Advertising, Persuasive Intent of

The child's understanding of the persuasive intent of advertising has been an issue in the literature on advertising and marketing to children for more than 30 years. Why should this be so? In the early 1970s, various lobbying groups in the United States were concerned about the content of television advertising to children and petitioned first the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and then the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to regulate advertising to children and, as the movement took hold, to ban advertising to children. The years since then have seen similar flurries of concern coming and going on a global scale, culminating in the recent anxieties about food advertising to children in the light of a worldwide increase in obesity. One of the arguments put forward was that children were vulnerable to advertising and, [Page 45]in particular, to the persuasive techniques used. In essence, the issue was whether commercial advertisements were inherently unfair and deceptive when aimed at young, impressionable children. If children cannot understand the intent behind advertising, there is a good case that it is unfair to allow advertising to be directed to them. Psychologists and other professionals can contribute to this debate by finding out the age at which children do understand.

It is, however, difficult to establish an age at which it can be said that most children understand the intent of advertising. The concept of advertising literacy suggests that several different abilities are required to understand advertising, and each of these can have its own trajectory of development with different rates for different children. We do know that most young children younger than about 6 years of age see advertising as merely entertainment. By 8–9 years, most children, when interviewed, will claim that advertising “tries to get you to buy stuff,” and often this is cited as evidence that children understand the commercial and persuasive functions of advertising. By early adolescence, skepticism toward advertising has developed fully. The question of what happens between these ages is less easily answered. It seems that children begin to realize that advertising provides information, as well as being simply fun, at about 7 years of age, but an understanding that this information is persuasive emerges later. Just knowing that information about brands and products is being provided, without an understanding that it is designed to get the audience to purchase, is evidence that children are potentially at risk at that age. Knowing that advertising provides selective information—information that gives only positive information about the brand—is an ability that seems to emerge at about 7 years of age, with most children able to recognize that advertising does not say negative things about brands by 8–9 years.

So does this mean that the answer can be found in the evidence? The answer must be yes, and we now know that an approximate age of 7–8 years is crucial in terms of an emerging ability on the part of the child to discern and evaluate the advertiser's persuasive intent. There is an emerging consensus in the literature that children under the age 8 or thereabouts cannot really understand that the intention of advertising is to persuade and influence buying behavior, and some children show only a dangerous partial understanding—they may think that it is simply information about brands. So should we protect younger children from advertising but place no restrictions on advertising to adolescents and older children because they are no different, in this respect, from adults? The situation is more complex. There is no consensus on any single definitive age as the time when advertising is understood. However, research suggests that younger children understand the intent of advertising better now than in previous years, which would suggest that children are getting more sophisticated with advertising. But there is another more sobering finding. Samples used have been limited to predominantly white children. When African American children were sampled, the lack of awareness of the purpose of advertising was considerably greater.

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