There is a substantial body of scientific evidence addressing all of these basic issues. The Task Force on Advertising and Children, responding to its charge, began by reviewing research on the impact of advertising on children, 2 with particular attention given both to the implications of children's cognitive development for understanding the potential effects of exposure to advertising and to specific harms that might result from exposure to advertising. These figures represent dramatic increases over those from the 1970s. It is estimated that advertisers spend more than $12 billion per year to reach the youth market and that children view more than 40,000 commercials each year. These two trends-the growth in advertising channels reaching children and the privatization of children's media use-have resulted in a dramatic increase in advertising directly intended for the eyes and ears of children. Many children also have unsupervised access to computers, meaning that much of the media (and advertising) content that children view is in contexts absent parental monitoring and supervision. children have televisions in their bedrooms. A recent study found that a majority of all U.S. Opportunities to advertise to children further expanded with the explosive growth of the Internet, and thousands of child-oriented Web sites with advertising content have appeared in the past few years.Ĭompounding the growth in channels for advertising targeting children has been another development: the privatization of children's media use. The British Parliament passed legislation in 1874 intended to protect children from the efforts of merchants to induce them to buy products and assume debt.Ĭommercial appeals to children, however, did not become commonplace until the advent and widespread adoption of television and grew exponentially with the advent of cable television, which allowed programmers to develop entire channels of child-oriented programming and advertising. Nevertheless, concerns over advertising targeting children preceded both radio and television. As an industry, advertising did not take off until the arrival of the various mass media: printing, radio, and television. Town criers were another early form of advertising. Advertising is hardly a recent human endeavor archaeologists have uncovered signs advertising property for rent dating back to ancient Rome and Pompeii.

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