Content
1. Introduction 2
2. Literature Review 3
2.1 What is advertisement 3
2.2 The definition of children, childhood and children’s consumer behaviour 5
2.3 Arguments on advertisements and children 6
3. Discussion 7
3.1 Advertisement should be controlled, especially towards children 7
3.2 Why under 12 years old? 8
3.3 Is more rigorous control possible? 10
4. Conclusion & Recommendation 11
5. Bibliographies: 12
1. Introduction
Children are always considered as a group that is particularly vulnerable and they need more concerns from adults. A young human being below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority is called child. Many people believe that they are at the age to imitate adults and things they have seen. Jones (2009) thinks young children have the ability to imitate since 2 years old and they copy the actions of others. So they are easily affected by others because young children cannot protect and defending themselves against damages unlike adults.
In the modern society, mass media plays an important role and advertisements can be found everywhere along with the development of modern technologies. According to Key Note’s survey of advertising market in 2012, UK advertising profits grew 2.6 per cent in the year of 2011. Moreover, digital marketing grows fast in advertising industry as consumers tend to use digital media platforms instead of tradition media (Key Note, 2012). Although the global economy is experiencing recession, the global advertising grows every year since 2010 (Key Note, 2012). However, there exist some among advertisements which is blamed to be harmful to children in the UK. For example, Bennett (2013) criticized that kids in the UK could watch Gambling advertisements on TV 211 times per year. Ofcom even declared that there is a fifteen times’ rise in the number of advertisements about gambling and