Children’s awareness of advertising: an educational path to the discovery of persuasion

Many studies demonstrate the positive relation between advertising and children’s consumption behaviours and attitudes. In Italy, a kid watching television for two hours a day is exposed to 16.000 commercials a year, 22% are food commercials (Russo, 2012). Scholars, nonetheless, affirm that exposure to advertising could be mitigated by factors as consumer literacy, education and parental control of television viewing and diet (Kline, 2011). The current within-subject research investigates thus how children with low/high persuasion awareness towards advertising differ in their understanding and analyses whether they could raise their consciousness of advertising so as to decode its objectives and messages and activate cognitive defences aimed at breaking them free from its influence. The focus is primarily on age and social factors. The sample of N1=66 second-grade students with control group of Nc=51 second grades was led through a pre-test (questionnaires and focus group), treatment (lessons about advertising and its techniques) and post-test (questionnaires) and allowed to formulate 4 hypotheses about children’s liking of advertising, their awareness about advertising aims, their acceptance of advertising attempts to make reality more attractive, and also children’s selection criteria in a supermarket. Though children’s appreciation of advertising does not significantly vary with awareness, nonetheless, 3 hypotheses were confirmed and the results evinced that children could be educated to advertising and learn its persuasion aims in a gradual way, and show how, at this age, school and family seem to be accelerating a process of recognition and categorization of advertising and enabling to activate cognitive defenses.