Consumerism In Advertising

Advertising is a means of mass communication methods that provides information about a specific product or service to convince a targeted audience. Advertisements are persuasion techniques that help in introducing new products in order to increase the product consumption. Also, commercials help in educating people around a particular service or product, which widens their knowledge and helps them embrace new life habits. Advertisements are crucial for both merchants and buyers, but they are more important for sellers than buyers, since sellers need to push up their product consumption, which is quite achievable by item promotion. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the father of modern advertising, Albert Lasker described advertisements

With the growth of the Internet and the widespread of television, advertisers can substantially target the ears and eyes of young children. Children are attracted to commercials that view goods and services they like and want such as candy and toys. Producing advertisements directed toward children that indirectly influence their materialistic behavior to increase the sales of the advertised goods and services; this is considered as one of the persuasive techniques advertisers use to deceive children. Furthermore, there was a recent research study conducted on young children, where they were divided into two groups. Empowered children, children who can rationally process commercials and are referred to as skilled consumers, where they were put into the group that was exposed to intended advertisements. The other group was vulnerable children, in which they were exposed to unintended advertisements (Buijzen & Valkenburg, 2003). Results have shown that “skilled consumers” were clearly capable of identifying the impacts of advertisements concerning product attitudes and brand awareness. On the other hand, the effects of unintended advertisements turned out to be negative, as children are highly influenced by persuasive commercials in terms of purchasing behaviors. Children’s vulnerability to advertising messages is due to not processing the information viewed critically, so they cannot come up with rational thoughts while viewing commercials. Therefore, this proves that young children who are influenced by advertisements develop an increase in materialistic behavior. Furthermore, advertisers use the idea of endorsing celebrities in television advertisements to attract children into consuming their products. Celebrity endorsement creates an alignment between two images, the product and the celebrity, in the child’s psychology. In other words, children will link