I found an article written back in 2008 by a man named Roosevelt Pitt. He writes about advertising in relation to food. In this article he writes about how cartoon characters often advertise food that is unhealthy for kids.
He explains how children love cartoons and are attracted to flashy colors and animation. This makes them want the food that their favorite character is advertising. Very often though, this food is unhealthy. Pitt's audience in this article is the parents of children who eat these unhealthy foods and also advertisers that run these ads with the cartoons. He claims that this is a major part of childhood obesity and that both parties should stop giving this unhealthy food to children. The purpose of this article is to inform the public about this trend of childhood obesity and one of its causes. It is a rather short article that mostly emphasizes on healthy diets for children.
His delivery was very hard-hitting in this article because he shows the seriousness of childhood obesity and implores parents to buy healthier food. The style of his writing was very elegant with educated word choice and very good sentence structure.
http://www.naturalnews.com/024398_child_children_advertising.html
I just learned about this in my advertising class and how unethical it is to target children. It's very common nowadays for characters to present unhealthy food to children, which is so disappointing. It's easy for advertisers to target children because they are easily attracted to bright colors and animated characters. It isn't right for them to do this to young kids since they don't know better than to listen to their favorite characters. This creates concern for kids because most of the products marketed to them cause their health to decline, since the main component of the foods are sugar and artificial flavorings. I believe it is wrong for advertisers to market to children but in today's society it is socially acceptable to market these types of things due to the fact that every one is just trying to make a living. There should really be stricter laws on these types of advertisements, but who am I to even decide upon this?
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