Write a article on children and tv advertising in 100-150 words
Answers
Introduction
Today, children are less innocent flowers and rather more practiced consumers with detailed knowledge of various products and brands available in the market. An average British child between eight and 13 is exposed to 22,000 television commercials a year – 300,000 if you include radio, television, print ads, billboards and the Internet. This places British youth third in the ranks of media-exposed kids in the world – after the US and Australia. (Martin Lindstrom, 2003)Today even in India, Television has come up in a huge way and advertising is a huge multimillion-dollar industry that has an enormous impact on the development of a child (Clay, 2000).Parents believe that there is change in the behavior of children when they watch television ads. Television ads sometimes have a negative impact on children since whenever they come across an advertisement, they demand to purchase the advertised product. Refusal of such requests often results in conflict. They think that children need some kind of protection from advertisements. (Sullivan, 2005) Television advertising offers product and brand-related ideas and information to children that results in purchase request to parents (Sullivan, 2005). This issue- to what extent television advertisements is effective in defining and changing the buying behavior of children-is worth investigating, and has motivated us to undertake this study. Indian marketers are increasingly targeting children because they find children are the only market segment that do not change their preferences rapidly and are easy to influence through advertisements.
Children and TV Advertising
Everything that glitters is not gold. This maxim aptly describes the insidious influence of advertisements. They are baits to trap children’s attention.
Most of the companies, manufactures make unscientific and undue claims about their products. For examples all the companies that make biscuits, cold drinks, potato chips, candies, etc. make appealing advertisements and play them again and again on different channels luring and misguiding children and viewers into buying them are predominantly unscientific and untrue.
The truth is there is no substitute for natural balanced diet such as green vegetables, fruits, nuts, milk, cereals, pulses, etc.; the nutritional values that these foods contain can never be replaced by the advertised products, still there is never an advertisement on them, even by the Government. The bitter truth is the companies of all products spend a whopping amount of money on advertisements. Since these companies enjoy enough power owing to their influence, they often display misleading and false claims about their products.
Owing to the misleading advertisements, the food habits of children have changed considerably and their health has been affected adversely. The Government must make health regulatory policies to keep people safe from the influence of the advertisements. People must also adopt saner and more cautious attitude towards advertisement.