How Children Are Being Influenced by Ads

All marketing techniques pursue one goal – to make people use the product that is being advertised. However, sometimes the target market can become apprehensive, and as a result, the advertisement fails to fulfil its ultimate mission. In such cases, marketers start looking for other social groups they can target, and that’s when children and teenagers are being exposed the most. What are the techniques used by marketing companies to influence children? They are not dramatically different from general ones because they still follow the rule of 4Ps in marketing – Product, Promotion, Price, and Place. Every company conducts a research that aims to find out what children are interested in, and then it builds a whole campaign around promoting their products using the discovered information as the basis.

There are certain areas of daily life where children and teenagers have a lot of influence regarding family’s decision-making.According to marketers, those areas are the following:

• family leisure (traveling and entertainment);
• meals options, especially breakfasts and eating out;
• clothing;
• technologies used directly by the younger generation (laptops, tablets, phones, headphones, gaming consoles).

Statistics show that children who watch TV only for as little as two hours per day are still exposed to over 20,000 commercial clips in a year. Since the majority of children are captivated by animation, marketing companies started using it as their main weapon. Many children, especially the youngest ones, cannot clearly distinguish where a cartoon ends and a commercial begins so they are easily influenced by everything they see on the screen. These commercials are always cheerful, colorful, and fun and they create a feeling that whatever is advertised will make the children’s lives equally cheerful, colorful, and fun. In these cases, the emphasis is never put on the practical application of the product that is advertised, but it is simply enough to convince children that they need that product.

As far as older children are concerned, marketers are also aware of the essential role of the Internet and social media in their lives. That is why popular platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram become effective means of advertisement. Teenagers are very prone to developing attachments to popular personalities, and very often those people also promote different products by setting certain trends. We have all seen teenage girls asking their moms to buy them a certain brand of cosmetics just because their favorite beauty guru has recommended it to them from the other side of their laptop screen.

With the developments of all modern technologies and the Internet, children are exposed to advertisement more than ever before. One does not even have to look far to find where to exert leverage over children because their interests are quite the same all over the globe. That is why commercials directed to children are widespread and effective today.