Stay Tuned: The Exploitation Of Children In Television Advertisements

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of
advertisements. Children spend thousands of hours captivated by various
advertising tactics and do not understand their subtleties. Though advertisers
in America's free enterprise system are regulated because of societal pressures,
they also are protected in their rights under freedom of expression to unfairly
target America's youth in order to sell to their parents, regardless of the very
young's inability to recognize the art of persuasion.
In the free enterprise system, the advertiser's role is to persuade
consumers to buy their products/services. They are given a product/service and
are required to use their best creative effort to make this product desirable
to the intended audience (Krugman 37). Because of this calculated and what
many deem as manipulative way of enticing the target audience, the advertising
industry is charged with several ethical breeches, which focus on a lack of
societal responsibility (Treise 59). Child Advocacy groups and concerned
parents, ...

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children at this
young age tend to treat all television content as a unidimensional type of
message. For instance, child viewers do not begin to discriminate between
fantasy or reality dimensions of television content at the most basic levels
until grade school. Advertisers compound this issue by using perceptual
similarities in program content and commercial content which adds to the
difficulty children already have in distinguishing between the two variables.
Secondly, the study substantiates that, "A substantial proportion of children,
particularly those below age eight, express little or no comprehension of the
persuasive intent of commercials" (Kunkel 63). This is a crucial ...

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