NICHE ARTICLE

Advertisement and Children

Nowadays televisions have invaded our homes. In the recent age of technology, we find television in each and every home. Television is generally used for entertainment and to get information, but when we look at advertisements we feel that it is the worst medium of publicity of products and brands. Today we can see the exaggeration of advertisements on television, when we look at those ads we find too much ads of products of the children to seize the mind of small children. In fact these ads get success in attracting children towards the products, because these ads are enough seducing to grab children’s attention.
Recently, publicity has become the necessary element for any company to sell its products. Everybody knows that in this age of competition, if any company wants to sell its products largely, it must advertise in great quantity and appealingly. So most of the companies emphasize on making attractive advertises. They spend plenty of money after making advertisements. Company consults ad agencies to make the advertisement. The creators of ad put in it many attractive components like; striking background, embellished statements and humorous dialogues. Most of the companies use the celebrity in the advertisement of its product. Advertisement which contains above stated aspects, become popular and that’s why the product becomes popular and gets sold on a large scale. For example, the advertisement of ‘Bournvita’ , which is being showed on television nowadays, in that particular ad they use a pair of children playing the game of chess, from those two one boy regularly drinks ‘Bournvita’ and the another child never drinks it. The first boy wins the game easily and tells another boy to drink ‘Bournvita’ regularly if he wants to be intelligent. Now we can imagine the impact of this advertisement on children and even on their parents too. Since, we watch television everyday; we come across many exaggerated advertisements as I have cited above.
In the present era, we can see many products which are related to children like chocolates, toothpaste, health-drinks, news-papers and many more. All the companies which make this type of products are only interested in selling their products. Therefore, to survive, each company tries to make its ad more attractive than other companies, to lure the children. They can do anything to snatch the attention of children. Today’s ads are pretty enough to lure the children.
Companies which make children’s products like chocolate, milk supplement, school-related tools etc. offer attractive free samples to children. They even rush to school many times to sell their products. Since they know that children see the ad of the particular product on television, when it will be showed to them they will obviously attracted towards it. I would like to cite some instances here.
One company reached on a school with a van, there was a brand name written on the sides"bold and clear". They had come to offer milk supplement along with the supply of milk, for children for mid-day snack. The company offered noodles another time. At last a drug company gave the free samples of ‘calcium sandoz’ to primary class children. Their purpose was same and that was the business.
Before sometime cadbury’s perk conducted a quiz competition at a school in Ahmedabad and distributed free samples of perk. On eating chocolate the children fell ill. This is just a small example. We can’t imagine the situation of tomorrow if we will not make our children aware about the fact of such products.
As we know very well that the children are not rational consumers. They cannot make out how ads play on their needs. Companies use the natural credulity of children and their lack of experience and understanding for commercial interests.

Conclusion:
Though, we cannot stop children from watching television, we can explain them peacefully about the disadvantages of such harming products. We can control the children only by explaining them.