Children and Advertising

Advertising can be termed as any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor (Kapoor, 2010). Although advertising might facilitate one to be up to date about latest product and technology, but on the other side, it can also create some pressing issues like Influence over children that could affect a child both mentally and physically. It can be argued, children are more vulnerable target audience for advertisers as they are easily influenced by advertisements without doubting its motive (Vadehra, 2010). It seems, globally, governments are taking serious steps to regulate advertising Influence over children. Sweden, for example, had banned the advertising for children below 12 years (Edling, 1999) while advertising is strictly regulated across other parts of Europe (RAC, 2003). Furthermore, there are voluntary groups like “Adbusters” and "Mothers group" that pressurize governments to regulate advertising (Vadehra, 2010). In India, It might be right to say, the laws corresponding to advertising are very lax and there are only couple of business organisation that can only put moral pressure on advertising. (Vadehra, 2010)

Without exaggerating, it can be said that in the last two decades, there has been a major change in the advertising Pattern in India. In 1970-90, advertising was limited to direct messages through radio, print and limited visuals. Moreover, there are several educational short visuals for children. In 1990s, when Indian broadcast industry was liberalised (Indianetzone, 2003), cable television revolution had changed the advertising entirely. Television had been now labelled as a powerful source of advertising. According to recent survey, in India, children watches 2-3 hrs television on weekdays and it increases on weekend and reaches an overwhelming high in vacations (Table 1). Moreover, India has on average 15 minutes of advertising in an hour during children programming (Table 2) as...