No, Kidding! Are We Branded From Birth ? Content Analysis of Ads in Children's Magazines

Children are the favorite among marketers and advertisers. Most of the advertisers make use of the convincing power children have to make adults purchase products. This is exploited by advertising the messages exclusively to cater to children’s taste and interest. This is a proposed exploratory study that looks at the message strategies used by the advertisers in ads present in children’s magazines. Most of the research conducted focuses on television commercials and this paper hopes to add to the research on ads in children’s magazine. This study uses the six-segment strategy wheel to analyze the ads in the children’s magazines. This study proposes to understand the relationship between message strategy and the product category. It also proposes to analyze the difference based on time. We plan to collect the data and analyze before the actual symposium and as of now, this paper is only a proposal.

Key words: Children’s magazine, Taylor’s six-segment strategy wheel, content analysis, advertising to children, print advertising.

This is a work-in-progress paper. This is submitted for the poster session.