Abstract
The average child is exposed to more than 40,000 television commercials a year. My focus is devoted primarily to the examination of television advertising for three reasons. Firstly, marketers who seek children for commercial purposes rely primarily on television because it is the easiest and most effective media for reaching large numbers of children nationwide. Secondly, television has an impact on children at much earlier ages than printed media can achieve, largely because textual literacy does not develop until many years after children have become regular television viewers. And thirdly, much is known about how children understand and are influenced by television advertising, while almost no evidence is available in the public domain regarding how children respond to advertising in new media environments such as the Internet. In the following sections, I will review what is known about the nature of children's exposure to advertising, before dealing with children's ability to recognize and defend against advertising messages, and in a third and last part I will expose the effects of advertising on children. With the globalization of mass media, the style of consumerism associated with modern industrialized societies of the western world has spread all around the planet. Young people can thus be recognized as a unique all-important market in their own right. Interest in young people really began with the baby boom generation after the second world war".
