Children in television advertising: a content analysis of a television week

In order to identify the representation of childhood and adolescence has been conducted a content analysis of television commercials aired by six major television networks in a week, for a total of 2813 cases, evaluating their formal and content characteristics. The descriptive data analysis points out children most present in advertising relating to the merchandise sector of food and drink, followed by games, personal care and services. The realistic is the prevalent format used within the advertising, and, in fact, the stories told in the commercials are held mainly in traditional settings so as to be representations of easily recognizable reality, but also representations of a reality of recreation and entertainment. Cluster analysis applied to the body of advertisements highlights a complex representation of children in advertising. In the representations of products aimed to adult target (home products, cars and tourism), the presence of the child or adolescent is functional to the construction of a setting that evokes the positivity of the family, while in the merchandise sector of personal care products, the child is presented as personification of tenderness and purity in a idyllic relation infant-mother. In spots of games children are often featured alone, while in clothing aimed solely at children the child is with other friends, to leverage on the desirability of being part of the peer group. Moreover children advertising still legitimate and perpetuate traditional and stereotyped gender models, over that in the contents, also through the use of formal characteristics.