What+Does+Advertising+Food+To+Children+Really+Do?+-Jenn+Lacko


 * __ Food Advertising and British Children’s Television __**

The particular journal article that I have chosen for this assignment discusses food advertising on British television and the potential affect is has on children. I would like to provide a bit of information about the article before I begin analyzing it in a quantitative way. The article discusses how children are exposed to nearly 20,000 advertisements per year and that in both the UK and USA restrictions on children’s advertising are limited. Because there is a lack of restriction when advertising to children, currently two thirds of the advertisements are food related, making up anywhere between 56-63% of all commercials. Of these commercials breakfast cereals and other snack foods are the most heavily advertised types of food. These factors alone might be enough to get ones mind wondering about the implications that food related advertisements have on children, but below I will discuss some of the other information that can be gathered based off of this articles quantitative study.

The main topic of interest as implied above is the significance of food advertising during children’s television, which is demonstrated by analyzing specific advertisements that are geared towards children, during children’s programming. This topic would be of interest to most people that deal with children on a regular basis. The reason for this is because depending on how children view and interpret these advertisements could affect their health and behavior in a serious way. Another article that I came across suggests that similar studies have been done prior to this one however, a difference between this study and previous studies that are relatable deals with the difference in advertising food to children based around gender. The article that I have chosen also suggests that previous studies were not as concerned with fast food advertisements as they are in this study.

The research question that is explored in this article revolves around the differences between food and non-food advertisements during children’s programming and whether these advertisements are geared specifically to children. The sample here is the advertisements that were gathered over the course of two weeks from children’s programming. The characteristic of this sample that makes this study important is whether the advertisements gathered from the sample material is geared towards children and advertises food. If this particular characteristic is present in the samples gathered it will help in answering the main research question of the study (stated above).

In this study the advertisements were analyzed based around several different categories that were created in order to makes the assessment of the different advertisements more valuable. These categories can be labeled as variables for our purposes. The variables include: Format, Main Characters, Additional characters, Themes, Verbal appeals, Product appeals, and Emotional appeals. These variables must all be considered equally when viewing the various advertisements to ensure more accurate results. The two variables that were noticed to be reoccurring in many of the advertisements that were geared towards children and dealt with food were Format and Themes. It was found that a majority of the advertisements that were geared towards children were in the animated format. Advertisements with animated formats also had engaging themes such as magic, fantasy, violence, humor etc. The author recapped in the explanation of this study that these two variables in particular (Format and Themes) were usually present in food advertisements aimed at children.

This data was analyzed with the use of the author’s explanation but was more importantly placed into a chart, making the data visually pleasing and easy to construct observations and conclusions from. From the author’s explanation and the thoughtfully crafted charts and graphs it has been concluded that Food advertisements continue to be the single largest category of products advertised during British children’s television. Of these food products cereal and snacks are advertised the most. Another significant finding as I alluded to above is that using animation in advertisements has been linked to greater attention in children.

The author/researcher is aware that certain techniques in food advertisements get a child’s attention. What the author/researcher is still unaware of however is whether certain children are more influenced than others by the techniques used in child food commercials. Are there other concerns such as behavioral, social, or environmental factors that could impact a child’s interpretation of these food advertisements? What I’ve realized from this article in general is that studies are largely never complete; there is always some underlying question that is unanswered which is probably why quantitative research can become so tedious and time consuming. Specifically from this journal article I have learned that animation is very appealing to children. Previously to this article I also over looked the storyline that advertisements utilize. Children seem to relate to advertisements more that have a specific theme and a storyline. Although this seems very obvious I had never really thought about it before, but it makes a lot of sense. As we have learned previously in this class children react better to themes and storylines in children’s television shows so why should children’s advertising be any different?

Hill, A.J., & Lewis, M.K. (1998). Food advertising on British children’s television: a content analysis and experimental study with nine-year olds. //International Journal of Obesity//, 22, 206-214.
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