The Ethics of Advertising to Children

Why marketing directed at children raises distinct ethical concerns that don't apply to advertising aimed at adults.

Advertising to adults operates on an underlying assumption: the audience can recognize a persuasive message for what it is and evaluate it critically before deciding whether to act on it. Advertising directed at children complicates that assumption in ways that raise genuine ethical questions distinct from advertising aimed at adult audiences.

Persuasion knowledge and why children lack it

Researchers use the term persuasion knowledge to describe a person’s developed understanding of how advertising works - that a company is trying to sell them something, that an ad presents an idealized rather than fully accurate picture, and that emotional appeals in marketing are a deliberate technique rather than a spontaneous, disinterested piece of information. This understanding develops gradually through childhood and isn’t fully in place until well into adolescence, meaning younger children in particular often can’t reliably distinguish a persuasive advertisement from neutral, unbiased information, which is precisely the ethical concern at the center of advertising directed at this age group.

Pester power and its economic logic

Advertising to the child to reach the parent's wallet

Many products marketed to children aren't actually purchased by children at all - they're purchased by parents, using the parent's own money. Advertisers have long understood this and developed marketing specifically designed to generate **pester power**: persistent requests from a child that pressure a parent into a purchase the parent might not have chosen independently. This represents a genuinely distinct ethical situation from ordinary advertising, since the marketing message is aimed at someone (the child) who isn't the actual buyer and often can't fully evaluate the message critically, specifically in order to influence someone else (the parent) who holds the purchasing power but wasn't the intended target of the message.

Regulatory restrictions that have followed

Many countries have adopted specific regulatory restrictions on advertising to children well beyond what applies to advertising aimed at adults - restrictions on advertising during children’s television programming, requirements for clearer disclosure when content is sponsored, and in some countries, outright bans on certain categories of advertising, like fast food or sugary drinks, during programming aimed specifically at younger children. These restrictions reflect a broad policy judgment that the normal assumption of informed, critical evaluation underlying most advertising regulation doesn’t reliably hold for young children.

Targeted advertising in the digital era

Targeted advertising - using data about an individual to show them specifically tailored marketing - raises a newer version of this same underlying concern, since digital platforms can identify and specifically target young users, sometimes gathering data about their interests and behavior to make marketing messages more persuasive to that specific individual child, without a parent necessarily aware of what marketing their child is actually seeing or how precisely it’s been tailored to appeal to them individually. This has driven a new wave of regulation specifically targeting children’s data collection and targeted advertising online, treating it as raising concerns distinct from - and often more acute than - the concerns already established around traditional broadcast advertising to children.

Key takeaways

Children generally lack the fully developed persuasion knowledge adults use to recognize and evaluate advertising critically.
Pester power marketing targets children specifically to influence parents, who hold the purchasing power but weren't the direct audience.
Many countries impose regulatory restrictions on advertising to children well beyond what applies to adult-targeted advertising.
Targeted digital advertising raises newer, often more acute versions of these same concerns around children's data and marketing.
These distinct ethical concerns stem from children's limited capacity to critically evaluate persuasive marketing messages.