Advertising, Effects on Children

Children's Ability to Discriminate

Numerous studies have documented that children below age 5 have difficulty discriminating between television programs and commercials. When children do begin to discriminate, they often do so based on perceptual characteristics. For example, young children say that commercials are shorter than programs. They also frequently identify commercials as part of the program. In an experimental setting in which children were asked to retell the story of the program just viewed, Dale Kunkel found that most children wove the commercial scene into their sequence of story events even though they had been asked to tell only the story of the program.

Media policies and advertising practices have contributed to children's confusion and difficulty in discriminating between commercial and noncommercial content. In 1974, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created the separation principle. Separation devices (e.g., “We'll be right back after these messages”) are segments roughly 5 seconds in length that are shown before and after commercial breaks. Rather than helping children understand the transition from program to commercial, research demonstrates that separators actually carry children's attention through the commercial to the next program segment because the separators include fun characters, music, and singing. Their form and style are very similar to those of the program itself.

Another advertising practice, host selling, makes discrimination difficult for children because the same characters used in commercials are featured in the adjacent program content (e.g., the Fruity Pebbles cereal ad is aired during a break in The Flintstones cartoon). Although host selling has been prohibited since 1974, evidence suggests that it is not effectively restricted. Kunkel's examination of the issue revealed that children aged 4 to 8 were less able to distinguish programs from commercials in host selling contexts.

Finally, the purpose of the program-length commercial is to expose children to a product line (e.g., GI Joe action figures) with the goal of increasing product sales and program popularity. The distinction between traditional, program-related product licensing and program-length commercials is based on which comes first, the program or the product. Historically, television programs were created to entertain or inform the viewing audience. Marketing of products then followed if the program was successful. In contrast, the program-length commercial was originally [Page 27]conceived as a vehicle for promoting products to the child audience. Barbara Wilson and Audrey Weiss found that program-length commercials impaired discrimination judgments, and Patricia Greenfield and colleagues found they promoted imitation rather than imaginative play.

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