Consuming Kids
30-11-14
Key Points:
- An enormous amount of spending in the U.S. is influenced by children.
- Children are a key audience in marketing.
- Children are easily impacted by advertising because they don't fully understand its purpose. Therefore, many people consider it unethical to advertise to children.
- Over the past 50 years or so, marketing to children has greatly increased as marketers realized they were an ideal target.
- Now children grow up with constant bombarding from advertising.
After watching this video I was amazed at how much children are taken advantage of, and how much money we spend on just stuff. I was disturbed by the idea that marketers take advantage of younger childrens' lack of understanding of advertising. I also never thought about what an ideal target children are, they are far less frugal with money than adults and fairly easy to persuade into thinking they want something. It seems sleazy to me to do that and I understand why many people don't want young children to be advertised to. I never have given a thought to how much advertising there is, or that there was a lot less targeted at children in the past. I was surrounded by it and still am, as it has become a part of everyone's life. We are accustomed to being immersed in the constant competition of advertisers trying to get you to spend money on their products. I can't think of specific time when an advertisement prompted me to buy something, but I do know that packaging definitely impacted me. The documentary showed a child having a meltdown in a grocery store, something my younger cousin does annoyingly often. I really like the idea of no advertising to young children. The documentary also mentioned "nagging". The highly irritating and therefore highly effective strategy that children often use to get their parents to buy them things. I will end this by suggesting we all go apologize to our parents for not kicking us out to the streets when we drove them mad with this constant annoyance.
image:
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