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 - 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.

Movies - Special Issues for Young Children

• It can take young children several viewings to fully absorb and understand the story and images in a movie. Indulge their need to watch a favourite movie over and over again. They're learning more every time, as well as getting comfort from the familiar.

Movies - Copyright

The Internet has revolutionized how young people watch movies: half of Canadian teens say that they download movies without paying for them at least once a week. ^[1]

Movies - Special Issues for Tweens and Teens

Though young adolescents may seem "all grown up", there are still many issues that need to be addressed relating to movie content. Many movies aimed at the "tween" age group (11–13) contain material that isn't appropriate for young teens. The rating systems don't necessarily help either: films that were rated Restricted (17 and over) at the cinema may become 14A when released on home video in Canada.

Privacy impacts of advertising and marketing

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.

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.[1] 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.

2SLGBTQ+ Representation in Advertising

As in other media, 2SLGBTQ+ people have gained a greater and more widely visible presence within the advertising world, with ad agencies courting the “Pink Dollar.” This is not surprising, considering that the 2SLGBTQ+ audience is estimated to be worth around $917 million in buying power.^[1]

2SLGBTQ+ Representation in Film and Television

When discussing media representation of various groups, especially those we consider marginalized, stereotypes are often a primary concern. But sometimes, breaking a stereotype doesn’t go quite far enough, and the issue can be a little more complicated than merely determining whether or not a character is represented in a positive or negative way. The section that follows explores different approaches to queer content by analyzing various ways that popular media have used characterized LGBTQ people.

Racial and Cultural Diversity in Entertainment Media

In much the same way that racialized groups are under- or misrepresented in news media, they are also not accurately portrayed in entertainment media, which tends to reinforce themes that are conveyed in the news. Although positive change is occurring, it is important that media content more accurately and fairly reflect the reality of Canadian multiculturalism.