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Before we talk about fast food Companies’ role in attracting children to their ‘bad’ food, let’s first shed some light on two important areas. First ,it’s important to define advertising and marketing. According to Mary and Simone, “advertisement is central to marketing of the food supply, while marketing is defined as an activity an organization engages in to facilitate an exchange between itself and its customers. Advertising is one type of marketing activity.” Secondly , it’s necessary to recognize that media plays a significant role in the lives of children. In Mary’s and Simone’s essay , it is mentioned that “ US children between the ages of two and four years view two hours of television daily ,this increase to over three hours and a half near the end of grade school ,then drop off to about 2.75 hours in later adolescence .” From this we can see that children watch television a lot and therefore television advertisements are a very good way to hook children to the fast food products and that’s what the fast food companies do . They spend a lot of money on television advertisements. To illustrate this point let’s take a look at the statistics that were mentioned in “Super size me “. “ MacDonald’s spent1.4 billion dollars on directed media advertisements. Pepsi spent one billion dollars on radio, television, and printed advertisements and Hershey spent 200 million on advertisements. However in a peak year, only two million was spent on advertising fruit and vegetables which is 100 times less than just one candy company.” This implies that the majority of food advertisements are about fast and unhealthy food. As a consequence, children watch a lot of fast food advertisements . Mary and Simone state that “US children may view between 200,00 -40,000 commercials each year and by the time they graduate from high school, they may have been exposed to 360,000 television advertisements .And food is over 50% of all advertisements targeting the children .Children view an average of one food commercial every five minutes of televion viewing time and may see approximately three hours of food commercials each week /” That’s a lot isn’t?? Not only that but fast food companies try to appeal to children specifically According to Morgan, they make colorful advertisements, cartoon characters and TV shows to attract children. They also ‘use’ famous people like Britney Spears, Michel Jordan, and David Beckam in their commercials.Those methods are very efficient. For example, children see colorful advertisements as a sign of joy and happiness and therefore they have the impression that fast food products make them happy. Using famous people in commercials has a big impact as well. When children see a very famous person like Britney Spears, for example ,making a commercial for Pepsi, they will relate Britney’s success in singing with drinking Pepsi. As a result , they will consume more and more Pepsi hoping that drinking Pepsi will make them famous like Britney and the same thing is true for other products including Burgers , French fries .
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