny letters.) The Internet is a vast sea of information. To use it well, we not only have to know how to swim but also how to avoid the sharks. Learning to tell the difference between an ad and a news story is an important step to becoming Internet-smart.
Sam Wineburg is a professor at Stanford University, in California.

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Picture this: You're searching the Internet and come across a website with interesting articles. Some are news stories. Their goal is to share information. Others only look like news stories. They're actually advertisements, or ads. The goal of an ad...

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By Common Sense Media | June 4, 2020

It seems as though kids absorb advertising through the atmosphere, but it's actually more calculated than that. Companies spend about $17 billion per year marketing to kids, and they make use of every available space -- from television to the Internet to clothing to food to books -- to establish a bond between consumers and products.

Sure, you can attribute some brand awareness to your kids' friends, other families, and relatives. But rest assured that the long arm of marketing never rests in its efforts to reach your kids. You may never buy My Little Pony dolls, let your kids drink Coke, or watch Sponge Bob SquarePants. But just look at some of the ways advertisers get these products in front of your kids' eyes:

Sheer volume. Kids age 2 to 11 see about 25,600 TV ads per year -- and that number doesn't account for advertising online, in print, or elsewhere. Repetition of ads also is highly effective at grabbing attention.

Product placement. The glasses of Coke placed in front of the judges on American Idol are the perfect example. In 2008, Coca-Cola accounted for 15 percent of all product placements that occurred on television and 70 percent of all placements viewed by children.

Branded accessories. Characters from movies, TV shows, games, and popular toys are emblazoned on all kinds of products, including backpacks, bed sheets, sneakers, and sippy cups.

Books. Brands license characters, products, and toys from TV shows, movies, and games to publishers.

Marketing in schools. Marketing extends even to schools. In fact, most kids get exposed to food and beverage marketing at school.

Food marketing. Lego Eggo Waffles, Sponge Bob SquarePants-shaped Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and even the Pillsbury Dough Boy all are designed to get kids' attention.

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How do my kids know about brands and products I've never bought?

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How do my kids know about brands and products I've never bought? - Learn more and get Common Sense Media's research-backed tips.

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Food companies engineer junk food to make it addictive. They label their products to make them seem much healthier than they are. And their advertisements target children.

All of this is according to a news report read recently by students in a Texas middle school. They were taking part in an experiment run by the University of Chicago and the University of Texas. "I don't understand how this is even legal," said a girl who took part in a similar study.

Researchers had students learn about food-industry advertising tactics × tactic JOSE LUIS PELAEZ INC./GETTY IMAGES a strategy (noun) We had a meeting to discuss a tactic for the group homework assignment. . They wanted to know if learning about them would change how kids feel about junk food. All over the world, kids are eating more foods that are high in salt, sugar, and fat. That is partly the result of clever ads that make junk food irresistible.

Christopher J. Bryan led the study. He says that when kids question the motives × motive injustice × injustice IMAGE SOURCE/GETTY IMAGES a reason for doing something (noun) Jason's weekly allowance is his motive for washing the dishes. behind junk-food ads, they feel like they're fighting DARRIN KLIMEK-GETTY IMAGES something that is unfair or morally wrong (noun) It was an injustice when the man was sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. . "The reward is knowing you're doing the right thing," Bryan told TIME for Kids.

Message Matters

Junk food has been linked to health problems such as heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. But in 2017, food companies spent nearly $9 billion on TV ads selling unhealthy fare.

Companies use varying tactics. An ad with cartoon characters may make cereal seem fun to eat. A professional athlete enjoying a sugary drink may make it look cool. Advertisers know that if kids want a product, they'll bug their parents to buy it. "You want the pester factor," says Marion Nestle, a professor of public health at New York University. Even parents don't notice the power of ads, she says: "By the time you're an adult, you're used to junk-food advertising. You just don't see it."

In the Texas study, Bryan had students view ads on an iPad. Their job was to write or draw on the screen, to make each ad's message true. For example, a McDonald's ad showed a Big Mac and the words "The thing you want when you order salad." To the end of the sentence, a student added "should be salad."

The results of Bryan's Texas study were published in April. They showed that three months after analyzing ads, students were still choosing healthier snacks: milk instead of sugary juices, fruit over cookies. "Kids are becoming conscious of themselves as agents in the world," Bryan says. "They see a chance to make the world a better place."

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Food companies engineer junk food to make it addictive. They label their products to make them seem much healthier than they are. And their advertisements target children. All of this is according to a news report read recently by students...

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Advertisements can have a lasting impact on children. They prompt children to mimic stunts and make them believe in exaggerated product outcomes. If you want to learn about the effects of advertisements on children, this post is for you.

Children remember advertisements as they are constantly broadcast on television and other media channels. This may lead to various mental and physical complications. In this post, we talk about how advertisements affect your children and how to deal with them.

Negative Effects Of Advertising On Children

According to the American Psychological Association, an average child is exposed to more than 40,000 TV commercials a year. Studies also suggest that children can recall the content after a single exposure to a commercial and may express a desire to buy the product (1).

Thus, it is imperative to understand the impact of advertising on children. Although the adverse effects of watching advertisements may outweigh the positives, not all advertisements are bad, and some could positively influence children.

First, let us consider the negative effects of advertising on children.

1. Influences their buying decisions

Research suggests that children who watch too much television are likely to demand more toys or other products. Until they are teens, children would not be able to identify advertisements as marketing messages, meaning they could perceive these messages and exaggerations as truths and demand to buy those products. In some cases, these ads can stay with them until they become adults (2).

2. Provokes tobacco and alcohol consumption

Advertisements on alcohol and tobacco can have significant repercussions on children and teens. Tobacco and alcohol advertising often targets the vulnerabilities of youth, presenting them as the key to improving self-image and independence, thus provoking children to consume them.

3. Causes eating disorders

Advertisements commonly use young and beautiful women to promote beauty products. It has become a norm to use only fair-skinned women, creating the stereotype that fair skin is beautiful and acceptable in society. Similarly, some ads perpetuate the stereotype that a slim body is healthy and beautiful. Such ads might make children conscious of their appearance and develop a negative body image. These might also lead to eating disorders, such as bulimia or anorexia.

4. Develops materialistic feelings

The constant bombardment of advertisements might dictate every moment of your child's life, and before you realize it, they may begin to define themselves by what they have and what they don't for who they are. This personality change can create a void in their lives, and they may try to fill it with materialistic things.

5. Beguiles children to try dangerous stunts

Advertisements often contain false claims or exaggerated content with the intent to attract consumers and grab their interest. Children who are naive may believe them to be true and try to imitate dangerous stunts at home. Although these are accompanied by a statutory message, they are generally overshadowed by the advertisements' pomp and show.

6. Causes obesity

One of the contributing factors behind childhood obesity is advertising. According to the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, food companies spend almost $11 billion on TV advertising annually (3). Furthermore, a study conducted in Brazil found that 50% of the advertising directed towards children is related to food, and 80% of those are unhealthy foods high in sugar, fats, and salt (4). Advertisements present the wrong notion that consuming a specific drink or fast food makes children successful or happy.

Under the influence of such ads, children tend to demand to buy more unhealthy foods, leading to obesity.

7. Develops negative feelings

Advertisements usually mock or compare products to show how one product is superior or better than the rest. Children might get influenced by these commercials and start comparing themselves with their peers or believing they are either superior or inferior to the rest. Such behavior may either lower their self-confidence or make them feel superior to others.

8. Influences them to resort to impulsive buying

Brands usually create advertisements with a persuasive intent so that the users buy their products. By repeatedly watching these ads, children might resort to impulsive buying even when they do not need the product.

9. Influences them to like high-end and expensive things

Under the influence of advertisements, children might develop a liking for high-end and branded clothes, shoes, and other products. They may even develop a disregard towards other brands that offer products of the same levels of utility but are not featured in ads.

10. Provokes violence and aggressive thoughts

Some advertisements may contain violent and aggressive content geared toward adults. But when children watch these, they might misinterpret them and resort to bullying or demeaning peers or siblings. Such negative behaviors developed in early childhood may stay with them into adulthood.

Positive Effects Of Advertisements On Children

Advertisements can also benefit children in different ways. Here are a few positive effects of advertising on children.

Advertisements help children gain knowledge about the various new products and innovations in the market.

Some advertisements spread awareness about road safety, risks of consuming tobacco and alcohol, etc. Such advertisements educate and warn children about the dangers of such activities.

Some advertisements also help influence children to eat healthily and exercise regularly.

Meaningful advertisements that promote hygienic habits, dental hygiene, etc., might help inculcate good habits in children.

Advertisements with strong messages, such as helping the elders and saving water, can positively impact children and give them a sense of responsibility.

The first and foremost thing to do is limit their television viewing time. Keep a cap on their screen time, and do not allow it to go beyond the stipulated time at any cost.

Encourage them to go out and play with friends for an hour or two daily. This will help divert their minds from the Internet and advertisements.

Introduce educational channels, such as Discovery and Animal Planet, and encourage them to watch these more often.

Sit with them while they are watching television. This way, you can explain and educate them to differentiate between good and bad content.
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When a child demands a certain product after watching an advertisement, instead of giving in, you need to explain and show them the ill effects of advertising and how it affects them.

If your children are entering their teenage years, educate them about the ill effects of consuming alcohol and tobacco.

Talk to children about the value of things and encourage them to practice minimalism. Once they understand the value of money, they might not get attracted to fallacious advertisements.

Although the cons outweigh the pros, you can reverse it by following a systematic approach and limiting your child's exposure to advertisements. Here is how you can do it.

What Can Parents Do?

Parents play a key role in negating the harmful effects of advertising on children. It is in their hands to prevent their children's minds from getting influenced. Nowadays, advertisements are not limited to television but permeate the Internet, online games, and even school books and supplies. Therefore, parents need to be extra cautious and limit their children's exposure to advertising.

The effects of advertisements on children can be negative and positive. Children are exposed to various advertisements while watching their favorite programs on television, and these ads may influence their desire for products and buying decisions. Some advertisements stereotype skin color to sell skin brightening products, which can impact the mental well-being of children with dark skin. Ads promoting alcohol, tobacco products, soft drinks, and packed and junk foods may make the children feel they are good and often influence their choices. Some ads can be positive and promote products to gain knowledge and improve health. So, it is your responsibility to explain the details of advertisements to your children so they can differentiate between good and bad.

References:

MomJunction's articles are written after analyzing the research works of expert authors and institutions. Our references consist of resources established by authorities in their respective fields. You can learn more about the authenticity of the information we present in our editorial policy.

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15 Positive & Negative Effects Of Advertisements On Children

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Advertisements can have a lasting impact on children. They prompt children to mimic stunts and make them believe in exaggerated product outcomes. If you want to learn about the effects of advertisements on children, this post is for you. Children remember advertisements as they are constantly broadcast on television and other media channels.

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Millions of dollars are spent every year by the advertising industry on ads that target children. Young audiences are bombarded with persuading messages through media such as the Internet, television, magazines, billboards, radio, etc.

According to research, an average child is exposed to over 40,000 commercials through TV every year (1). One study even alleges that in the U.S., children are spending more time watching TV than they are in school, meaning that they are viewing more advertisements.

For decades, a part of the free market form of society has been advertised to children and it must be comprised as another part of a complex engine of the economy that works tirelessly to give everyone a better lifestyle. Advertising to children helps in generating jobs, putting money into the economy and instilling the importance of the freedom to choose at a young age. It also helps in developing a child's ability to comprehend the value of money and teaches them that a person can achieve anything if they have the will to pay the price.

Television Advertising To Children:

As far as advertising goes, the biggest impact made on children is through television. According to a recent study, children spend about 4.5 hours every day watching TV (2). This means that they are bombarded with advertisements daily and the truth is that not even the top researchers know how they may be being influenced by these ads. How children react to them depends on a number of factors including their age, what they have experienced or know and how much opportunity they have had to ask questions and discuss what they see in the media.

Research suggests that when children watch more television, they are likely to want and demand more toys or other products. It is also suggested that they may notice ads more when they watch television on their own. According to a national survey of children's TV-watching behavior in 2010, 72 percent reported that they had no restrictions on the amount of time they could watch TV and 52 percent reported that they had the freedom to watch any type of content they wanted (3).

Studies have found that children do not have the ability to skeptically view marketing messages or even identify advertisements as marketing messages until they are in their teens. This means that marketing messages can be perceived as truths, and in many cases, those messages can stay with them until they become adults.

New research has shown that when companies advertise to children using characters or mascots, the brand becomes a loved one and the feeling that the product is healthy and wholesome can stick right to adulthood. This is despite the fact that the product is neither healthy nor wholesome. This is known to even apply to "line extensions", which are new versions of the product that are launched by the same brand. That advertising can have lingering effects that hamper an adult's ability to change their opinion of brands that are not healthy because they loved them as children.
[ Read: Effects Of Television On Children ]
Advertising And Alcohol And Tobacco Consumption Among Children:

Over the years, there have been a lot of research on alcohol and cigarette ads and their effect on children. More recently, there have been more subtle marketing strategies with the placement of certain products in films and TV shows. Studies show that advertisements can push unhealthy behaviors in children and adolescents. They also show that it is becoming increasingly difficult to protect them as companies market their products by exploiting the Internet and social media.

According to experts, the odds of underage drinking are increased by advertisements. A recent study showed that exposure to alcohol advertising is linked to an increase in adolescent alcohol use and this in turn is associated with higher levels of problems such as alcohol drinking and getting intoxicated, getting into fights and missing school. Through alcohol advertising, adolescents are being sold a commodity that they should not consume in any amount.

Food Advertising And Children:

According to research, children and teens in the U.S. see an average of 12 to 14 food advertisements on television every day (4). Experts say that TV advertising plays a very important role in how foods are marketed to children. However, parents may not realize that advertising messages are also being relayed to children from other directions.

Advertisers have reward programs on their websites and they are also advertising on other websites and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, mobile apps and more. There is a huge number of ways that children are exposed to advertising. As they become increasingly tech-savvy, advertisers find better ways to get their messages across to young minds. For instance, there are "Advergames" that can be played online which are used to promote products (5).

So what is being marketed to children? According to experts, the top four products that advertisers are marketing are fast foods, sugary drinks, sugared cereals and candy (6). Studies on childhood obesity and its connection to screen time have shown that exposing a preschooler to a novel or new product for even just 30 seconds can change their preference for a brand. In another study, the effects of branding were looked at and 3 to 5 year olds were given two portions of identical foods. One portion was given in McDonald's wrappers. When asked to point out which foods tasted better, the children said that the ones with the McDonald's wrappers were better (7)

Fast or junk foods are one of the most commonly seen ads on television with pizzas, burgers and other delicious-looking foods being shown on screens every few minutes. Children see fit-looking adults munching on various junk foods and assume that they are healthy as they do not understand the concept of advertising. Research has found that consumption of fast foods has increased among children due to these ads. In fact, they have been so influenced by them that consumption of these unhealthy foods and snacks has almost doubled (8).

The rising popularity of fast foods and snacks has led to an increase of obesity, heart problems, diabetes and other serious health issues among children. This is a major problem, especially in developing countries where advertisers are targeting young children and teenagers. As mentioned, young, healthy-looking models are used, hiding the fact that these foods are some of the unhealthiest in the world. With so many such ads, bombarding television screens and children, it is time to start addressing the issue.

Sexual Content In Advertisements:

Many advertisements these days use beautiful young women to attract buyers. This will no doubt have a seriously negative effect on how children think. From chocolates to clothing, almost every ad seen is sexual in nature. Children then think that they need to look that way to be accepted. Or that is how they should behave to be popular. Children both young and teenagers have a negative perspective and this affects them in many different ways.

Young girls today have major body issues due to the images they see on TV, magazines, etc. They are told that they have to look a certain way to be accepted in society. If they are not slim or fair or beautiful, they are unpopular and will not make any friends. They also think that if they do not look or act sexy like the women on TV, they will not be accepted. On the other hand, so-called "pretty" girls look down on their counterparts based solely on their looks. These are some of the effects of the ads seen today.

Young girls can also become body conscious due to the ads that depict popular women as being slim and sexy. The fact is that no matter where one looks, there are always beautiful women with the perfect bodies and faces marketing products. Due to their desire to look like such women, girls can develop eating disorders like bulimia, anorexia, etc. (9) These can be extremely dangerous and even cause death in some cases.

Objectification of women is another serious issue that is brought on by advertisements. Children of all ages learn to objectify women as a result of the sexually-charged advertisements that are often seen today whether it is on television screens or magazines. Women are shown as being sex objects to sell a product, creating a negative impact on the minds of young children.

As children are not monitored as much as they should be, they are exposed to sexually-explicit images that affect how they think about women, their bodies as well as others.(10) This is why parents need to take charge of what their children watch or see. They also need to be able to talk to them about various topics like how appearance is not the most important thing in a person's life and how they do not need to be "sexy" or "hot" to be liked and loved by others.

Negative Impact Of Advertisements On Children:

Although there are some positive effects of advertising on children, the fact is that advertising can also have many negative effects on young minds, especially if parents are not careful and do not teach their children that money is important. In many cases, the messages in the ads are misinterpreted and it results in children having the wrong beliefs about a large number of issues. Advertising influences their minds, creating a need for them to own the product they see. Flashy ads on TV, magazines, the Internet and other forms of media only generate impulse buying.

Parents who are unable to deal with increasing demands or temper tantrums have a tendency to give in to their children's demands. This result in children getting used to the kind of lifestyle that is shown on television and other media forms. This creates the wrong impression on young minds that they will not be able to live a life that does not come with certain material things. Thus, it is certainly true that the power of advertising effects on children is one that cannot be ignored easily.

Some of the negative effects of advertising on children include:

Advertisements encourage children to their parents to buy the products they see in commercials, regardless of whether they need them or not and whether they are useful or not. Many throw tantrums and use different tactics to force the adults to get them what they want.
[ Read: Effects Of Social Media On Children ]
As mentioned earlier, children are likely to misinterpret the messages that are conveyed in commercials. Studies have shown that they also tend to focus on the negatives rather than the positive side of the messages.

Flashy commercials and ads on TV, the Internet, magazines, etc. create a tendency for impulse shopping (11).

Children tend to get attracted to high-end brands that advertise clothes, shoes and other products and disregard lesser-known ones that are not seen in ads.

Many advertisements seen today involve dangerous stunts which children try to imitate as they do not understand the statutory warnings that come with the ads.

With so many attractive commercials, marketing junk foods and unhealthy beverages, children's health has been adversely affected. These ads encourage unhealthy eating, which in turn has led to an increase in obesity, diabetes, heart problems and other conditions in young children (12).

Child advertising may impact self-esteem, making them feel inferior to other children if they do not have the latest products that are seen in commercials.
[ Read: Effects Of Mobile Phones On Kids ]
Sexually suggestive ads are everywhere these days. This makes children objectify women and also allows them to think that looking or acting a certain way is the only way to make friends or be popular. These ads also make young girl's body conscious and in many cases, can cause eating disorders like bulimia, anorexia, etc.

With more commercials targeting children, reality and fantasy do not seem too different. This can cause a lot of confusion among children, distorting their sense of reality.

Increasing Efforts:

According to experts who have been studying the effect of advertising on children, psychologists can help parents and their children get smart to the various strategies that advertisers use, particularly in schools. In fact, even as advertisers use schools as venues for marketing products, very little research has explored whether these ads in schools create a distraction for students from learning or increase the pressure on them to buy the advertised products.

Experts say that psychologists are required to help educators address and try to solve this problem. For example, they can help in creating interventions for media literacy so that children can be helped to understand the persuasive intent of advertisements. Psychologists can help in mounting public-information campaigns so that parents, teachers and legislators can have a better understanding of these issues (13).

In the past few decades, advertising has gone through tremendous changes as it has increasingly targeted younger audiences. One such change is the use of the Internet to reach children in subtle ways, including through the games they play. In many cases, users are not even aware of the effort and undertaking of advertisers and marketers (14). Highly sophisticated advertising methods are used to reach children. However, experts say that there is virtually no research on how Internet interactivity is used to reach these younger audiences.

There are an increasing number of parents who support the use of psychology to find out the effects of advertising on children and curbing them. No doubt parents are concerned about how advertisements are affecting their children. Their children make unreasonable demands due to the ads they see - new toys and unhealthy foods that they should be avoiding. These situations are extremely difficult for them to handle.

There is a material shift that is happening in society and this shift is having a major impact and an enormous influence, which are psychological in nature, on the lives of children. This requires the attention of psychologists as they may be the most help in showing the true nature of advertisements for children and their effects and society as a whole.

What Can Parents Do?

The first thing recommended by experts is reducing screen time (15). This way, parents can reduce the number of messages that young children are exposed to. Parents are also urged to keep track of what their children see when they are given time to watch television.

Also, parents should not simply refuse when their children ask for something. They should ask them why they want that particular product and where they saw or heard about it. If they answer that they saw it on television or on the Internet, they should be told that the advertisers want them to want it and that they are trying to sell the product to them. This can lead to further discussion about advertising and how they work on the masses.
[ Read: How To Get Your Child Into Modeling ]
The advertising effect on children can be limited. As mentioned, young children often believe what they are told by advertisements and do not have the ability to understand the difference between the TV show they are watching and advertising messages.

It is important for parents to limit the amount of commercial TV that their children watch (16). If they have a favorite TV show, a great way to ensure that they are not exposed to the commercials in between is to record it for them. They can also buy DVDs of those favorite shows, thus limiting their TV screen time and exposure to advertisements.

For children who are at school-age, it is important for parents to talk to them about the ads. Children should be encouraged to think about what all these advertisements are trying to say. The focus should be put on ads that children see most often, whether it is when they watch television or ads in brochures and magazines. There are two questions that parents should ask their children and that can get them thinking:

What is being advertised? Parents should help their children identify the product that is being advertised and most importantly, the product information (17). For example - what is the product? What is its purpose?

What are the strategies advertisers are using to sell the product? Parents should help their children figure out how the advertisement is making the product more attractive (18). This helps in making the point that not everything that is seen on TV can be believed, especially when it comes to ads. It will help children develop a questioning attitude towards the claims that advertisers make.

As mentioned earlier, with people becoming more open sexually, more and more advertisements are using sexually suggestive strategies to attract buyers. Children see these images on their TV screens, computers and magazines and it will undoubtedly have an effect on their young minds. It is important for parents to not only monitor their children's screen time, but talk to them about what they see as well. Children do not know the difference between an ad on TV and reality, so it is crucial that they understand that what they see on TV is not really how people act (19). They have a tendency to mimic what they see and that is why parents need to be careful of what they are exposed to.

The goal should be to help children figure out the difference between the product information and the strategies used by advertisers to sell the product. To make sure that children process ads critically, they need to learn how to discriminate between content that is commercial and non-commercial and identify the persuasive intent of the advertisement.

With so many advertisements popping up on TV and computer screens, magazines, billboards, etc., it is important to ensure that the images that children are being exposed to are monitored (20). Also, it should be reiterated that screen time should be kept to a minimum at all costs. There are many things that parents can do to ensure that the various marketing strategies used by advertisers do not have a negative effect on their children. The best thing that they can do is encourage children to go out and play, read, play indoor and outdoor games and socialize (21). Once they realize that they do not have to be glued to the TV to have a good time, they will spend less screen time and be less exposed to ads.

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9 Negative Side Effects Of Advertising On Children

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Millions of dollars are spent every year by the advertising industry on ads that target children. Young audiences are bombarded with persuading messages through media such as the Internet, television, magazines, billboards, radio, etc. According to research, an average child is exposed to over 40,000 commercials through TV every year (1).

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How to Teach Your Kids to Be Smart Consumers

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How to Teach Your Kids to Be Smart Consumers

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how to teach your kids to be advertising-savvy consumers - cnn

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How to teach your kids to be ad-savvy consumers

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Helping kids understand how advertising works can help protect them from being exploited. Use these tips to help your kids develop strong media-literacy skills so they can become informed consumers.

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How Schools Can Teach Kids to be Smart Consumers

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How Schools Can Teach Kids to be Smart Consumers

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Most financial literacy efforts in schools don't improve people's behavior later in life. That could be because we're focusing on the wrong things.

Trying to teach teenagers how to shop for a mortgage, for example, may be an exercise in futility. The information simply isn't relevant to them - yet. By the time they are ready to buy a home, the loans available and the rules surrounding them may have changed.

Instead, we should be teaching kids the habits that make savvy consumers. These four skills make a difference regardless of someone's circumstances or the economic climate:

Skepticism

Smart consumers need to think critically about the advertising, offers and advice that bombard them every day. They need to look beyond surfaces to determine what's really being sold to them, and why.

"We need to ask, 'What is the motivation of the entity that's giving me this information?'" says Josh Golin, executive director of the advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

Some people are unnerved by the idea of teaching skepticism to children, worrying that it could foster distrust, inaction and negative thinking.

"Not all marketing is deception and not all advisors are people only eager to take your money," says financial literacy expert Annamaria Lusardi, economics professor at the George Washington University School of Business.

Others, including the nonprofit financial literacy advocate Foolproof Foundation, say healthy skepticism can be taught in an age-appropriate way that helps young people feel empowered rather than paralyzed.

"I don't think we can teach 6-year-olds skepticism, but by the time children are in middle school they're able to understand the concepts of persuasive intent and self-interest," Golin says.

Discernment

Research and comparison shopping may be second nature to the financially savvy, but they're skills like any other that need to be learned - and many adults don't have them, says financial literacy expert and Rutgers University professor Barbara O'Neill.

O'Neill emphasizes the "rule of three" in her financial literacy courses. O'Neill has students research three credit card offers, for example, comparing the interest rates, penalty rates, fees and rewards for each, and evaluating which might be best for their particular situation.

The exercise gives students practice in comparison shopping, but also gives them a handy rule of thumb for other decisions.

"Whether they're hiring a plumber or buying a car, they need to check at least three different sources," O'Neill says.

Planning

Being able to anticipate setbacks and challenges is as important as setting goals. People who plan ahead for large, irregular expenses are 10 times as likely to be financially healthy as those who don't, according to a 2015 study by the Center for Financial Services Innovation, a nonprofit that promotes financial health.

Financial literacy education often focuses on goal-based planning, such as budgeting for retirement or a down payment, or saving a set amount for emergencies, notes John Thompson, CFSI chief program officer. That's important, he says, but perhaps not as relevant to early-stage workers as building financial flexibility into their lives.

Schools can teach the importance of having access to lower-cost lines of credit, such as a credit card with a reasonable interest rate, in addition to savings. Too often cash-strapped young people turn to payday lenders and other high-cost credit because they haven't planned for the unexpected, Thompson says.

"You want to make sure you have access to the tools and products you need before a problem presents itself," Thompson says. "When you have to act immediately, your options are fewer."

Saving

A regular savings habit is also associated with financial health, the CFSI study found. The act of saving is more important than the amounts, Thompson says.

"A few hundred dollars can really make a difference," he says.

Regular doesn't necessarily mean automatic. People who automate their savings, through paycheck contributions to 401(k)s or recurring transfers from their checking accounts, do tend to save more. But automation requires relatively stable finances, something millions of Americans don't have, O'Neill points out.

"People with these volatile incomes can't do anything automatically," O'Neill says. "They need the flexibility to juggle."

Some start-ups are betting that smarter apps can help, either by helping people save or invest small amounts (Digit and Acorns are examples) or by smoothing out incomes using savings and payday advances (Even). Schools can teach kids to do something similar by tracking the ups and downs of their incomes, and saving when they have surpluses.

"When you have the peaks, that's when you save," O'Neill says.
This article was written by NerdWallet and was originally published by The Associated Press.

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How Schools Can Teach Kids To Be Smart Consumers

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Most financial literacy efforts in schools don't improve people's behavior later in life. That could be because we're focusing on the wrong things. Trying to teach teenagers how to shop for a mortgage, for example, may be an exercise in futility. The information simply isn't relevant to them - yet.

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Introduction

James Hansen, 5, can't read yet, but he has no problem identifying the logos of his favorite products. For a recent homework assignment, the kindergartner had to list all the words he knew by sight. As his mother, Barbara Brabec, of Studio City, California, held up food items and toy boxes, James began shouting out their names. In no time, they had filled a notebook page with brands he recognized, including Cheerios, Legos, Lunchables, and Skippy. At that moment Brabec realized just how much her son is influenced by marketers. "I was amazed by how many product names he knew," she says.

She shouldn't have been. Young children are bombarded by advertisements -- on TV, on buses and billboards, in stores, and even at school. In fact, according to James U. McNeal, Ph.D., author of The Kids Market: Myths and Realities, the average child recognizes more than 200 logos by the time he enters first grade.

While preschoolers were once seen as having a limited effect on their parents' purchases, they are now widely viewed as little people with big buying influence. Companies spend an estimated $14.4 billion annually to advertise and promote their products to your kids, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. And it's working. A 1999 study revealed that children become brand-conscious as early as age 3, and half ask for specific brands by age 5.

"They're not just grocery-store pants-pullers anymore," says Anne Sutherland, author of Kidfluence: The Marketer's Guide to Understanding and Reaching Generation Y -- Kids, Tweens, and Teens. "Young children today play an important part in making family decisions on everything from cars to vacations."

Kids are highly attractive to marketers for several reasons. First and foremost, they've got their hands in your pockets. Whether you call it the nag factor or the power of pestering, children sway parents' decisions to the tune of $290 billion annually. "McDonald's was one of the first companies to recognize that most family dining-out decisions are influenced by children," says Christie Nordhielm, Ph.D., an assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. That realization led to the introduction of Ronald McDonald and, later, the wildly successful (and imitated) Happy Meals.

Nor is it just your money your kids are spending. Children ages 4 to 12 shell out an estimated $35.6 billion of their own cash annually, more than four times what they did a decade ago. They may not have huge allowances, but what they do have is highly disposable.

And since many companies feel the brands kids connect with now will be the ones they'll stick with in the future, they're not just selling kid stuff. For instance, General Motors, in part because boys form impressions of cars at an early age, now sponsors a Test Track ride (including a display of future vehicle designs) at Walt Disney World's Epcot Center. And Home Depot offers a toy tool set designed to imprint its brand on youngsters.

"Marketing is teaching young children to be active consumers," says Linda Gulyn, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at Marymount University, in Arlington, Virginia. And that lesson is coming before they're capable of making informed decisions. "Until about age 6, a child doesn't recognize that an ad is intended to persuade him to want something," Dr. Gulyn says. "Preschoolers are very trusting of adults and other authorities. They believe what they hear and see is real and true."

Commercial Consequences

Television advertising is the most powerful way marketers reach kids. On average, a child spends four hours in front of the tube each day and views as many as 40,000 commercials per year.

Often, as Amy Kite, of Glencoe, Illinois, prepares dinner for her family of five, Benjamin, her 4-year-old son, will yell for her to come see an ad for a product he wants to buy. Lately, he's been fascinated by commercials for Hot Wheels cars and Lucky Charms cereal. (In the grocery store recently he asked, "Are these the ones with the new bigger marshmallows?")

Through focus groups and psychological research, companies are constantly studying how children think so they can maximize the impact of their messages. Using cartoon characters like Tony the Tiger and the Trix Rabbit has long been viewed as an effective selling and brand-building strategy. "Animated characters send a signal to children that this is their world, so they should listen," Sutherland says.

A more recent marketing twist: using characters from your kids' favorite programs -- Dora the Explorer, Blue's Clues -- to sell toothpaste, books, yogurt, macaroni and cheese, and more. Brands are also establishing product partnerships (think Kellogg's Disney Mickey's Magix cereal) that strengthen both brands.

The latest marketing escalation is McDonald's plan to introduce a licensed McKids line of clothing to be sold at Wal-Mart, as well as toys, educational videos, and books that both Target and Toys "R" Us will carry.

A growing number of companies are even marketing directly through schools. Toys "R" Us, Petco, and Sports Authority are among those participating in a cooperative called Field Trip Factory, which arranges to have kindergartners and grade-schoolers visit their stores. And then there is Channel One, which brings educational TV programming -- along with paid commercials -- to more than 8 million American students.

"There's almost no place where something isn't being sold to our children," says Diane Wood, executive director of the Center for a New American Dream, a Takoma Park, Maryland, advocacy group whose goal is to help Americans resist excessive consumerism.

And parents are concerned: A poll conducted by the center showed that almost 80 percent of respondents think marketing pressures kids to buy products that are unhealthy or too costly; seven out of ten say such advertising is bad for their kids' values; and almost two thirds of parents say that their children define their self-worth in terms of possessions and that the problem has worsened over time.

A Bad Rap?

While it's easy to see the downside of marketing to kids, critics tend to dismiss positive examples of the practice. A number of companies, for instance, use advertising money to support educational children's shows -- like Sesame Street and Clifford the Big Red Dog.

Strong brand association among preschoolers also has its pluses for parents. Amy Kite notes that Oral-B Stages Buzz Lightyear toothpaste and a Reach SpongeBob SquarePants toothbrush make her son, Benjamin, 4, excited to brush his teeth. And Dora the Explorer underpants and an Elmo potty seat made toilet-teaching her daughter, Emily, 2, a lot simpler. "It's as if I've got a whole team of characters on my side to get my kids to do things they might otherwise resist," she says.

Detractors argue that the way these characters are being used to sell products is exploitative. Advocacy groups are also up in arms about commercialized classrooms, saying children shouldn't have to sift through advertising messages to get to educational ones.

Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a lobbying group cofounded by Ralph Nader, says commercials aimed at kids under 12 should be banned outright, as has been done in Norway and Sweden. That's just one provision of the Parents' Bill of Rights he's lobbying to Congress. Among the bill's other objectives: to prohibit marketers from tracking kids' purchases; to eliminate all forms of school advertising; and to require that companies reveal all money paid to have their products appear in films and on TV shows.

"We're trying to prevent this commercial culture from subverting the values of our kids," Ruskin says.

Commercial Alert has already helped pass a law requiring parents to be notified about all market research being done at their kids' schools, and it has pushed individual school districts to remove junk-food vending machines. But while public support for the Parents' Bill of Rights is on the rise, the proposed legislation has yet to be introduced by Congress.

In the meantime, parents have an unlikely ally in their fight against inappropriate ads: the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU), which is funded by the marketers themselves as a means of self-regulation. CARU makes sure advertisements targeted at children don't make misleading claims or misrepresent a food product's nutritional value. The organization recently challenged a Sunny Delight spot that showed the bottle breaking through a concrete block, arguing that young kids might believe that the drink conveys great strength. The company promptly agreed to alter the content of the commercial.

CARU director Elizabeth Lascoutx says the watchdog group boasts a compliance rate of 95 percent. "No industry segment wants to get labeled as harming children, and that's partially what drives participation in our system," she says.

The Message Starts at Home

Despite such symbolic victories, kid-directed marketing remains a lucrative, powerful, and fast-growing business. The primary burden of regulating its impact remains with busy parents, who must find the time to teach children the difference between want and need, explain the mainpulative role of commericals, and above all, stand up to their kids' constant demands for products.

Christina Kwik, a mother in San Diego, is doing her best to raise discerning consumers. She makes it a policy to stand firm about what to buy when she's in the supermarket, even if it means fending off tantrums from her children, Stephanie, 7, Monica, 5, and Kevin, 3. Kwik also tries to instill values by reading books such as The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies to her kids.

Moderating her children's wants, though, is an ongoing battle, as it is for every parent. It's a fundamental impulse to try to make your child happy whenever possible, and everyone caves from time to time.

"Sometimes when my 3-year-old son, Rob, says 'I want french fries at McDonald's,' I say okay, because I just don't have the energy to deal with it," says Lauren Monti, a mom from Chicopee, Massachusetts.

Giving in to commercial-driven desires on occasion is not such a bad thing, Dr. Gulyn concedes. However, she points out that making snap decisions out of convenience can make it a lot tougher to refuse a child's product requests in the future. "As a parent, it's critical to maintain your ability to say no to products that don't serve the best interests of yoru children."

Tips for Raising Kids in a Commercial Culture

The Center for a New American Dream offers these tips for raising a child in today's commercial culture.

Consume responsibly. Remember that you're a role model for your child. Speaking wistfully about things you wish you had will reinforce the idea that material goods make for a better life.

Educate him about ads. By age 6, your child should be able to understand the manipulative purpose of a commercial. Explain the difference between want and need, and ask what he thinks he'll gain by having a product he desires.

Set limits. If you feel a product is dangerous or wasteful, explain why to your child.

Cut back on television. The fewer commercials your child watches, the less impact they'll have.

Talk to other parents. It's easier to resist a child's lobbying efforts when you know how other parents handle similar situations.

Set an allowance. Encourage your child to stash money in a piggy bank. Your child will appreciate a toy more once she buys it.

Focus on the nonmaterial. Make time for simple activities that stimulate the imagination, like playing outside, reading, and drawing.

Take action. Contact companies whose ads you think are inappropriate.

Copyright © 2004 Margaret Magnarelli. Reprinted with permission of Parents magazine March 2004 issue.

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Teaching Kids About Money: How Corporations Turn Our Kids Into Consumers

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Marketers invest more than $14 billion a year to turn little children into huge consumers. And it's working: your preschooler already knows the products he wants -- and how to nag you to buy them. Can parents avoid raising material girls and boys?

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American Psychological Association. (2004, February 20). Advertising and Children. https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/advertising-children

Introduction

Advertising is hardly a recent human endeavor; archaeologists have uncovered signs advertising property for rent dating back to ancient Rome and Pompeii. Town criers were another early form of advertising. As an industry, advertising did not take off until the arrival of the various mass media: printing, radio, and television. Nevertheless, concerns over advertising targeting children preceded both radio and television. The British Parliament passed legislation in 1874 intended to protect children from the efforts of merchants to induce them to buy products and assume debt.

Commercial appeals to children, however, did not become commonplace until the advent and widespread adoption of television and grew exponentially with the advent of cable television, which allowed programmers to develop entire channels of child-oriented programming and advertising. Opportunities to advertise to children further expanded with the explosive growth of the Internet, and thousands of child-oriented Web sites with advertising content have appeared in the past few years.
Compounding the growth in channels for advertising targeting children has been another development: the privatization of children's media use. A recent study found that a majority of all U.S. children have televisions in their bedrooms. Many children also have unsupervised access to computers, meaning that much of the media (and advertising) content that children view is in contexts absent parental monitoring and supervision.

These two trends-the growth in advertising channels reaching children and the privatization of children's media use-have resulted in a dramatic increase in advertising directly intended for the eyes and ears of children. It is estimated that advertisers spend more than $12 billion per year to reach the youth market and that children view more than 40,000 commercials each year. These figures represent dramatic increases over those from the 1970s.

The Task Force on Advertising and Children, responding to its charge, began by reviewing research on the impact of advertising on children, 2 with particular attention given both to the implications of children's cognitive development for understanding the potential effects of exposure to advertising and to specific harms that might result from exposure to advertising. There is a substantial body of scientific evidence addressing all of these basic issues. In contrast, concerns about advertising that have emerged as a result of new and changing technological capabilities, such as interactive forms of advertising and commercial Web sites targeting children, have yet to attract almost any empirical study. Consequently, our research review and conclusions are largely confined to more traditional advertising approaches, although we identify the issues in need of further research investigation within our final recommendations.

Cognitive Development and Advertising

Two important information processing tasks are required for any person to achieve a mature understanding of advertising messages. First, the individual must be able to distinguish between commercial and noncommercial content. In other words, an individual must be able to differentiate the ads from the programs. Studies of children indicate that those below the ages of 4-5 years do not consistently distinguish program from commercial content, even when program/commercial separation devices ("GoBots will be back after these messages") are used. As children reach the age of 4-5 years, they typically perceive a categorical distinction between commercials and programming, but primarily on the basis of affective ("commercials are funnier") or perceptual ("commercials are shorter") cues only.

The second essential cognitive task involved in a mature comprehension of advertising is the ability to recognize the persuasive intent of advertising and to apply that knowledge in the child's understanding of the advertising message. In other words, mature persuasive intent comprehension involves not only the recognition that the advertiser has a perspective different from the viewer and that advertisers intend to persuade their audience to want to buy their products, but also that such persuasive communication is biased, and that biased messages must be interpreted differently than unbiased messages.

Basic developmental research on egocentrism and perspective taking, along with a great deal of evidence specifically examining developmental differences in the comprehension of persuasive intent within advertisements, establishes clearly that most children younger than 7-8 years of age do not recognize the persuasive intent of commercial appeals. However, there is far less research examining whether and at what ages children begin to appreciate that advertising messages are inherently biased or on when children begin to develop strategies to counteract the bias within these messages. It is clear that both of these abilities are dependent upon the child's development of the ability to understand the persuasive intent of advertising, meaning that mature comprehension of advertising occurs no earlier than age 7-8 years on average. Further investigation is needed to establish the upper age boundary of children who are uniquely vulnerable to televised commercial persuasion as a function of normative developmental limitations on their information-processing capabilities. Nonetheless, a key conclusion of the task force, which is supported by a strong base of empirical evidence, is that young children below 7-8 years of age clearly lack an understanding of the persuasive intent of television advertising.

The Effects of Advertising on Children

The task force reviewed research addressing two important types of questions regarding the effects of advertising on children. First, does advertising affect children's commercial recall and product preferences? If not, the $12 billion spent annually by advertisers in commercial appeals to children would represent a surprisingly poor investment. Second, does exposure to advertising result in consumption of products that are inimical to the health and well-being of children? For example, does advertising play a role in the overconsumption of candy and sugared cereals or in underage drinking of alcoholic beverages?

Research on children's commercial recall and product preferences confirms that advertising typically achieves its intended effects. A variety of studies using differing methodologies find that children recall content from the ads to which they've been exposed. Product preference has been shown to occur with as little as a single commercial exposure and to strengthen with repeated exposures. Most importantly, studies have shown that product preferences affect children's product purchase requests and that these requests do influence parents' purchasing decisions.

The more fundamental concern regarding the effects of advertising on children relates to questions of potential harm resulting from exposure. A variety of research findings are relevant to this issue. Several studies, for example, have found that parent-child conflicts occur commonly when parents deny their children's product purchase requests that were precipitated by advertising. Considerable research has examined advertising's cumulative effect on children's eating habits. Studies have documented that a high percentage of advertisements targeting children feature candy, fast foods, and snacks and that exposure to such advertising increases consumption of these products. While consumption of nonnutritious foods per se may not be harmful, overconsumption of these products, particularly to the exclusion of healthier food, is linked to obesity and poorer health. Several studies have found strong associations between increases in advertising for nonnutritious foods and rates of childhood obesity.

A variety of studies have found a substantial relationship between children's viewing of tobacco and alcohol ads and positive attitudes toward consumption of such products. Children find many such commercials attractive (e.g., Joe Camel, the Budweiser frogs) and consequently have high brand awareness of such products and positive attitudes toward them. These products and their spokes-characters have been found to be featured in programming and publications frequently viewed by minors, and reviews of this research (including the Surgeon General's analysis) conclude that advertising of them contributes to youth smoking and drinking.

Critics have also expressed concern regarding the prevalence of advertising of violent media, such as movies and video games, targeting children. Three reports by the Federal Trade Commission found considerable support for such charges, and while studies have not directly assessed the impact of such advertising, it is highly likely that such ads do affect children's media preferences.

Schools and Commercialism

The TFAC gave special consideration to commercialism in the schools for two reasons. First, children spend a considerable amount of their childhood in school settings, and because school attendance is compulsory, children have little freedom to avoid any commercial content they are exposed to in schools. Second, it is conceivable that commercial content delivered in schools may be assumed to have the tacit endorsement of respected teachers and school officials, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of the advertising.

Several recent analyses have summarized the extent and growth of advertising and other marketing activities in schools, including an important study by the U.S. General Accounting Office. Advertising and marketing takes several forms: direct advertising in school classrooms (via advertiser-sponsored video or audio programming), indirect advertising (via corporate-sponsored educational materials), product sales contracts (with soda and snack food companies), and school-based corporate-sponsored marketing research. Several of these advertising and marketing activities have been pursued aggressively by schools as a source of additional revenue, but these activities have generally been greeted critically by those outside school systems.

What surprised the task force was the dearth of research on commercialism in the schools. We found only two empirical studies that addressed in-school commercialism issues, one a content analysis of ads and the other a study of the effect of school-based ads on product-related attitudes and preferences and materialistic attitudes. Given the widespread nature of these advertising practices, along with their potential impact on consumer attitudes and behaviors and students' educational attitudes and achievement, it is perplexing that so little research has been conducted to date.

Public Policy Implications

Research indicates clearly that advertising exerts substantial influence on children's attitudes and behaviors, and these effects go well beyond moving product desire from one brand to another. More specifically, the evidence points directly to one fundamental concern: that advertising targeting children below the ages of 7-8 years is inherently unfair because it capitalizes on younger children's inability to attribute persuasive intent to advertising. As a result of this limitation, children below this age comprehend the information contained in television commercials uncritically, accepting most advertising claims and appeals as truthful, accurate, and unbiased. Until fairly recently, advertisers tended to view children in this age range as off limits as advertising targets, but industry practices have changed as new developments in media technology have facilitated greater degrees of age-niche programming and related advertising.

Concern over the fairness of targeting such young children is not a new development. Research on the issue dates back to the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, the Federal Communications Commission considered a proposal to ban advertising to audiences of young children but settled on a more modest approach: limiting the amount of advertising time within children's programming and restricting certain advertising practices likely to make it more difficult for children to make attributions of persuasive intent. Later in the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission also considered banning all television advertising to young children, citing exactly the type of developmental research the task force reviewed. Congress, responding to television and advertising industry pressure, forced the FTC to abandon this proposal by threatening the agency's funding. While the FTC did drop its effort to restrict advertising to children, it stated in its final order that the issue of advertising to young children is one that should remain a public concern, given the compelling body of scientific evidence documenting young children's unique vulnerability to commercial persuasion. Since that time, the advertising industry has recognized the sensitivity of these issues in its own self-regulatory advertising guidelines, but this code is exceedingly vague, compliance is completely voluntary, and enforcement is not actively pursued.

In our view, the psychological evidence we have reviewed holds critical implications for public policy. The strength of the research documenting young children's limited ability to recognize and defend against television advertising has improved substantially since the 1970s, when both the FCC and the FTC seriously considered, although ultimately eschewed, broad-based restrictions on advertising targeting audiences of young children. We believe that the accumulation of evidence on this topic is now compelling enough to warrant regulatory action by the government to protect the interests of children, and therefore offer a recommendation that restrictions be placed on advertising to children too young to recognize advertising's persuasive intent. The implementation of such a policy would place the United States in good company, alongside such countries as Australia, Canada, Sweden, and Great Britain, which have already adopted regulations prohibiting advertising on programs targeting audiences of young children.

Implications for the Field of Psychology

There are three areas in which the task force considered implications of the evidence reviewed for the field of psychology (PDF, 617KB), including the role of psychologists as researchers, educators, and the applied professional practice of marketing research.

While research psychologists have already established the cognitive limitations of younger children's comprehension of advertising messages, there are many important areas where further investigation is needed. Nearly all research on advertising to children involves studies of television, leaving us with little empirical knowledge about other commercial forms and contexts. For example, we know virtually nothing about how children recognize and defend against commercial messages delivered in new media environments, such as the Internet. We know virtually nothing about new interactive advertising strategies being employed on the World Wide Web. We have no clear indication whether advertising delivered in school environments is more influential, less influential, or indistinguishable from advertising delivered in other contexts or whether allowing advertising in the schools exerts adverse effects on young people's esteem for educational institutions. There is also a surprising paucity of research on the role of gender, race, ethnicity, and culture on the perception and comprehension of advertising as well as the ways in which they might influence responses to advertising. Given that advertisers develop ad campaigns to reach child audiences segmented by gender, race, and ethnicity, there is a clear need for research on these topics. Obviously, there is much of importance yet to be learned from psychological research in these topic areas, and thus it is an appropriate time for the field of psychology to reinvigorate the examination of how children understand and are influenced by contemporary advertising strategies and messages.

Psychologists can also play important roles in educating their students, clients, and people in the communities they serve regarding the types of concerns raised in this report. Education, in the form of media literacy, may assist parents and older children to consider the influence of advertising in their lives more seriously and to take actions protecting them from unwanted commercial influence. It should be noted, however, that the task force did not place great emphasis on media literacy strategies for addressing the concerns about advertising to young children for two reasons. First, there is limited research documenting the efficacy of media literacy training in protecting young children against advertising effects, and this vacuum corresponds with strong theoretical grounds for expecting that such training cannot overcome the cognitive limitations of younger children in this realm. More research is needed before one should invest much faith in media literacy as a principal means of combating commercial persuasion targeting young children, although older children might be expected to benefit more productively from such efforts. Second, it was the sense of the task force that an overreliance on media literacy as a key strategy for defending against advertising effects is misdirected and places too great a responsibility on children. All too often we see calls for interventions designed to "world proof" the child when we would be better off relying on strategies that offer protections for children, in this case from advertising deemed to be unfair and potentially harmful to children. An over-reliance on media literacy could, in this instance, be tantamount to blaming
the victim.

Finally, the growth in marketing efforts targeting children has seemingly fueled an increase in the industry's use of applied psychologists working as marketing researchers or consultants to enhance the persuasive effect of child-oriented advertising campaigns. Given the well-established limitations on children's ability to recognize and defend against commercial persuasion, such efforts raise sensitivities that warrant careful consideration by the field and particularly by those individuals involved in such practices, especially in those cases when younger children are targeted by advertisers. If it is unfair to direct commercial persuasion to audiences of young children, then it would seem to be equally unfair to employ psychological theory and research evidence to more effectively accomplish persuasive outcomes in young child viewers, at least insofar as the promotion of applied commercial interests are concerned. While drawing lines in this realm may be challenging, careful consideration is warranted to insure that psychologists hold faithful to their mission to benefit their research subjects, their clients, and the society at large.

I. PUBLIC POLICY

Restrict Advertising Primarily Directed to Audiences of Young Children
We recommend that television advertising be restricted during programming directed to or seen by audiences primarily composed of children 8 years of age and under.

State Advertising Disclaimers So They Can Be Understood by the Intended Audience
We recommend that advertising disclaimers in children's programming be stated in language children can understand and be aired in both audio and video for a time length conducive to reading, hearing, and comprehending.
II. PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Conduct Research on the Changing Contexts and Modes of Advertising Practices
We recommend that psychologists conduct research on what is new and what is different in advertising that targets children and adolescents, and consider its implications.

Investigate Ad Processing/Effects in Interactive Media Environments
We recommend that psychologists actively investigate how young children comprehend and are influenced by advertising in new interactive media environments such as the Internet and the
World Wide Web

Study the Development of Understanding of Persuasive Intent in More Sophisticated Fashion With Children Older than 8 Years of Age
We recommend that psychologists renew their investigation of the age at which children come to fully comprehend the persuasive intent that necessarily underlies all television advertising.

Study the Role of Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Relationship to the Psychological and Social Effects of Advertising on Children
We recommend that psychologists examine whether the psychological processes involved in the understanding of persuasive intent, as well as the impact of exposure to advertising, vary in relationship to gender, race, ethnicity and culture.

Conduct Research on Media Literacy
We recommend that psychologists conduct media literacy research to assist in the development of effective curricula for students at different grade levels.
III. APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY
Provide Public Education
We recommend that psychologists who are knowledgeable about the effects of advertising on children and youth be encouraged to communicate with parents and professionals who work with children and youth.

Support Continuing Education
We recommend that APA support continuing professional education (CPE) programs for psychologists on media literacy, with particular attention paid to issues related to media advertising and marketing to children.

Weigh Professional Practices Associated With Advertising to Children
We recommend that APA undertake efforts to help psychologists weigh the potential ethical challenges involved in professional efforts to more effectively advertise to children, particularly those children who are too young to comprehend the persuasive intent of television commercials.
IV. INDUSTRY PRACTICES
Encourage More Rigorous Industry Self-Regulation
We recommend that the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus publicize its guidelines more widely so that parents and others can call to its attention deviations from the guidelines.
V. MEDIA LITERACY
Develop Media Literacy Curricula
We recommend that psychologists take a central role in developing and implementing effective advertising media literacy curricula for all school grade levels from 3rd through 12th.
VI. ADVERTISING AND SCHOOLS
Restrict School-Based Advertising That Targets Young Children
We recommend that advertising in all forms should be restricted in school environments serving children 8 years old and under.

Conduct Research on Effects of School-Based Commercial Practices
We recommend that psychologists engage in research on the impact of advertising and commercialism in schools.

Advocate Professional Collaborations
We recommend that APA collaborate with other professional and educational organizations to raise public, professional, and political awareness with respect to the increased commercialization of schools.

Chair: Brian Wilcox, PhD

Joanne Cantor, PhD

Peter Dowrick, PhD

Dale Kunkel, PhD

Susan Linn, EdD

Edward Palmer, PhD

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apa task force on advertising and children

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American Psychological Association. (2004, February 20). Advertising and Children. https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/advertising-children Advertising is hardly a recent human endeavor; archaeologists have uncovered signs advertising property for rent dating back to ancient Rome and Pompeii. Town criers were another early form of advertising. As an industry, advertising did not take off until the arrival of the various mass media: printing, radio, and television.

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By Common Sense Media | June 4, 2020

Advertisers know that the earlier kids learns about a brand, the more likely they'll be to buy the product later (or beg their parents to buy it). Marketing to preschoolers mostly entails commercials on television (or streaming services), since television is still the dominant medium for young children.

As for preteens, advertisers spend many billions of dollars per year making sure their products get in front of their eyes, and they have more places to capture their attention: television, the Internet, games, movies, apps -- you name it. Advertisers also know that kids greatly influence their parents' buying decisions, to the tune of $500 billion per year. The most significant aspect of marketing to preteens, though, is that now they can talk back. Although companies are limited in the data they can collect from kids under 13, they can still gain insights into their behavior and preferences.

Finally, teens are one of the most important demographics for marketers. Their brand preferences are still gelling, they have money to spend, and they exert a strong influence on their parents' spending ( even on big-ticket items such as cars). Because 25 percent of teens access the Internet through mobile devices, companies are targeting them where they hang out: in apps, in games, and on websites that stream music and video and offer other downloadable content. Teen-focused brands use a combination of traditional marketing techniques and new communication methods to influence product preferences.

Methods marketers use to reach young kids:

Hooking them young. Getting the product in front of a target audience as much as possible strengthens a company's ability to capture consumers " from the cradle to the grave." Think cartoon characters on diapers.

Dividing and targeting genders. Brands try to establish a preference for gendered toys as early as possible. The sooner your child has a desire for "boy" toys or "girl" toys, the sooner he or she becomes a customer. That opens the door for even more gendered products.

Developing taste preferences. Junk-food marketing to kids is a $2 billion-per-year industry. Cartoon characters appear on cereal boxes, toys appear inside boxes, and characters shill for brands on TV -- for example, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head advertise potato chips. And it works.

Methods marketers use to reach preteens:

The need for stimulation. If you're wondering why commercials for tweens look like they were filmed by a caffeine-addled jackrabbit, it's because tween brains crave -- and respond strongly to -- stimulation. If something is exciting, they take notice.

The desire to engage. Brands bury their sales pitches to this age. Preteens are swayed by experience, not lectures -- hence games, apps, contests, and other interactive gimmicks to attract and hold their attention.

The craving for emotional connection. If you have a tween, you know that kids at this age are not entirely rational. They LOVE a specific dress, they MUST HAVE a particular song, they're OBSESSED with a certain game. Marketers use strategies that stir up emotions so kids identify with a product.

Methods marketers use to reach teens:

Exploiting insecurities. Brands appealing to teens take advantage of their particular vulnerabilities: the desire to fit in, to be perceived as attractive, and to not be a huge dork. Teens are extremely attuned to their place in the peer hierarchy, and advertising acts as a kind of "super peer" in guiding them toward what's cool and what's acceptable. Both teen boys and girls are highly susceptible to messages around body image, and marketers use this to their advantage.

Tracking data. Once kids turn 13, companies have little restrictions over marketing to them and collecting their data. The information they collect isn't personally identifiable -- it's far more valuable. Tracking teens' digital trails helps companies precisely determine their tastes, interests, purchase histories, preferences, and even their locations so they can market products to them or sell that data to other companies. Talk to teens about using privacy settings and understanding what information they're unwittingly giving to companies.

Using peer influence on social media. Advertisers actively enlist teen followers on social media to market products. You can find this in online stores such as J. Crew's, where you can share items you like with friends. Many brands encourage teens to broadcast their interactions with brands (such as uploading pics of themselves with a particular purse, drink, or outfit). These techniques reinforce the idea that brands "make" the person, and it's essential to help teens realize that their self-worth is not determined by what they own (or don't own).

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What is the impact of advertising on kids?

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By Common Sense Media | June 4, 2020 Advertisers know that the earlier kids learns about a brand, the more likely they'll be to buy the product later (or beg their parents to buy it). Marketing to preschoolers mostly entails commercials on television (or streaming services), since television is still the dominant medium for young children.

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Product placement lives on today, as companies place their products in movies in the hope that filmgoers will buy what they see onscreen. But which cases of product placement in the movies have really worked? Click ahead to see 10 of the most notable product placement success stories.

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The next time you're out at the movies with the kids, be aware of all those products being "innocently" promoted throughout the film. A new study by the Hood Center for Children and Families at Dartmouth Medical School has determined that the placement of food products in movies, which for the record are not unintentional, could in fact have a negative impact on the health of your children.

Most of the products used in movie scenes are foods and beverages that are high in calories and low in nutrition. In other words, they're just downright bad for you and your kids. And while the decision to consume these products ultimately lies with the individual (or his or her parent), product placement in movies may in fact a more effective way to encourage consumption than previously recognized, especially when it targets children.

The current findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, highlight the difficulties in promoting healthy diets in American children, which has declined substantially in the past two decades. By some estimates, only 1% of the children in this country eat a diet that is consistent with the Food Pyramid established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

This situation is evident when examining foods prevalent in the American diet, which is filled with highly processed foods high in fat, salt and sugar, in combination with an absence of fresh fruits and vegetables. These eating patterns are considered to be a major contributing factor in the obesity epidemic plaguing this country.

The controversy behind food advertising that targets children is nothing new, and has been well studied over the years. However, the effect that advertising in movies has on a child's preferences for food and beverages has not been studied as extensively, especially when compared to television advertising.

Product placement on TV shares many similarities to its big screen counterpart, in that they both tend to promote unhealthy choices and major brand names, but there are some important differences as well. On the one hand, TV ads during adolescent programming tend to focus on fast food and ready-to-eat cereals, while movies seem to favor sweetened beverages (especially soda pop), which accounted for nearly 1 in 4 brand placements.

These advertising strategies appear to be geared towards older children and teenagers, who are at a stage in their lives where they're beginning to assert themselves and make their own decisions independent of parental advice and oversight, especially where food choices are concerned. The authors note that while the true impact of movie advertising is not clearly known, it could very well provide a viable way for advertisers to encourage brand loyalty at a particularly vulnerable period in a child's life, thus setting them down the path of unhealthy eating, along with the many adverse consequences that go with it, including obesity.

Obesity has become one of the most pressing public health issues affecting this country, especially in children.

over the past two decades, obesity rates have doubled in children between the ages of 6 to 11 years

during that same time period, obesity has tripled in adolescents between the ages of 12 and 19 years

30% of kids eat fast food every day

20% of preschool children are obese, as are 30% of children as a whole

obesity can lead to self esteem issues and marginalization by their peers

obese kids are four times more likely to suffer from depression

obesity predisposes children to chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes

Healthy diet choices begin at home, and parents need to set precedents for their kids early on. With the hectic world that we live in, convenience can often take the place of sound eating decisions, making it all the more important for parents to take the team to encourage healthy eating and to practice what they preach.

For more information about healthy eating, visit MyPyramid.com, sponsored by the USDA. For more information about obesity, check out the websites for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Product Placement In Movies Influences Children

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The next time you're out at the movies with the kids, be aware of all those products being "innocently" promoted throughout the film. A new study by the Hood Center for Children and Families at Dartmouth Medical School has determined that the placement of food products in movies, which for the record are not unintentional, could in fact have a negative impact on the health of your children.

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Breaking Gender Stereotypes in the Toy Box (Published 2018)

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What toys children play with can influence the skills they learn and the possibilities they see for themselves.

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Sparkle Unicorns And Fart Ninjas: What Parents Can Do About Gendered Toys

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Toys are more pink and blue than ever before, experts say. But before you ban the sparkle unicorns and foam-dart blasters, consider other ways to help kids expand their play possibilities.

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Advertising to Kids is a Tricky Business

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Advertising to Kids is a Tricky Business

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The tricky business of advertising to children

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As Subway launches a multi-million-dollar healthy eating ad campaign aimed at kids, is marketing to children harmful or a useful tool for teaching critical analysis?

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What the Research Says: Gender-Typed Toys

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What makes a good toy for a young child? NAEYC asked two researchers about what their work tells us about toys, children, and play.

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4 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

It is not often that a lone, 7-year-old girl can influence the strategy of the largest toy company in the world. Yet that is what seemingly happened when Charlotte Benjamin's plea to the Lego Company for more girl figurines was published and shared on Twitter.

The letter derided Lego for creating all the exciting builder kits for boys, including sets where "boys went on adventures, worked, saved people ... and even swam with sharks," while all of the female sets only had girls that "sit at home, go to the beach, and shop."
Related: Lego to Release a 'Female Scientist' Mini-Figure Set
Just a few weeks after the letter went viral, Lego issued a response, stating, "We have been very focused on including more female characters and themes that invite even more girls to build." Just a few months later, the company released Research Institute, a play set created by geophysicist Ellen Kooijman.

Whether the letter directly influenced Lego (probably not) is unknown and unimportant. At the heart of this issue is the need for toys that bridge the gender gap, a topic that in my industry has generated a tremendous amount of consideration.

According to Richard Gottlieb, of Global Toy Experts, a world-renowned consultancy and resource for toy-industry insight, the shift in public opinion on the matter is clear, but companies are not seeing the light. Gottlieb polled a number of leading scholars, thinkers and industry experts about the need for more gender-neutral products in 2010, and this is what he found:

96 percent agreed that math and science toys can improve a child's educational success. Sets include chemistry kits, build-your-own-volcano kits and more.

78 percent believed that these math and science toys are not being developed and marketed to girls.

59 percent believed that the toys children play with have an impact on their eventual career choices.

83 percent believed that the packaging and color scheme of a toy will affect the likelihood that a child will play with a particular toy.

74 percent believed that playing with toys that foster nurturing as a child can impact one's ability to be a better parent or caregiver in life.

83 percent thought that there was an absence of toys that foster nurturing for boys.

A majority agreed that math and science toys can improve a child's educational success.

While the data clearly shows the perceived impact of specific types of toys and the influence they yield on children, large companies are very slow to incorporate the findings into product development. This would explain the overwhelmingly pink-themed girl aisles.
Related: Introducing Entrepreneur Barbie
This means opportunity for forward thinking entrepreneurs. Small businesses are perfect candidates for taking advantage of the void being created by the quickly changing cultural preferences, accelerated greatly by STEM promotion and young girls such as Charlotte, to create more gender-neutral products.

One shining example of a company that has done well in this void is Goldieblox, a toy company on a mission to inspire the next generation of female engineers. Goldieblox founder Debbie Sterling is a talented and intelligent young entrepreneur who, against the grain, graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and product design.

She was bothered by how few women were in her program and eventually became obsessed with the notion of "disrupting the pink aisle" with a toy that would introduce girls to the joy of engineering at a young age.

Her idea is clearly popular. Goldieblox successfully raised over $285,000 through a crowdfunding campaign and later went on to raise an undisclosed amount through angel investors. The company even won a valuable 50-second commercial spot during the Super Bowl.

Companies are catching up. Lego continues to develop toys that cross the gender gap, and even Hasbro, after another viral appeal by a 13-year-old boy, introduced a purple "Easy Bake Oven" to be less girl-focused. The progress is slow, however, and not just in toys. As our cultural continues to shift and our preferences become more refined, the question will be: Who is going to step up and fill the void?

What do you think? Are more gender neutral products needed? Do they influence your opinions of companies or how you shop? Please share your thoughts below.
Related: A Netflix for Legos - Building a Startup Brick by Brick

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The Hidden Opportunity: Toys That Bridge the Gender Gap

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4 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. It is not often that a lone, 7-year-old girl can influence the strategy of the largest toy company in the world. Yet that is what seemingly happened when Charlotte Benjamin's plea to the Lego Company for more girl figurines was published and shared on Twitter.

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Megan Perryman's 5-year-old daughter was browsing toys in a store. She picked up a toy recorder and her expression quickly changed as if she had done something wrong. "Oh no," she said. "I've got the boys' one!"

In her own childhood, Perryman didn't feel limited to only playing with "girls'" toys. She says boys and girls in the UK in the 1980s played with Transformers, princesses, knights-it wasn't a big deal if the toy was pink or blue. Back then, she says, there weren't signs up in toy stores telling her which toys were made for "girls" and which were made for "boys." Perryman is now one of the leading voices in Let Toys Be Toys, a UK-based campaign that pushes retail stores to stop marketing their toys toward only girls or only boys.

In 1960, only 11 percent of households in the U.S. with children under 18 had the mother as the primary or sole breadwinner. Today, a recent study reports, a record-breaking 40 percent of them do. With traditional gender roles in the labor force slowly fading away, it would make sense to see more gender-neutral advertising today: boys playing with toy oven sets, girls playing with toy trucks, etc.

But children's toys are arguably more gendered now than ever before.

If you've been to a store that sells toys in the last decade, you've already seen it:Toys today are often separated into blue and pink sections for "boys'" toys and "girls'" toys. "Boys'" toys tend to involve aggression, such as toys that make punching or crashing sounds, while "girls'" toys often revolve around beauty and domesticity.

Lego, which for years marketed mainly to boys, recently launched a line of pastel-colored toys called "Lego Friends" in an attempt to appeal to girls. Unfortunately, Lego ended up making toys that suggested girls are only interested in baking, decorating houses and getting their hair done at a salon while boys like working construction and saving damsels in distress.

The gendering of toys has carried on into the age of the Internet. The Disney and Toys "R" Us online stores, for example, have a separate sections for boys and for girls.

Elizabeth Sweet, who researches gender and children's toys at UC Davis, says toy advertisements actually appeared to be the least gendered around 1975. She says,

At the height of the women's movement, these ideas about gender division were being challenged in ways that are no longer as successfully challenged today.

Let Toys Be Toys also pointed out how toys have become more gendered (i.e., more pink-ified) since the '70s. They recently tweeted an image they created (below) that compares a 1976 Argos catalog with the company's more recent products.

In Sweet's studies, 1995's toy catalogs and ads were almost equally as gendered as they had been in 1945. In 1945, however, only 30 percent of toys were explicitly labeled for girls or boys, while Sweet believes that toys today are much more often explicitly labeled. She says today's gendering of toys isn't reflective of how far we've come in social gender equity since the 1970s: "What we see today is just way beyond anything that happened over the 20th century."

So what does gendering toys mean for the way kids are growing up today?

Let Toys Be Toys says toys are crucial to the way kids learn about the world:

Toys focused on action, construction and technology hone spatial skills, foster problem solving and encourage children to be active. Toys focused on role play and small-scale theater allow them to practice social skills. Arts and crafts are good for fine motor skills and perseverance.

Boys and girls need the chance to develop in all these areas, but many stores divide toys into separate boys' and girls' sections. ... Both boys and girls miss out this way.

Perryman says she has already seen campaigns such as Let Toys Be Toys make a difference. For example, Boots, one of the UK's leading retailers, recently agreed to take down signs that labeled toys by gender. Perryman says it's great that stores such as Boots have agreed, but points out that there's still much to be done. She says gendered toys have become so common that most people don't think twice about it.

"We seem to have lost that ability to see how unacceptable this is," she said. "It has become normal." This phenomenon became an unavoidable reality to Perryman when she had children herself. She says no matter how hard she tries to let her children choose their own toys, outside influences on her one-year-old son and her five-year-old daughter have become inescapable.

Elizabeth Sweet believes the marketing of toys to specific genders is caused, in a way, by a catch-22 situation: Companies feel they will sell more toys if they advertise to a narrower demographic, but that creates greater social consequences for kids who want to play with a toy marketed to the opposite gender.

Toy companies say they are basing these decisions on research that has found differences between what boys and girls want-even though, Sweet points out, it's impossible to know whether the differences researchers find are biological or societal. If you're a little boy born into a society that tells you playing with pink toys is wrong, don't you think you would prefer the blue toy?

Riley, a 5-year-old girl whose YouTube video went viral in 2011 with more than 4 million views, said it best:

Why do all the girls have to buy princesses? Some girls like superheros, some girls like princesses, some boys like superheros, some boys like princesses!

Click here to sign the petition to get U.S. toy stores to stop separating their toys into "girls" and "boys" sections, and click here to sign the petition to get toy retailers in the UK and Ireland to do the same.
Photo of shelves labeled "boys" and "girls" by Flickr user Janet McKnight under Creative Commons 2.0. Screenshots taken from Disney Store's online pages used under Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. Argos catalog comparison by Let Toys Be Toys, and used with permission.

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Megan Perryman's 5-year-old daughter was browsing toys in a store. She picked up a toy recorder and her expression quickly changed as if she had done something wrong. 'Oh no,' she said. 'I've got the boys' one!' In her own childhood, Perryman didn't feel limited to only playing with 'girls'' toys.

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If you have children, you are probably already well aware the impact that advertising can have on them. How many times have you heard them say that they want a specific toy, meal, or place to visit after hearing about it on TV in an ad? Nowadays, kids are even more influenced by ads because many have frequent access to smartphones and tablets, where they are introduced to online ads. This is a market that many advertisers are starting to explore. However, when serving ads to kids, there are some serious mistakes that can be very harmful to your business. Listed below are 5 no-no's that you must avoid when advertising to kids.

Inappropriate content

If you are going to be running ads on a site catered to kids, you must ensure that the ads being shown are appropriate for the target audience. The last thing you need are ads for casinos or some other forms of adult content that are not suitable for the little ones. The content really needs to be G-rated in order to be considered appropriate, as even pushing it to PG-13 can run the risk of being inappropriate to a portion of the audience. Screening the ads carefully is therefore a very important task.

No educational benefit

One thing that advertisers might forget when they have kids as the target audience is that it will not be the little ones who make the final decision on the purchase. That task will often fall to the parents as the important gate keeper. They will more than likely want to see what the ad and the product are all about before they pull the trigger on the purchase. A fun ad or product will appeal to kids, but if it has zero educational benefit, parents will likely veto the purchase. Thus, it important to provide values and benefits to both the parents and the kids.

Social responsibility

There are times when the thing you are advertising seems fine, but which may actually not be that great of an idea. The perfect example are foods and snacks that are certainly tasty to kids, but which are packed full of sugar and totally unhealthy. Yes, kids will snap these up with their allowance money, but at what cost? Misleading tag lines and wasteful packaging might feel like no harm but it should be avoided. Be ethical and social responsible with your ads and your products to kids.

Pricing

Speaking of allowance money, parents will often try to teach their kids the value of a dollar by telling them that if they want something so badly, they need to buy it with their savings. While this is certainly a fine parenting skill, it's one that can backfire on an advertiser if they are selling products that are well out of the price range of what the average kid has in his/her piggy bank.

Privacy issues

There are still a lot of people out there who are uncomfortable with sharing their personal data online, so just imagine how they will feel if they come across a site that is asking their kids for a whole lot of personal information. Asking kids for a ton of personal data is going to throw up a lot of red flags with the parents, so it's best that you keep that stuff to the bare minimum or legally required fields.

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Major mistakes when advertising to kids - AdSpeed AdServer

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If you have children, you are probably already well aware the impact that advertising can have on them. How many times have you heard them say that they want a specific toy, meal, or place to visit after hearing about it on TV in an ad?

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Who gets to play now? – new research on TV toy ads

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New research from Let Toys Be Toys shows real progress since 2015, with more ads featuring both boys and girls, and fewer categories where either boys […]