Many people feel frightened by advertising because they feel that advertisers know a good deal about them and discover ways to make them spend their money. A survey in 1974 showed that 59 percent of people think that advertising is dishonest, and in 1986, 70 percent believed this (Goodrum and Dalrymple 8). Perhaps this is because a person growing up in the United States will see an average of 16,000 ads in a single day (Graydon 8).  These ads are targeted to all generations, but usually each one has a specific target in mind.  Before the 1950s, ads were only directed towards adults because children were not considered buyers.  In 1950, advertisers began to realize that children had money to spend and influenced many of their parents’ decisions when purchasing an item (Graydon 17).

Culture and advertising is always changing.  Everyday, advertisers are thinking up new ways to attract new customers, while keeping the old.  Children and teenagers have become a huge target because they don’t have bills to pay and spend their money more freely.  The contrasts between now and the early 1900’s are drastic, because advertisers spend thousands of dollars promoting to children and teenagers.  Before, they would never advertise to children, and spent zero dollars even thinking about them.    Advertisers now promote directly to kids, use brands to decide what is popular, and get advice from their customers.

            Having the consumer’s attention before getting to the point has been a challenge for many advertisers when trying to promote directly to kids.  Many kids have short attention spans and want the point to be given quickly.  Advertisers have realized that unless they have the attention of the youngsters, they are wasting their time, money, and energy (Sacharin 7).  Most commercials try to be dazzling and brief to keep people’s attention.  “Get in, get out, get gone.  In a world of endless media choices, brevity and simplicity are more than virtues-they’re becoming necessities” (Graydon 73). 

            When ads first came out, they were very exciting.  People enjoyed looking at the pictures and told their friends about them.  Now, more and more people are paying less attention to ads.  If it doesn’t grab their attention, they don’t watch, listen, or look.  “Author Evan Schawartz has suggested that we are becoming the first society with attention deficit disorder” (Graydon 19). 

            The possibilities for ads are endless; they are everywhere.  Nobody can escape the ads, as they have now become a part of life.  There are ads on the radio, Internet, billboards, flyers, yearbooks, newspapers, and even in bathroom stalls.  The competition is forcing people to think of new and creative ways to get their product out there.  All these different types of advertising are vying for people’s attention, and people are starting to lose sense of who deserves their attention or even who to pay attention to.  As a result, sometimes important messages that would have been significant to them get lost.     

Advertisers didn’t immediately start advertising to kids.  Before they advertised directly at kids, they aimed at having the parents purchase for the family.  According to scholar Lynn Spigel, TV industrialists first tried to frighten parents into buying TV for their kids.  “Your daughter won’t ever tell you the humiliation she’s felt in begging those precious hours of television from a neighbor,” read one advertisement (Quart 50).

            Once advertisers starting advertising to kids, they discovered that they needed to make sure they kept learning about this always changing new market. They had to find ways to keep in tune with their customers, and make sure that as they altered and changed, so did the advertising.  What worked one year did not always work another year  (Farbey 15).  Ivory soap advertised using a variety of models including children, pets, and adults.  In the 1950s, an ad portrayed children riding an elephant who was carrying soap in his mouth.  Although it appears that they were aimed towards women, some ads told the men to purchase the soap to be a helpful member of the household (Goodrum and Dalrymple 47).

            Even the cereal was aimed towards the parents to buy for the children.  While most usually pictured children, such as a little boy named Johnny who came home with a note that read, “Never send me anything but Kellogg’s-The Genuine Toasted Corn Flakes” (Goodrum and Dalrymple 67), it wasn’t to convince the children to buy the product, but the mothers. Once advertisers realized that children not only influenced parents in their decisions and that they also had their own money to spend as well, children and teenagers became new targets. 

            In 1951, Advertest Research of New Brunswick surveyed mothers and found that 60 percent said their kids wanted the products they saw on television.  During the early 1960s, the youth were already being associated as “hip, vernacular, and futurity”.  By 1964, an estimated $50 million had been spent on advertising directed at kids.  However, it would take 20 more years before selling to kids became a major job of advertisers.  In 1989, corporations spent around $600 million on marketing to kids and twenty times that in 1999 (Quart 50).   

            According to Ogilvy and Matter Worldwide, “Different audiences respond better to different messages and different tone of voice, and companies’ communication objectives may also vary by audience” (Roman, Maas, and Nisenholtz 66).  Advertisers discovered that brands were one way to reach children.  Even though Evan I. Schwartz says that brands do not exist on the shelves of stores, but only in the minds of the consumers, brands still affect how young adults think about themselves (Macchiette and Ray 202).

            Having the right brand is a very popular way to become cool throughout the young school years and even in high school.  Trend-setters pick the brands which will be popular at that time, and everyone else follows in their footsteps.  Stuart Agres argues that “A brand is a set of differentiating promises that link a product or service to its customers” (Macchiette and Ray 202).  He feels that it is not just a name, because wearing that brand means that the customer is proud of the service that company offers.  If they didn’t like the company, they wouldn’t help the company advertise by being a walking billboard. 

Walking billboards is an excellent way for advertisers to take advantage of the fact that young adults want to be fashionable and cool.  Former president of Gray Advertising, Nancy Shalek once said, “Advertising at its best is making people feel that without the product, you’re a loser” (Graydon 33).  At many middle schools, kids feel lost if they aren’t wearing a popular brand.  A group of girls from ages eight to eleven were once surveyed, asking who their role model was. They all answered Julia Roberts because she was so pretty, and always knew what was popular.  Good looking people sell brands to younger girls because they show perfection, which skews their perception of themselves.  They don’t want to appear to be a loser or old-fashioned (Graydon 54). 

Seeing as a brand may be cool one day and disliked the next, prices go up and down depending on what is fashionable that season.  One day, a brand will be unpopular and the next it will be selling off the shelves.  Some brands will always be popular and are considered something to strive for.  Brands such as Coach, Prada and Gucci can charge over $500 for a purse because they have worked their way to the top and are now known across the globe. 

A way to keep children hooked on a product for the rest of their life is branding.  Branding is writing the name of an advertiser’s product on the product itself so that a consumer will always be reminded of where it came from.    Oreo cookies have done especially well, as they are one of the most popular kinds of cookies.  Nike’s swoosh checkmark, on the other hand, has become burned in people’s memories and will be recognized forever. 

Some symbols are recognized by people in different countries as well as the United States.  “Recent research has found that even babies as young as six months of age can recognize images of corporate logos and mascots” (Graydon 45).  Cute, cuddly and toy-like mascots such as the Energizer Bunny, Pillsbury Doughboy, Ronald McDonald, and Tony the Tiger from Frosted Flakes also help kids to crave an item.  Besides advertising and promoting their products, they are also able to make extra money from the stuffed animals and other items they sell with their mascot on it.

Kids are easily affected by celebrities.  The thought of being like a celebrity is very appealing and fascinates them.  Many advertisers use stars to promote their products.  Hockey-great Wayne Gretzky was in many commercials, including McDonalds and Ford.  Hillary Duff has become quite popular in her ads for Candies while Tiger Woods advertises for many companies such as Disney and Nike.  The advertisers have found only one problem when using celebrities; they have to make sure that the customers or people viewing the ad will actually believe that the celebrity will really use the product and accept as true the things they are saying about the product (Graydon 46).

            The younger generation has always enjoys getting fruit snacks, perfume and clothes that their favorite actor or actress endorses. This doesn’t always work, which is why sometimes advertisers decide instead to use product placement. Product placement is the placing of advertiser’s products in a movie, video game, or even a book so that it is advertising without the customer realizing it.  Sometimes you will see only a shot of it, such as Spiderman swinging past a Budweiser billboard in Manhattan.  Other times it will be in the conversation, such as in 10 Things I Hate About You in which a girl explains the difference between “like” and “love”: “I like my Sketchers but I love Prada” (Quart 90).    Many of the pretty girls in teen films wear the popular brands, which are decided by the companies who give the most money to receive advertising on the film.

Many companies ask teens to give advice on what advertisements appeal to them.  Delia’s is one of these companies and it has helped them grow more each year.  They have a group of teenagers who receive samples of some of their line on which they give their opinion, and then send back the items.  The kids don’t mind because they enjoy having their voices heard.  At their age, it’s hard to get adults to listen to them.  So when an older adult asks them for advice, they jump at the chance.  By doing this, however, they are helping their friends to become branded, because the advertisers use their advice to convince their friends to buy their products (Quart 17-19). 

The surveys and advice the advertisers receive has helped them to realize many kids are easily persuaded by words like: new, improved, quick, amazing, and easy.  It also helps to attract their attention as well as helping to sell the product.  Sometimes companies use giant, jumbo, mega, max and large to play tricks on children so that they assume they are receiving more of the product than a different brand. Kids usually don’t wonder why a “large” soda is bigger than a “small” soda; they usually just assume that it is.  However, many people have discovered that a “large” soda really has more ice than soda.  There is really no difference between a “10-ounce” chocolate bar and a “big” 10-ounce chocolate bar.  The same is true of a liter and a full liter.  These words are used to fool your brain and influence you to purchase their “larger” brand instead of a different brand with the same size (Graydon 41).

Many adults know that children love to hear the same story over and over again.  The more they hear it, the more they like and enjoy it.  The same is true with advertising.  The more you hear it, the more effective it becomes.  Too much repetition, on the other hand, can be very annoying.  People may stop noticing it or just ignore it altogether.  David Lubards has been known to say, “Consumers are like roaches: you spray them and spray them and they get immune after awhile” (Graydon 48).  That is why there are many different versions of the same ad, so that the product name and slogan are repeated and remembered.

A new campaign that advertisers have come up with is called Guerilla Marketing.  It is a sneaky marketing campaign that advertisers use to look for new and unusual places to sneak in promotional messages without making obvious as to what they are really trying to do. Sometimes there are commercials in movies that are really an advertisement or the person raving about a product next to you has really been paid to do it.

Sony Ericsson Mobil Communications is an excellent example of this.  They once hired 60 actors and provided them with new mobile phones that actually doubled as cameras.  They were informed to hang around places that tourists would go, such as the Empire State Building in New York City and Seattle’s Space Needle.  They were asked to ask unsuspecting passersby to take their pictures, including children.  Another 60 actors were hired to hang out in bars, engage strangers in conversation, or play with their phones in a part of the bar where they would attract attention.  “It was aimed to get people talking about the mobile phone without letting them know they were really actors,” Sony told reporters (Graydon 57).

Even though this mission was aimed mostly at adults, advertisers have realized that children and teenagers influence their parents in most of the decisions they make when purchasing a large item.   This is why they often spend a good deal of their time appealing to the younger generation, even though they don’t even make up half of the population.  “Only 30 percent of the U.S. population is under the age of 21, and only 10 percent is age 11 to 17.  The 50 percent standard, therefore, permits placement of ads on programs where the underage population far exceeds its representation in the population” (Macchiette and Ray 334).

Car manufactures have realized that eight to fourteen year olds help decide what vehicle their parents should purchase.  One magazine for six to ten year olds featured an entire ad dedicated to minivans.  Perhaps this is because “there is an estimate that kids have a say in close to $300 billion worth of their parents spending” (Graydon 18).  Advertisers are always dreaming up new ads that will convince children to nag to their parents to purchase one pizza over another or buy this soap over that one.  This is why many advertisers make general objects more appealing to the youth.  Heinz came out with purple and green ketchup.  Kool-Aid changes colors.  Squeezable bottles, colorful packing, and goofy pictures also gain attention from young kids.

Kids under the age of six don’t always understand that TV isn’t real, but they pay a lot of attention to commercials which they trust.  They often don’t know the difference between ads and programs, noticing only that the ads are shorter.  From age six to nine, they are paying a lot of attention to commercials and can tell the difference between ads and programs.  They began to recognize that the purpose of ads is to persuade.  When they reach the ages of ten to fourteen, they are less interested in commercials and are very aware that the intention of ads, unlike programs, is to persuade.  They can often identify and explain some persuasive techniques used in the ads (Graydon 29).

There are now many commercials during cartoons and comedies aimed to sell to kids.  They are fully devoted to kids because they know that the kids are usually the ones who watch these shows.  During cartoons, there are usually stuffed toys, dolls, and games.  Comedies usually have fast food, directed consumers-teenagers (Graydon 20). 

Advertising adult items to the younger generation isn’t a new thing.  Cigarettes and tobacco companies have done this for years.  Credit cards companies are also joining in by advertising to teenagers as young as sixteen, even though they really shouldn’t be able to own a credit card yet.  These young people are unaware of the dangers of one until it is actually in their hands.  Alcohol appeals to those under 21 because many believe that breaking the law is a way to get back at their parents or rebel.  Advertisers have realized this, and latched onto selling their products to these rebellious teenagers (Macchiette and Ray 261-262).

Make-up is another example.  It was once advertised only for women.  It claimed to make them look younger, twice as beautiful, and attractive.  Now, make-up is even advertised for teenagers.  There is Smackers and Bonnie Bell for nine and up, but even younger girls also use it.  By the time they are teenagers, these girls have already started wearing real make-up at age eleven (Goodrum and Dalrymple 9).

Companies have finally realized that kids spend a lot of time on the Internet.  They now put their advertising on popular sites.  Some sites allow you to download things in exchange for signing up for a service.  Movie sites will show trailers which use “word of mouth” to get around.  While the kids are on the websites, some companies ask them to fill out surveys so they can receive feedback.  Many people will fill them out just to kill time or if they are bored.  “Research shows that while you are ‘swimming’ around the Internet, getting caught up in games or contests; you can easily slip into the ‘flow state’.  Your heightened excitement makes you less likely to question and more likely to respond to advertiser suggestion” (Graydon 23).  What these kids learn while on the Internet, advertisers hope, is passed on to friends and family. 

Advertisers also love to find jingles, give out free samples, and show funny commercials so that the kids will use word of mouth to get their name out there.  They also benefit when the kids suggest brand or products to their friends.  However, they sometimes rely on cookies to make sure they are advertising to the right people.  Cookies help them to discover where a consumer is shopping on the Internet.  “A cookie can track what visitors do on the site and target accordingly” (Zeff and Aronson 139). This works well for the businesses that are trying to discover what sites are the most popular with teens and children.  They can also be tagged every time they revisit the site and others allow them to track through joining or participating sites.

Although advertisers don’t know the perfect way to advertise, the success they have had since they first started advertising directly at kids in the 1950s is phenomenal.  Advertisers have learned to appeal to kids, make brands become popular and receive advice from customers to make their advertising better.  While the magic “formula” has not been discovered yet, advertising has learned to adapt as the world changes.  They have realized that using trial and error is basically the only way to do it, although sometimes an error can cost millions of dollars.  Advertising is continually changing and keeping up with the new technology and advances to keep children and teenagers hooked.

 

 

Works Cited

Farbey, A D.  How to Produce Successful Advertising.  3rd ed.  Milford, CT:  Kogan Page US, 2002.

Goodrum, Charles, and Helen Dalrymple.  Advertising in America.  1st ed.  New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990.

Graydon, Shari.  Made you look.  2nd ed.  U.S.: Annick Press, 2003.

Macchiette, Barton, and Abhigit Ray.  Taking Sides.  1st ed.  Guilford, Connecticut: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2001.

Quart, Alissa.  Branded.  1st ed.  Cambridge, MA: The Perseus Books Group, 2003.

Roman, Keeneth, Jane Maas, and Marin Nisenholtz.  How to Advertise.  3rd ed.  New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003.

Sacharin, Ken.  Attention!  1st ed.  New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001.

Zeff, Robbin, and Brad Aronson.  Advertising on the internet. 2nd ed. New York: John  Wiley and Sons, Inc, 1999.