除了睡覺，孩子們大部分的空閑時間都在看電視。截止到一個孩子高中畢業時，他/她大約看了350000則廣告（卡爾松佩姬&萊文，1992年）。對于一般的孩子來說，家里的電視機平均每天有七個小時是開著的。在一周的時間內，學齡前兒童（兩歲到五歲）一般會看28個小時的電視。學齡兒童（六歲到十一歲）一般會看24個小時的電視（科茨和故事，1994年）。由于花了大量的時間在看電視上，孩子們就會聽信于不斷重復的廣告傳播的內容。
 

廣告幾乎是隨處可見的。兒童市場的常見媒體載體就是電視廣告。插播在兒童節目間隙的電視廣告日益增加，星期六早上會特別安排多一些。廣告一般出現在錄像帶、兒童雜志、商場里，甚至會出現在課堂上的電視教育節目里（柯林斯，1994年）。一則電視插座的廣告獲得了相當多的負面宣傳渠道。這是一個營銷手段，即營銷人員在課堂的新聞節目中插入一個長達12分鐘的兒童廣告，并每天在全國12000多所學校中播放。
 

Next to sleeping, children spend the majority of their free time watching television. By the time a young child graduates from high school, he/she will have seen an estimated 350,000 commercials (Carlsson-Paige & Levin, 1992). For the average child, the television set is on in the home for an average of seven hours per day. In a one week time frame the average preschool-aged child (ages two through five) watches 28 hours of television. The average school-aged child (ages six to 11) watches 24 hours of television (Kotz & Story, 1994). With such a great amount of exposure time, the young child is repetitively exposed to the advertiser’s persuasive dialogue.
 

Advertisements can be found virtually everywhere. Common media vehicles that are used for the children's market are, television commercials with an increase during children's programs, especially Saturday morning programming, on videotapes, in children's magazines, in malls, and even in the classroom through television- educational programming (Collins, 1994). One television outlet that has received a considerable amount of negative publicity is Channel One. This is a program where marketers enter the classroom setting by embedding advertisements aimed at children into segments of a 12 minute newscast that is shown daily in more than 12,000 schools across the country. The appeal to marketers is to guarantee reaching the intended target audience. The target audience may be current users or potential buyers, those who make the buying decision or those who influence it (Kotler & Armstrong, 2010, p. 409). In this case, the target audience is the children who influence the buying decisions of their parents. The result is that it unfairly takes advantage of children, which is basically sponsored by the school system via television advertisers.#p#分頁標題#e#
 

Children are often mesmerized by television. They fixate upon television and become hypnotized by watching. The attention level of young viewers is increased with the presence of children, eye contact, puppets, and rapid pacing. Television advertisements target younger audiences by using colorful images and rapid movement, often in the form of animation (Brady, 1992). The advertisements that are primarily directed towards the children’s market are for toys and foods. Studies show that children see the images on television as a window of the world; these images affect their thoughts and ideas. Therefore, marketers are manipulating children by predominantly showing advertisements that encourage materialism and eating.
 

Research findings on how children interpret television commercials are not the only indicator of what constitutes a fair market. Public opinion, along with the observations of other regarded professionals, observe the unfair target of the children's market. According to Cynthia Schiebe, assistant professor of psychology at Ithaca College and director of The Center for Research on the Effects of Television, has the following to say in relation to children as an unfair market:
 

‘The point is not that advertising is wrong, but it often plays unfair...Children can't distinguish the persuasive intent of commercials. There is enormous evidence that young children have various difficulties in understanding the nature of commercials. They give more credibility to the person speaking than they should, especially if it's someone like Cap'n Crunch or Ronald McDonald, or someone who is a role model.’ Ms. Schiebe, through her work as a psychologist and a researcher, asserts that adults have the capabilities to detect persuasive strategies where children do not have the same capabilities.

Peggy Charren, leader for 25 years of Action for Children's Television (ACT), believes that advertising takes advantage of impressionable youngsters. Charren states: 'Children are the only unpaid sales force in the history of America. Advertisers don't expect kids to buy the product. The kids are being used to sell the product to the parent.' Despite the ethical and moral debates, marketers continue to focus on the children's market because children have become a tremendous source of revenue and an increasingly important commodity for the advertising and marketing industry. Besides being an ethical issue, marketing that is directed towards children can create adverse effects. A study conducted by the American Dietetic Association found that marketers primarily promote high fat and/or high sugar foods and drinks to children. The foods that are being advertised are not consistent with dietary recommendations. The extended periods of time that children spend watching television has raised concern on the effects that it has on health attitudes and behaviors of children. By broadcasting the antithesis of a healthful diet, it may be a significant contributor to obesity in children. Obesity is the result of an energy imbalance that is created when the diet contains mostly high fat and sugar (Kotz & Story, 1994).#p#分頁標題#e#
 

The American Dietetic Association conducted their study by viewing 52.5 hours of television during children's programming. In that time 997 commercials were for a product and a mere 68 were public service announcements. More than half (56.5%) were advertisements for foods while only 10 of the 68 public service announcements were nutrition related. On average, of the 19 commercials advertisements per hour, 11 were for food. This means a child views a commercial for food every five minutes (Kotz & Story, 1994). This may be an acceptable practice if the foods advertised were nutritious; however, the foods being marketed were mainly inconsistent with what constitutes a healthy diet. Of the 564 food advertisements, 43.6% were for foods in the fats, oils and sweets group; 37.5% were for foods in the breads, cereals, rice, and pasta food group; and 23% of those ads were for high sugar cereals. In this particular study there was not a single advertisement for fruits or vegetables (Kotz & Story, 1994).
 

Heavy marketing of high fat and/or sugar foods and not advertising foods with nutritional value is unfairly promoting an unhealthy lifestyle; the child does not have the knowledge of what is healthy and is not able to understand that commercials are designed to sell products (Kotz & Story, 1994). This view has also been accepted by The American Academy of Pediatrics. Their position is stated as the following:
 

 ‘Parents rather than children should determine what children should eat. Children are unprepared to make appropriate food choices and do not understand the relationship of food choices to health maintenance and disease prevention....Because young children cannot understand the relationship between food choices and chronic nutritional diseases, advertising food products to children promotes profit rather than health’ (Kotz & Story, 1994).
 

While researching this topic, I spent some time watching children’s television. I found that the amount of advertisements for high fat foods were consistent with the research conducted by The American Dietetic Association. During a two-hour period, I observed more than 30 minutes of commercial advertising. Among these were advertisements for McDonalds, General Mills snacks (fruit roll ups), and various cereal commercials. Among the channels that I viewed I found that public television (local) was the highest in commercial advertising aimed at the younger audience. These commercials often interrupted programs, while cable and satellite channels such as Boom, cartoon network, and nickelodeon had fewer commercials and the programs were not interrupted by advertisements.
 

Advertisers promote materialism in young children by creating a loss of self-sufficiency in their ability to make the best with what they have. Due to marketer’s influential power on children and the use of the program-length commercial, children think they have to have certain toys just in order to play. In the past, children created their own accessories, props and so forth in acting out their play. Today, marketers convince children that they must have a manufactured accessory and prop to play. Basically, the advertiser is taking control of the situation and therefore undermining the child's basic sense of self-sufficiency (Carlsson-Paige & Levin, 1992).#p#分頁標題#e#
 

Not only do marketers dictate how children should play, but they are also creating an environment where children consistently demand more. Toy manufacturers produce lines of toys which are correlated with cartoons or other children's programming. This type of strategy is successful in making the child want it more. The toys being sold in this way have only one specific function so the child has to get other components to play effectively. The advertiser is getting the child to think in terms of quantity (Carlsson-Paige & Levin, 1992). This creates profit for the advertising industry and creates a materialistic view of the world for the child.
 

The controversy over the children’s market heated up in the late 1960's when children were considered their own market. Advertisers used direct hard-sell approaches in attempts to persuade the children's market to want the product or service. The advertisers focused their approach on exaggerated claims and showed these commercials often. The public took notice of the repetitiveness and appeals being used and voiced their concern to the Federal Communications Commission (Kunkel & Roberts, 1999) with no avail.
 

In 1970, pressures from a child advocacy group, Action for Children's television (ACT) presented ample evidence to the FCC on television advertising that takes advantage of children. According to findings conducted by the Surgeon General’s Report, advertising is taking advantage of children because; one, children the age of five cannot distinguish program content from commercial content and, two, children eight and under do not have the cognitive skills to identify persuasion. Therefore, children are an unfair market and the public expects protection on a government level.
 

ACT petitioned the FCC to ban all advertisements directed towards children eight and under. Despite receiving more than 100,000 letters in support of ACT's petition, the FCC did not comply with the request. It took the FCC four years to come up with some restrictions. The restrictions included: advertisers must limit advertisement time to 9.5 minutes per hour on weekends when viewing is highest and 12 minutes during the week. The FCC believed reducing frequency would offer the child some sort of protection from marketers. In order to protect the child five and under who cannot distinguish program content from advertisers, the FCC required all stations to comply with the separation principle. This policy was applied in three different areas: One new requirement was that all television programs adopt a separation device referred to as a bumper. This device signals to the child a commercial is about to be broadcast. For instance, an announcer might say, 'And now a word from our sponsor' (Kunkel & Roberts, 1999). Critics claim that advertisers have circumvented the rules and they minimize the warnings. For example, when speaking disclaimers such as the one mentioned before, the voice is often spoken rapidly and is not understood fully by the child viewer. The second area of regulation prohibited host selling. Host selling is when a character from the program promoted products either directly, during or following their show. For example a Barbie Doll commercial could not be seen during a Barbie Doll television show. Finally, program-length commercials were prohibited (Kunkel).#p#分頁標題#e#
 

In the early 1980's, during the time of the Reagan administration, the advertising/marketing industry basically deregulated itself. Mattel and other toy companies reinstated the program-length commercial. In 1984, ACT responded to the reintroduction of program length commercials by filing a complaint to the FCC. However, according to the FCC, marketplace forces can better determine commercial levels than our own rules. Kunkel and Roberts had the following conclusion to make:
 

'When forced to choose at an extreme level, society (at least in the form of its representative government) valued the protection of private enterprise, commercial speech, and some degree of the concept of caveat emptor more than it valued the protection of children in their interaction with these institutions' (67). The government needs to intervene with some form of regulated guidelines because a child should not be regarded in the same sense as an adult audience. Children are vulnerable to persuasion and should not be forced to succumb to materialism so early in life.
 

There have been many others concerned with this position and the freedom of expression in the free enterprise system that has allowed television to become the mass marketing tool. Marketers seem unconcerned about ethical obligations and are merely concerned with profit margins. It is society's responsibility to push for regulations that will protect children from advertisers. The first amendment gives all citizens responsibility along with freedom, the responsibility to protect their vulnerable youth, the responsibility to limit their excesses. With the pervasion of advertising, this has become next to impossible. The tactics that marketers use to target children through these commercials makes children feel incomplete, inferior, and inadequate if they do not purchase or get their parents to purchase various advertised products. It also creates a worldview that says to children, if you don’t have these things then you are not as good as those that do. It is our responsibility to nurture children to become self-sufficient, creative, healthy adults who do not have a distorted tendency for materialism. However, we know that it is a marketer’s responsibility and job to find a target market for their product and advertise the product to the best of their ability in order to yield high profits.
 

I believe that there is enough evidence to say that in many ways our children are unfairly targeted in television advertising. Hopefully as parents, educators, and members of society we can help to minimize the negative effects that advertising may have on our children by supervising what they watch. It is to say then that the unfair targeting of our children through television advertising has became a problem due to our own ignorance and unwillingness to make the appropriate changes in what we allow our children to be exposed to. I believe that marketers are only doing their job and apparently doing their job well. At the end of the day, it is the parent’s responsibility to sensor what their children are exposed to and to the best of their ability. This will be a debate that will likely continue on for some time to come. Parents who believe that their children are being unethically targeted by marketers need to remember that it is also their responsibility to monitor their children’s exposure to these elements.#p#分頁標題#e#