Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Television advertising directed towards young children (aged two to five) should not be allowed. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Advertisements are one of the significant factors in modern marketing strategies. Controversy exists over whether advertising can effectively and positively affect young children or not. From my vantage point, producing advertisements for very young children is an irrational activity because not only can they not perceive them comprehensively, but also they are not autonomous enough to decide based on advertisements individually.
To begin with, young children's perception of their environment is immature, unlike adults. That is to say, young children, can easily be misled by bad advertisements. Improper advertisements may also lead to a misconception to them. My personal experience is a compelling illustration of this. My five-year-old nephew watched TV programs he encountered in a TV advertisement about toy trucks. He thought those trucks were huge and asked me how the children in the advertisement could lift them easily. I told him that advertising companies use tricks like this in order to deceive children.
Second, the children aged between two and five, which are not schooled too, can not decide independently. In other words, they have not been educated seriously yet and have a dependent and undeveloped persona. Thus, based on the mentioned reasons, it does not make commercial sense to allocate budgets to produce advertisements for them. For instance, imagine an advertising company spending vast money to prepare appropriate advertisements for very young children. The unschooled children only can pay attention to visual objects in advertisements and can not comprehend the main point of the advertisements. Therefore, the company may probably face financial problems and go bankrupt.
In a nutshell, I firmly believe that TV advertising their primary goal is very young children should be prohibited. This is because it can bring about misconceptions for young children. In addition, the disadvantageous aspects of this marketing strategy can readily overwhelm its beneficial facets.
Submitted by Alireza Shahidi on