Is Advertising to Children Ethical?

Is advertising to children ethical?

When little Jimmy is playing app game “talking tom cat”， a pop up banner of toy brand suddenly occurs，which triggers this boy to click and further engagement unconsciously. Just as what you have seen, nowadays，with the emerging of digital media, children are more readily exposed in the commercial advertising world than ever,  meanwhile the ethical issue in terms of advertising to child is hotly debated among consumers, academics and marketing practitioners.

To some aspects，marketing to children is essential both to children themselves and advertisers. On the one hand, children are legitimate consumers who have the right to see and hear those advertisements. They undergo a process of socialization, whereby they learn how to be consumers (Solomon et al., 2014). Parents and friends instill some of this knowledge, but a lot of it comes from exposure to mass media and advertising. Especially, positive moral value that broadcasts from TV commercial will be beneficial to the nurture of children’s moral cognition, emotion and behavior.

On the other hand, rising media consumption takes place among children, for example, in the US, the average child watches around 16,000 television adverts per year. While they are also increasingly influential during a widening range of purchase decisions, especially for those industries, like toy, children's food. Therefore, it is necessary that marketers should create campaigns to target children directly, with the intent of forging brand loyalties at an early age, like what subway did in 2014.

However, since children differ in their ability to process consumer information, many serious ethical issues are raised when promotional messages try to appeal to them directly (Solomon et al., 2002).

First of all, children are in some cases so easily persuaded. As Josh Golin pointed out, “In their early years, their brains are not sufficiently developed to process adverts in the same way adults do. Until the age of eight, they don’t even understand the concept of persuasive intent”. (Wright, 2015) Perhaps, child will obsess with those products they don’t need. Therefore, it is unethical to deliver a commercial message and persuade children to buy.

Secondly, with the lacking regulation, harmful or inappropriate message of ads will bring potential risk to children. From the research of APA (2012), one of the main issues was body image, those portrayal of idealized body images may influence the self-image of children negatively, particularly young girls. Other issues, like sexual content and nudity, encouraging violent or dangerous behavior, were also concern regarding the potential impact they might have on children.

All in all，it is hard to put forward a black-and-white thinking towards this debate. However, some solutions still could be addressed to solve this issue. First of all, government or related organizations should make laws or policies to protect children. For example, in the UK, the ASA will ban any ad that could result in a child’s physical, mental or moral harm (Asa.org.uk, 2015). In China, there is also advertising law that has strict regulation on the commercial ads to children. Further more, company should act responsibly towards children, take corporate responsibility into consideration when pursuing to achieve profits. Such as LEGO group, they have been working to further optimize efforts to leave a positive impact on children (Stecher, 2015).