Discuss gender representation in television advertising aimed at children, and what effect this may have on the target audience.

Advertisers segment the audiences into different sections because different products would apply to different age groups, different personalities and different couples etc. They create audience profiles to determine what kind of person would buy their product, so they can create the advert around the audience profile and hopefully attract their desired target audience.

Some advertisers use pester power to try and make the child pester the adult for the product. This is quite an effective sale strategy because the younger children are, the more attention they require. In some ways the advert is actually encouraging the child to ask repeatedly for the product until the parents give in.

The spider man advert that was aimed at young boys aged about 8-12 years old was being very stereotypical of boys that age. They had the boys in the advert that were the same age as the target audience, and also the boys were wearing the stereotypical boy colours such as blue and red. The advertisers also used a faster rocked up version of the spider man theme tune, and boys are supposed to be fans of rock music.

The girls' advert for the "Seraphina doll" was completely different. They had used pastel colours to represent the "girlishness" of the advert, and also they had a posh woman being the narrator, which in a way is suggesting the way that young ladies should aspire to be. In the advert the girls were all princesses who had blonde hair and were grooming the cat, which shows that they were caring for it, which is also what the housewife should aspire to be!

This is unfair to both genders because an advert is trying to make them change who they are to make them buy a product. Girls are being represented as caring princesses whereas boys, are being represented as being adventurous and rockers, and this is wrong for both genders, as some girls are adventurous and many boys are caring!

Adverts use stereotyping for both genders as they feel that if they can pinpoint a specific quality of people then they could get them to buy their product, like for example, the girls advert, all girls when they are young all dream of being a princess and now advertisers are using this to their advantage by saying things like "become a real princess", which is clearly a lie and makes the girls use pester power on their parents because they want to be a real princess.

There are very few adverts that challenge that stereotyping because it seems to have succeeded in the advertising business, so they are trying to get as much money out of the consumer as they can.

In this essay I have tried to specify some of the stereotypical aspects of children's advertising. In my opinion stereotyping in advertising is wrong, because it is trying to change the way that children live their lives, by saying "your life won't be complete without this product" and by pushing the fact that you are not perfect until you get the product. This can make the child feel very unhappy if they do not have the product, even to the extent of feeling their parents don't love them, because their parents haven't bought the product for them. It can also make the parents feel guilty because they haven't got the money to buy the product, and they feel like they are letting their child down, all of this pressure for something that we don't really need, is actually quite ridiculous.

By Olivia Harriman

Olivia Harriman Media 1