Introduction

Children have been a target for marketers for over 100 years. In the late nineteenth century, legislation was passed in Britain designed to protect children from merchants targeting them with goods (Wilcox et al., 2004). During the first half of the twentieth century, however, as mass media became widely established, children were increasingly targeted by marketers. Concern about this development centred on the ability of children to know when someone is trying to manipulate them to purchase things. Children may begin to make simple distinctions about advertising even by the time they start school, but their full understanding of how it works and what motives underpin it can remain ill formed until their teenage years (Young, 1990; Gunter & McAleer, 1997; Gunter, Oates & Blades, 2005). With rapid recent developments in communications technologies, a range of new advertising techniques has emerged that embed commercial promotions within entertainment content and virtual communication environments, rendering them subtle and difficult to differentiate. Such developments have raised fresh concerns about children and advertising that research is struggling to keep up with. This book aims to review what we know so far about the latest developments in child-targeted advertising and its impact.