Unit 4 – Media Studies 8 How do advertisers target Canadian youth?

What is advertising? Advertising to children is the act of marketing or advertising products or services to young people. In 2010, children under 13 years old impacted the spending of over $75 billion in Canada alone. This has created a large incentive to advertise to children which has led to the development of a multimillion dollar industry. The increasing controversy over the ethics of continued advertising to children has even led to its banning in some European countries.

“But I don’t even notice advertisements.” Average Canadian children see around 3000 advertisements a day on TV, the Internet, billboards, and in magazines. Over the course of a year they view 40,000 television commercials alone. Industry spends an estimated $12 billion on advertising to children each year. More than 160 magazines are targeted toward young people and teen focused magazines contain as much as 45% more advertisements for alcohol products than other magazines.

Do I actually buy products because of advertising? Their report Children, Adolescents, and Advertising states that children are specifically vulnerable to advertising and that in fact young people below the age of 8 do not understand the difference between advertising and programming. Children are among the most sophisticated observers of ads. They can sing the jingles and identify the logos, and they often have strong feelings about products. What they generally don't understand, however, are the issues that underlie how advertising works. Mass media are used not only to sell goods but also ideas: how we should behave, what rules are important, who we should respect and what we should value.

How many advertisements have you seen today? Do you remember any of the products? What group of society are the following advertisements aimed at? Which techniques are used?

Where is advertising? Commercial advertising media can include billboards, street furniture components, printed flyers and rack cards, radio, cinema and television adverts, web banners, mobile telephone screens, shopping carts, web popups, skywriting, bus stop benches, human billboards, magazines, newspapers, town criers, sides of buses, banners attached to or sides of airplanes, in-flight advertisements on seatback tray tables or overhead storage bins, taxicab doors, roof mounts and passenger screens, musical stage shows, subway platforms and trains, elastic bands on disposable diapers, stickers on apples in supermarkets, shopping cart handles, the opening section of streaming audio and video, posters, and the backs of event tickets and supermarket receipts. Any place an "identified" sponsor pays to deliver their message through a medium is advertising.

Where do advertisements come from? Most advertisements are the products of specialized ad agency’s who have a very sophisticated means of creating and marketing products to consumers. In freelance advertising, companies hold public competitions to create ads for their product, the best one of which is chosen for widespread distribution with a prize given to the winner(s).

What techniques are they using? After watching the commercial advertisements listed above take 1 minute to determine the technique that the advertisers were using, we will then discuss our answers as a class.

Write your own advertisement. Draw/compose and advertisement for one of the following products. Clearly employ a technique listed on your hand-out.