Issues of tobacco advertising for youth assignment

This type of advertising, on top of peer pressure, is the mystery behind the rise in adolescent smoking. Should tobacco advertising be restricted? This is a very controversial issue. There is the idea that young children that smoke started smoking because of advertisements, but there is also the idea that children start smoking for other reasons. Many big, well-known tobacco companies are being sued for their advertisements. But tobacco companies say that youth smokers are not especially valuable to the companies, so all these lawsuits are useless.

In particular a cartoon character was used to sell cigarettes to adults. Many tobacco companies use objects that would attract children, like actors and actresses and scenes in their favorite movies. Tobacco advertisers also make tobacco use seem sexy, fun, glamorous, macho and most insidiously healthful. Directors of movies put tobacco scenes in movies with some of children’s favorite actors like Will Smith, Robin Williams, Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey, and even the famous cartoon character, Roger Rabbit. Some movies that these actors are in have had large youth box office takes.

Children are very easily influenced, especially through television and magazine advertisement, so if they were to have advertisements demoting tobacco use then they might actually see the truth about the danger of tobacco. The visual advertisement is a much more effective method of getting a point across. Television has restricted the commercials, but the movie industry still promotes tobacco use in today’s movies. If a child sees their favorite action hero smoking they think it’s cool.

They will do anything to be like them, especially today’s cartoon characters. If a child reads in a magazine that his favorite wrestler smokes, that would be a major influence on him. Once again proving the visual is more powerful than the spoken word. The advantages of this solution would be that now the thirty-four percent of teens who began smoking because of the advertisements they saw will now not smoke due to the lack of advertisements. This will not eliminate the problem, but it will definitely decrease the amount of new underage smokers.

Another difficulty would be to get the companies to agree to this. But I also believe that if the companies were aware of the bad effects of tobacco and the effects the advertisements have on children, they would change their minds and take those factors into consideration. To be concluding, any suggest solutions cannot be success without the support by the entire society; with the innocence of youth and deficiency of life experience, children do not have the ability to determine the credibility of the source from which they receive information.

Advertisers claim it is the role of the parent to manage influences on their children. However, the advertisers need to share this responsibility as it would be impossible to counteract all of the potentially adverse effects. Children must endure the consequences of advertising that is not appropriately directed at them from all mediums. All adults, parents and advertisers, must join together to deflect the contradicting messages derived from marketing such as health risks from smoking or drinking alcohol, proper diet, and unrealistic body image.