Females and the Role of Media

If Values are Right, What's Left?

         Susan Linn (2004)

     The media today works to mass communicate information around the globe. A large portion of that media is focused on women and children. How do these media agencies become part of our lives and way of life? One way is the influence of our values. Commercial media and advertising on children directly imposes values and messages. As a society we can’t escape values, are own or others. What we encounter in the media and what we take to heart are based on the media that we choose to read/watch and believe. Many of our values are formed when we are children and as we grow up and become adults. Children today are influenced by the media, especially commercials that play between and during programs. The media creates marketing campaigns directed at our children in hopes of influencing them. Marketing the idea to children that they are capable of free choice is a ploy that is used in order for consumption. The children believes that they should have a specific good or item and they push parents to purchase this product. The marketers are influencing the children’s values and manipulating factors of choice. Kids today are bombarded with marketing and receive the message that by getting things they will be happy. The media works to exploit the mind of the child in hopes of creating a consumer.
    I feel that marketing to a younger demographic has evolved into a competition between advertisers. McDonalds is an exmple of a company that uses this advertising to excite kids. The idea of the happy meal that comes with the toy appleals to all children. The overall goal is to see how many children can get their parents to buy a specific product. The problem with the media marketing is that the children are not learning values from their parents that will help them as they grow up. These marketing campaigns become a second set of parents, directing children to do what they want and buy things in order to be happy. The habit of buying items based on the appeal of a commercial is a customer behaviour that only benefits the companies. I believe that working to manipulate children is a cheap tactic by companies. Young children believe what they see and hear on television. Values are an important part of a person’s life. By moulding ones values around consumer goods and subliminal messages, a false sense of happiness is created. These marketers want children to believe that you can only be happy if you buy everything that you want in life. The real message that needs to be sent to these children is that being happy does not evolve around consumer goods but on ones personal beliefs, ones family and ones love for life