Advertising Ethics 2

One of the most controversial areas of marketing has long been that of advertising to children. Today, advertisers are focusing their ads at younger and younger audiences, many of whom are still in diapers. The reason that adverters are targeting younger and younger children is that they are trying to establish “brand-name preference” at as early of an age as possible. (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006) Marketers are now using psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and behavioral scientists as a way of shaping and cementing a child’s brand preference. (Barbaro & Earp, 2008) These “child experts” draw from developmental psychology principles in order to persuade children that they need a certain product. (Dittmann, 2004) These corporations want to become part of the fabric of children’s lives, through their advertisements and persuasions of brand preferences. (Barbaro & Earp, 2008) Today, children and adolescents view an average of 40,000 ads on TV in a given year. (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006) Of those 40,000 ads, more than 7,600 are for the food and beverage industry, advertising items such as candy, cereal, and fast food. (Bakir & Vitell, 2010) In a given day, an average young person is exposed to more than 3,000 ads over a wide variety of mediums. (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006) Although in the past the majority of advertising has been done on television or through print ads, advertisers are becoming much more creative, in that there are now running games, contests, and events that will attract children, but only have a subtle presence by the advertiser. (Clifford, 2010) Over the past few decades, advertising has changed tremendously, turning to younger audiences by using new mediums to interact with them, such as “adver-games” on the internet. (Dittmann, 2004) Today, of the 69 million children in America, almost 10 million of them are online. Parents have become concerned with the amount of advertising on kid-based Web

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