Advertising to children

Advertising to children is the act of marketing or advertising products or services as defined by national legislation and advertising standards. It is often the subject of debate, relating to the alleged influence on children’s consumption. Laws concerning such advertisements have largely evolved in recent years. In most countries, advertising for children is framed by a mix of legislation and advertising self-regulation.

In the nineteenth century, the compulsory education of children was established. Consequently, children began to be targeted by an increasing number of publications. Comic books started appearing around this period and were not initially targeted to children because they were largely uneducated. However, it was apparent that the majority of readers were children nonetheless. Publishers realized the importance of marketing comic books to teenagers to inflate their potential sales. This resulted in the rise of comic book promotion to the youth market in the 19th century. Radio and then television (broadcast media) grew. For advertisers, these tools expanded the ability of communicating to consumers effectively through advanced visual and oral medium. It is described in (Blades, et al., 2014) that, during the 19th century, a broadcasting system was utilised effectively to enhance advertisements within The United States of America. Spot advertising, a novel form of promotion in this era, came to be known as a prodigious way of advertising. Spot advertising is television advertising, which appears shortly between programmes. However, spot advertising was not the only commercial promotion that came to be popular. Sponsorship arrangements also began to appear. Advertisers linked their name with certain programmes and supported some of the production cost. American advertisers sponsored TV programmes or films in order to promote their products through broadcast media. A significant opportunity arose for advertisers and marketers with increased numbers of internet users due to the invention of the household computer in the early 1990`s. This movement expanded more ways of advertising and intensified the relationship between marketers and consumer. Concern grew that children had a significant disadvantage in this secretive form of marketing. This is because advertising could easily manipulate children as they are less able to comprehend the implicit objective of advertisers.

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