Ethical Issues Supporting Children Advertising Essay

Ethical Issues Supporting Children Advertising - Essay Example Ethical Issues Surrounding Children Advertising Introduction Advertising to children has long been the point of extensive debate about the impacts such advertisements could have on young, vulnerable, and easily influenced consumers. One issue with children advertising is that kids are not capable of differentiating between the programme and the advertisement. Hence, youngsters do not have the same critical thought as grown-ups do and more apt to believe ads (Buijzen & Valkenburg 2005). Ads may take advantage of children’s irresistible desires for bodily gratification, attachment, play, persuading them to choose prefer physical items over socially driven alternatives. Some scholars claim that ads make children impulsive, impatient, and materialistic (Ramsey 2006). Therefore, this essay takes into consideration the ethical issues surrounding children advertising. Relevant Theories/Models Because the issue of advertising’s effect on youngsters was charged to childrenâ€⠄¢s cognitive developmental weaknesses, with a number of governmental concerns for the possible fault of unethical advertisers who deliberately deceive youngsters with their advertisements, that became the main emphasis for the believed solution, too. Thus, Jean Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory is a relevant and suitable model for the issue of ethical issues surrounding children’s advertising (Mercer & Miller-McLemore 2005). Originally, marketers’ application of models of development started as reactions to detractors of children advertising with explanations that the models would help them to further promote ethical marketing. Marketers could prevent the making of ads that unjustly exploit children’s lack of ability to function outside a developmentally established scope of information deciphering. For instance, the study of Ward and colleagues focuses on the inclination of children to give importance to a portrayed product fully relative to actua l attributes (Srivastava & Nandan 2010). The child would give importance to more vibrant colour or bigger size instead of doing a critical assessment of how the product could carry out its publicised features or purposes, which may be anticipated at a later developmental phase of a child (Shimanovsky & Lewis 2006). Therefore, this essay supports the argument that this knowledge can strongly contribute to the promotion of ethical children’s advertising. In this essay, the issue puts emphasis only on ethical and suitable children’s advertising, rooted in the belief that encouraging them to be fine and critical consumers is an admirable objective, and this belief is never challenged. The discourses on children advertising persist, all the same, with advocates of a critical, perceptive child challenging those who emphasise children’s core incorruptibility and immaturity (Davis 2002). A particular issue in establishing the disagreement between marketing and children as a problem of a child’s undeveloped capacity for rational thoughts rests in the beliefs that advertising composes mainly of disseminating product information and that a critical, wise person has the liberty to work on acquired information (Abelman & Atkin 2000). According to Stuhlfault and Farrell (2009), this point of view overlooks the complexity of image and representation in advertising, together with the different ways wherein individuals encounter an ad (e.g. as entertainment, as a social