Advertisements Towards Children

Of course, children don't realize the object of the game for the marketers. Their goal is to make the children want their product, whether it creates a disruption throughout the media or not. Marketers gear a lot of food products and obviously toys toward children. They use numerous amounts of techniques in order to gain the children's attention and gain them as a consumer. One of the many tests they complete on children is a "blink test" where they observe how much the children blink during each advert. They choose the advert that the children blinked less during. As I think back to how the commercials and advertisements were during when I was a child, I realize now how they were able to achieve their goals of making the children and parents consumers.

This photo shows how the media has basically consumed children.

Children don't have the right brain mentality to decide whether the product is actually better because it is The Little Mermaid fruit snacks or whether the fruit snacks are the same but said to be better just because the adverts tell us that.  Children listen to everyone and everything. They copy everyone and everything. They usually do whatever they are told to do if it has something to do with benefitting them, like most people would. Now, thinking about how the parents feel towards these advertisments geared towards children, I can't imagine they are too pleased. Arguing with a 5 year old in a grocery store over whether Princess fruit snacks are better than regular fruit snacks is a lost cause. Whether batman bandaids are better than regular bandaids just because they have a character from their favorite show/movie on it makes the child think that it just tastes that much better. A prime example of this is a child named Abby whom my mother used to nanny. She is 4 years old. She has everything you can imagine with a logo of all of the Disney Princesses. She has a jacket, a blanket, a chair, a sleeping bag, and she was Ariel, the little mermaid, for Halloween this year. Without knowing it of course, she acts like a princess and thinks as though she should be treated like one. Thinking back, she watches a lot of TV, her day im sure mostly consists of watching TV other than when she is at school. In a way, I feel that TV and the media has shaped her view of everything (well what a 4 year old can handle in their brain) even though she is 4 years old. Yes, she is so young but she is so educated on things that she thinks she needs. I have watched her while she was watching TV before bed and almost every commercial, that was geared to a young girl, she said "I want that". These advertisements don't help the parents at all in these situations. Especially, because some parents just can't say "No".
Going off on how today's generation is with products being more enhanced, children in the next generation are probably going to be having iPhones at the age of 4. 2 year olds nowadays even know how to use an iPhone; they know that you have to swipe the screen and click on the screen in order to work it. Sometimes I wonder if they know what they are doing, because most of the time it sure looks like it. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I wouldn't be surprised. I can honestly say that I'm kind of disappointed in today's generation. I'm so sick of hearing children, usually ages 10-18, saying how much they want something and why they have to have it. My sister recently had two phones, now she just recieved the iPhone 5 from my Dad. I never understood why he bought her a new phone. I remember though, when I was her age, 15, I still had the Razer as my cell phone. These days children are so much more selfish and unthankful of what they have. I believe most of this is due to the media. The media tells us what to like, who to like, what is cool, what is not cool, what is necessary, and what is the product that "we need to have". The media tells the children of today's society what to like and they carry that with them throughout their lives, which is what the marketers aim for. They want to be able to grab children's attention and maintain it as they grow into adults. Why can't the media market products without choosing children to conform into consumerism? Well, the most obvious reason is, they just don't want to. They want to empower themselves by choosing a group that doesn't fully understand their reasons for marketing these products and that will tell their parents to buy them something just because they were told it was "cool" or "necessary for you to have".