Sourced from: Health Promotion Journal of Australia 2006 : 17 (1) Owen B. J. Carter, Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer Control, Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia
Regulation of children’s television advertising
The Children’s Television Standards (CTS) of the Australian Broadcasting Authority ban all advertising during broadcasts of P-classified (preschool) programs and restricts advertising during C-classified (children) programs to five minutes per half-hour. Presumably as an incentive to air Australian productions, local television dramas that are C-classified are allowed to be aired with 15 minutes of advertisements per hour, the same as G-classified (general) programs. The content of advertisements aimed at children is also restricted by the CTS such that advertisements are prohibited from encouraging children to make purchase requests of their parents or imply that possession of products is associated with superiority among peers. However, Australian children’s viewing behaviours actually peak between 7-8pm, when Australian dramas and G-classified programs are likely to be aired, suggesting that current regulations to limit children’s exposure to advertising may not be as effective as intended.
Television advertising’s influence on children
Controlled studies have consistently shown that children exposed to advertising choose advertised products at significantly higher rates than those unexposed. This heightened desire for advertised products has been observed to translate into purchase requests, and does not diminish with age. It has been estimated that children influence their parents in the choice of snack food purchase and fast food restaurant patronage in around 75% of occasions, with children exposed to television advertisements being more likely to be involved in conflict with their parents when making such choices. This is labelled variously within marketing books as the ‘nag factor’, ‘pester power’ or ‘kidfluence’. Two separate literature reviews have concluded that there is sufficient evidence to suggest food advertising has an independent effect on the preferences, purchasing behaviour and consumption of food by children at both brand and category levels.
Children’s vulnerability to television advertising
Given the ubiquity of food advertising on children’s television, it is important to establish what effect this has. The literature suggests children are aware of television advertising from an early age, usually acquiring the ability to distinguish between television advertisements and program content by 5-6 years. By the age of nine years, children have as much knowledge of advertising slogans as their parents, even in product categories targeted at adults. Younger children appear particularly vulnerable to television advertising as their appreciation of its persuasive intent only emerges slowly as a function of age and cognitive development. Several studies suggest 75-100% of six year-olds fail to comprehend the basic purpose of television advertising, characterised by an ignorance of who pays for them, high levels of trust in advertisement messages, and describing advertisements as friendly, informative announcements for the availability of products and services. As the cognitive abilities of children develop, an understanding emerges that enables them to recognise the persuasive commercial intent of advertising, such that by the age of 12 years they are more cynical of the claims made in advertisements, resulting in less favourable attitudes towards the advertisements and fewer purchase requests to parents. However, beliefs about the informative and persuasive intent of television advertising have been observed to coexist within children until quite late into their cognitive development. One marketing industry report defends the right to advertise to children by pointing to research suggesting children’s understanding of the persuasive intent of advertising may precede their ability to satisfactorily articulate the concept. The report cites studies where children were assumed to
appreciate the persuasive intent of advertisements from a very young age onwards (3-6 years), characterised by the ability to point to pictorial depictions of product purchasing behaviours when asked what the characters in the advertisements “want them to do”. However, replications of these experiments, where the number of pictorial alternatives was increased from an original two to eight, found the success rate of children choosing the purchasing behaviour, for children at least up to the age of six years, was no better than chance.
No comments:
Post a Comment