Should Companies Market Towards Children? How Far is Too Far?
- GroovyHayley
- Apr 3, 2022
- 3 min read
Imagine. You are 6 years old, sitting on the couch and watching your favorite cartoon. Suddenly
the show cuts off and you sit in awe as you watch the kids on the screen play with the newest and coolest toy. You immediately hop off the couch and run to your parents, begging them to call the number and order the toy for you! With the rise of the digital age, an increasing number of young children are exposed to advertisements every day.
Photo by Hayley Hall | Made via Procreate
Young children lack the ability to understand the detailed tactics that go into creating persuasive advertisements. The American Academy of Pediatrics states that children do not have the cognitive ability to recognize advertisements until age 8. With an annual $12 billion dedicated to advertisements that specifically target children, research shows that kids are exposed to approximately 40,000 advertisements every year.
If every advertisement shown to the kids was 15 seconds long, that would equal 600,000 seconds of ads,10,000 minutes, 166.5 hours, or 7 days. This excessive exposure to targeted advertisements can affect the mental and physical development of the children who watch them.
Children are told that they need these products to be happy in life, which may lead to them practicing poor eating habits, obesity, becoming smokers, and drinking alcohol.
These negative consequences of targeted advertising can lead to health issues later in life, and even death in some cases. An approximate 678,000 Americans die every year as a result of poor eating habits and obesity-related diseases. Obesity levels have doubled in adults, tripled in children, and quadrupled in adolescents within the last 30 years.
Many places around the world have taken notice of the dangers and implemented laws restricting and even banning targeted advertising towards children. Over 30 different countries have national laws that decrease the amount of targeted advertising towards children. Some of these countries include Europe, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Korea, and the Russian Federation, which limit where advertisements can be shown to children.
In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) called for the U.S. protection of children against targeted marketing. They wanted to minimize the advertisements containing unhealthy foods, and therefore decrease their harmful effects on viewers. Despite the efforts from the WHO, children are still bombarded with ads across the internet every day.
An increasing number of parents allow their young kids to surf around on the web. A few popular social media platforms used by children around the world include Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube, which all contain targeted advertising along with many other dangers. A 2018 survey conducted by Pew Research Center found that 81% of all parents with children ages 11 and below grant their kids access to videos on YouTube, with 34% of them letting their kids watch regularly.
According to an Insider Intelligence report, 70% of the surveyed children ages 2 to 12 recalled seeing a recent ad on YouTube. After receiving millions of dollars in fines by federal regulators over alleged privacy violations, YouTube decided to announce that they are limiting personalized advertisements and user data collection. They also deleted over 1.8 million different videos that violated their child safety policies. Some of these inappropriate child targeted videos contained violence, obscenity, and sexual themes.
Quebec, Norway, and Sweden have taken things a step further than the U.S. by banning advertisements altogether throughout the shows that children watch. Quebec also banned all marketing within schools, accompanied by Belgium, Portugal, Vietnam, and certain locations within Germany. These measures help ensure that impressionable children are not influenced by such a large quantity of persuasive advertisements at the beginning of their lives.
It is crucial that parents implement digital boundaries before allowing their children to explore the internet. Social media opens users up to a whole new world which contains an abundance of captivating positive content, but also has the risk of containing negative content which could have dangerous effects on users, especially young ones.
The majority of children will always be curious about technology and want to watch entertaining videos on T.V. or explore on video platforms such as YouTube. It is our responsibility as a Nation to prevent corporations from having the ability to alter the minds of children through manipulative targeted advertising. The corporations that participate in advertisements directed at children face a large moral dilemma. It is unethical to manipulate the mind of a child and make money off of their vulnerability, and should be banned within the U.S. immediately.
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