Advertising, Market Size and

In 2003, the American Psychological Association (APA) estimated that marketers spend more than $12 billion a year on television commercials aimed at children and adolescents and that the typical child, regardless of age, views more than 40,000 commercials each year. This occurs despite Federal Communications Commission (FCC) limits of 10.5 minutes of advertising per hour on television during weekends and 12 minutes on weekdays in programming aimed at children. Even those limits are occasionally violated, as indicated by the $1 million fine the FCC levied against Nickelodeon Channel owner Viacom and the $500,000 fine against ABC Family Channel owner Disney for violating the FCC children's commercial restrictions.

Another indicator of the size of the market is the $10 billion that U.S. Senator Harkin (D-Iowa) claimed in 2005 is spent by the food industry each year on advertising targeted at children. In a 2005 announcement that it was voluntarily halting all television advertising of foods it considered unhealthy for children under 12, Kraft Foods, one of the largest advertisers in the country, noted that it spent about $90 million annually on such advertising. The company has a policy of not advertising to children under 6 years of age.

Advertisers are interested in reaching children and adolescents because they are a large and growing market. For example, American adolescents are estimated to spend some $140 billion a year, and children 12 and younger are said to spend $25 billion. The latter are believed to exert influence over parents in an additional $200 billion in spending. A 2005 study by Simmons Market Research found that teenagers spend an average of $458 million a week. A report in Business 2.0 magazine estimated the amount teenagers spend as much higher at $94.7 billion for goods and services.

Commercials have become so pervasive on television that one major cable company launched a 24-hour digital cable channel for preschoolers in 2005. It includes commercials before and after programs, most of which were originally broadcast on PBS, such as Sesame Street and Barney and Friends. The prevalence of such advertising led the American Psychological Association to issue a 2005 report recommending that the federal government restrict marketing aimed at anyone 8 or younger. A 2005 study by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers found an average of 10.65 food advertisements in a sample of TV ads, leading the authors to conclude that 6-to-11-year-olds view about 11,000 such ads each year, more than one third of which are for fast food and convenience foods. Many nutritionists attribute the growing problem with overweight students to the increased consumption of convenience foods and fast foods.