Negative Effects of Advertising on Youth – Term Paper

Advertising is a widely-used promotion tool that is geared towards drawing more attention to potential customers for an existing or a new product. Thus, advertising as a promotion tool is a mass marketing strategy (Kirmani & Yi, 1991). Also, advertising strategies will, therefore, concentrate more on the advantages which the customer will get from that product or service. Be that as it may, advertising tends to have negative impacts on the society (Kirmani & Yi, 1991). For instance, some advertising strategies are geared towards children and could result in negative impacts regarding safety, health, and nutrition. Some of these advertisements act as baits to the customers. As a result, the adverts end up being misleading and causing many negative issues. Along these lines, this paper explores a Lakia shoe commercial that features a child.

Negative effects of advertisements on society

The Lakia shoe commercial features a young boy who starts off by skating away from his father. The one-minute video then progresses to show the child slipping across the streets while his father chases him. Along the way, the boy comes across various people such a young couple kissing in the streets. The young boy stops and is seen to admire the young couple making out. Not further away, he also stops and smiles at a young girl who seems to be almost his age. The boy continues to skate dangerously on the streets until he gets to a tree with many pairs of shoes hanging on the branches. He tries to throw his, but his height doesn’t allow him to throw that high. Finally, his father catches up with him and surprisingly enough, he helps the boy to throw the shoes onto the branches.

At first sight, it looks like a decent advertisement promoting cute shoes, but an in-depth analysis reflects many negative influences to children. First, the commercial is seen to glorify the boy’s act of running away from his father and letting the father chase him across the streets worried. In future, children could take this as an acceptable behavior to let their parents worry about their whereabouts and safety. Second, the boy skates dangerously across the streets without any protective gear or adult supervision. This puts him at risk of getting injured. In so doing, the commercial disregards the need to be cautious and adopt safety measures among children. The third concern is the values and moral aspect of the commercial. Morals and values in society are reflected by people’s actions in public, relations towards each other, dress codes, and general appearance. For instance, the boy is seen to admire a young couple kissing on the streets. In my opinion, that scene was unnecessary as it sends the wrong message to young children. Some may interpret that as a relationship between kissing and a nice pair of shoes and thus engage in such immoral acts before they are ready. 

Finally, the commercial should have been geared towards advertising the shoes and shoes only without the incorporation of other unnecessary aspects. These aspects acted as baits to impress the consumers. For instance, the Skechers Kids with Memory Foam commercial is an example of a good advert. It features a young boy who is skateboarding with his father, meets a friend and chats for a while, dances with a few more friends, and joins more friends in skating. In this particular advert, the video and the pictures don’t portray anything negative. The commercial shows the story of a young, responsible and jovial boy and in so doing, advertise the skechers shoes for kids.

References

American Academy of Pediatrics. (2006). Children, Adolescents, and Advertising. Pediatrics, 2563-2566.

Kirmani, A., & Yi, Y. (1991). The Effects of Advertising Context on Consumer Responses. Advances in Consumer Research, 414-416.