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.
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.
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.
Television is an inescapable part of modern culture. We depend on TV for entertainment, news, education, culture, weather, sports—and even music, since the advent of music videos.
Most of us have happy memories of watching television with our families when we were young. But what was once a simple shared pastime has become an increasingly complex—and sometimes problematic part of modern family life.
Television viewing generally drops during adolescence as young people start to spend more time socializing, doing schoolwork, and using other media, such as music, video games, computers and the Internet.
Canada’s Broadcasting Act, last amended in 1991, outlines industry guidelines for portrayal of diversity.
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.
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.
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]
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.