An investigation of the effects of visual aspects of television advertisements on children consumers

Abstract

Nowadays advertisements try to orient children and teenagers towards unnecessary and unhealthy consumption of goods by making exaggereted claims of their benefits in our country where the youth population is very high. Even though advertisers’ wrong and misleading information affects children’s mental and physical health negatively, they persist with their advertisements to boost their sells. Thus, advertisements increase the children’s demands and make them unconscious consumers. However parents, must criticize these advertisements to counter their effect on the children’s consumer identity. For this reason in order to find out the degree to which children were affected from television advertisements and their parents’ reactions to these advertisements, 1054 students in 9-14 aged group were surveyed at primary schools in Konya city centre. Based on the visual items of advertisements, younger students attached more importance to brands, students who watched televison a lot attached more importance to actors in the advertisements, students from high socioeconomic level attached more importance to products themselves, students from low socioeconomic level attached more importance to colours of the products, female students attached more importance to colours of the products and decor. It was determined that 41.8 percent of the students didn’t find the advertisements convincing. Nevertheless, even though their parents generally criticized the advertisements (85.3 %) their children watched, the children wanted to buy the products they watched on advertisements (91.5 %).