Do you want kids to grow up eating only McDonalds? Do you want them only buying at a certain store because of a commercial they saw on the television? I think not but this will happen if we don’t stop mass advertising to young children. Advertisers will do this no matter how young the child because to them it’s just a way to make money. They get to kids of any age especially little ones because the younger they are the more naïve they are. They use the sneakiest of the sneaky techniques to get to them. Advertisers will do anything to get through to kids these days.

My first example of the big companies to get to the young kids is through a technique known as buzz advertising. What they do is get celebrities to wear their products and merchandise. Kids who idolize them as heroes decide to be just like them and go out and buy what they saw them wearing plus more. It gets so much money into the pockets of theses companies. Another way is to get “cool” kids from the community to wear their items. The non-“cool” kid’s think that will make them cool so they go buy what they saw, putting money into the companies’ hands, and thinking they are cool.

The second example of this kind of advertising for big glam companies is to use immersive advertising. They use this by getting to little kid sites likes neopets.com and display their products. McDonald’s lets you virtually buy food from them to use for your pet but that also makes kids want to go to the actual store for the real food. Disney also uses neopets.com and you can watch little trailers of movies they are about to make, this makes little children want to go see the movie giving the companies more money. Through sites like this parents think this is really harmless and don’t anything. So money is just flying out of their pockets.

My third example of getting through to teens is viral advertising. They use sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga to get through to almost the teen. They spread little advertisements through your whole friends list, sending it to your friends friends and so on and so forth spreading like a virus. It gets to almost everyone and most people can’t tell that it’s advertising. Companies are smart and use these sneaky techniques to get to our society. They also use data mining to get kids and by this they track websites that you go on and then use that to attack you. Hoping that your friends have the same interest they also send those things to them.

My final example of this kind of advertising of through psychology. A study showed that kids thought a carrot tasted better wrapped in a McDonalds wrapper. This is just not right because the exact same carrot one wrapped in a plain wrapper, and one in a McDonald’s wrapper should taste the same but the Golden Arches make all the difference. Kids think this is all better but no its not. Doing this is very unethical and very unprofessional. They should be able to find better ways to get to kids other then brainwashing them. Other studies show that at the age of 6 months old babies have seen over 100 commercials and that by the age of 6 years old they can recognize over 50 logos from different companies including McDonalds golden arches.

In conclusion, if we want our kids to grow up in a society controlled by advertisements and golden arches and wrapped up food that tastes better then the original then we can continue on the way we have been living then keep it this way. Certain but if we want our kids to grow up in an environment that is healthy and that has controlled advertising then we should act now to stop the major ways to get to kids to buy their products. In my opinion theses advertisements control some of how we live and tell us that one thing is better then another thing. Then later they say that this other thing doesn’t compare to them. They try and display a certain appearance for people to see and think is better for them. But what they don’t understand is that no matter what there is a circle that goes back to what they thought was bad becomes something good. Laws need to be made that censor what can and can’t be shown or said on TV. This would really help our society in growing correctly without interruption to child growth. If this cannot be done then advertising should be stopped completely. It doesn’t have to been this drastic but that will happen if we aren’t careful with what is put on the television.