Children advertising

Argue for or against a ban on advertising to children. Consider both the pros and the cons of such a policy. Which side outweighs the other? Write a persuasive argumentation to convince the others of your opinion!

As an advertiser I think that there’s nothing wrong in advertising products to children, they are a big segment of our market and a lot of products are targeted to them. If we don’t advertise products directly to them how are we going to sell them? The final decision is normally made by the parents but how would they know what to buy and not to buy? I think it is impossible not to advertise to children since they will be the final users of the product. One thing that we have to have in mind though is that they are children, very naïve and easily persuaded and use this as a caution tool instead of taking advantage of it.

Pros
· Highly effective since children are easy to influence with popular cartoons or catchy toons, just look at all merchandising Disney sells!
· An average child in the United States sees about 40,000 commercials a year just while watching television.
· With more than 40 million kids online daily, and growing, perhaps no tool has become more important to marketers than the Internet.
· In a household, children are always put first, specially with the way economy is now a days.

Cons
· Exposing children to massive advertisement more or less makes them consumers without purchase power, with this they simply look to make the children influence the decision making of the parents.
· Children do not have the capacity to decide what to buy or not


Sources
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2009/may/22/advertising-messages-bombard-children/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/media/17adco.html