Marketing and Consumerism - Overview
Kids are a highly desirable market for advertising: they control almost 150 billion dollars of spending in the U.S. alone and have a lifetime of spending ahead of them.
Children and advertising
Kids are a highly desirable market for advertising: they control almost 150 billion dollars of spending in the U.S. alone and have a lifetime of spending ahead of them.
How Marketers Target Kids
Advertising: It’s everywhere No, it’s not your imagination. The amount of advertising and marketing we are exposed to daily has exploded: on average, we see more than four thousand ads each day. At the gas pumps, in the movie theatre, in a washroom stall, on stickers on fruit, during sporting events and plastered all over social media—advertising is pretty much impossible to avoid.
Advertising techniques
How advertising works… even when you don’t realize it. Just letting kids know they’re being advertised to is not enough to make them engage critically with an ad. Helping kids recognize how advertising works is essential, too. Even young kids can become more skeptical about marketing when they’re told why and how ads try to persuade them.
Online Commerce
Kids don’t just see ads in media: more and more, they buy things right on their screens. This section looks at the ways that young people shop online and how they can be manipulated into spending.
Privacy impacts of advertising and marketing
One of the oldest adages in marketing is “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half.” It’s as important for advertisers to reach the right people as it is to make an appealing ad, so they have developed many different ways of targeting ads effectively. Online advertising lets marketers match different ads with individual users. This section looks at how that’s done and how it affects kids’ privacy.
Tobacco, alcohol and cannabis
“Advertising has always sold anxiety, and it certainly sells anxiety to the young. It’s always telling them they’re losers unless they’re cool.” (Mark Crispin Miller, The Merchants of Cool, 2000)
Marketing & Consumerism - Special Issues for Young Children
Parents of young children have an important role to play in protecting their kids from invasive marketing and in educating them about advertising from an early age.
Marketing and Consumerism - Special Issues for Tweens and Teens
One of the most important recent developments in advertising to kids has been the defining of a "tween" market (ages 8 to 12).
Taking Action - Marketing and Consumerism
To help kids avoid the many traps and pitfalls set up by online marketers, parents and teachers need to become more informed about online marketing techniques and privacy issues – and then pass the information on to kids.