McDonald's Targeting Children

I have recently come across an article titled “McDonald’s slapped down for focusing its Happy Meal advertising on the toy and not the food” written by Lara O’Reilly, in regards to ethical persuasion, dealing with McDonald’s and their choice of target in their commercials. The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) warned the company after viewing this ad: https://ispot.tv/a/7l5c . After viewing this commercial myself, I have taken time to reflect on my opinion as to whether or not this ad portrays ethical or unethical persuasion.

To summarize this ad, it emphasizes a very happy child getting a toy out of her happy meal box and then asking the children watching the ad, “What “insert toy name here” will you find in your happy meal?!”

This ad is extremely unethical because you are not focusing on the food that comes with the meal. As this country already has an obesity problem, which is spilling into our younger generations, McDonald’s is taking advantage of defenseless children who really just want the toy. Yes, the children probably want the addictive food of McDonald’s as well, but they are too young to understand the dangerous outcomes of not eating this food in moderation.

Recently, in my advertising class, we discussed the laws regarding advertising to children. One major key was that you could not show the toy for longer than 1 second. In the US, advertising to children is regulated by the Better Business Bureau and states that advertisers should not stimulate the children’s unreasonable expectations about product quality or performance. McDonald’s surely violates this code in this advertisement, which is why it led to the warnings from the CARU. In response to the ad, McDonald’s quit running it and said, “The ad at issue is no longer running. Although we believe that the ad primarily focuses the child’s attention on the product, McDonald’s respects the self-regulatory process and will take CARU’s comments into consideration when producing future ads.”

In regards to characteristics of ethical persuasion, I feel this violates conscious awareness and the language towards the children. In terms of conscious awareness, these young children cannot process the pros from the cons of an ad at such a young age, which is unethical for a company to know this and take advantage of them. They are also using expressive language from the child in the commercial to provoke the children viewing to want a toy of their own.

All in all, I feel that this ad is very unethical because of the way McDonald’s targeted children viewing the ad. They violated policies regarding focusing on the toy too much, violated the children’s conscious awareness, and used language coming from a child that would provoke a child to want the product without knowing what they are truly getting.

http://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-told-to-change-ads-by-childrens-advertising-review-unit-2015-5