Ads.

I recently saw a movie in my Social Psych titled Consuming Kids.  This shocking documentary showed how kids are being marketed to in levels never seen before. Advertisers will not only test their ads to find the right attention grabbing moments, but will also imply the nag factor. Just what is this factor: How much a child nags until the desired item is bought. Marketers WANT kids to nag and have searched for the proper ways to GET them to nag. With all this said, I have a question to ask. How bad are ads really?

The movie is clear that ads contribute to the lack creativity. Kids don't exorcise their brain muscles. Instead they only imitate what is scene. One child psychologist added that adds have done more then just slow the creative mind. They make children want money. In his early years up to now he'd always ask the same question. "What would you like to be when you grow up." Before the 80s the answered varied. Some kids said firemen, some said nurse. But today he reports that his new patients overwhelmingly respond with rich. Not a profession that could make them rich. Just rich. It is true adds may have contributed to that, but I have this to say.
If adds hinder a child's thinking skill so it can only imitate what it sees, then why are all the pre 1980s kids responding with generic jobs? To drive the bad add point home this movie showed an old TV show where people asked kids the same job question. As usual they answered with the same generic jobs that everyone knows about.  Now this clip does make me think poorly of the post 80s adds. But it also made me think of something else. Kids seem to imitate a lot of things through out childhood. The only problem is that what kids imitate are not what used to be. Children said the generic job titles because thats all they knew. Now all they know is something different. Is that all bad? Hard to say.