The dissertation focuses on revealing the main aspects of influence used in advertising, in which children appear both as recipients and mediators. The age and gender characteristics of the perception of advertising phenomena are determined, as well as the prior choice advertising messages of modern children’s audiences are outlined. The impact of advertisement on a child as a whole and its personal identity formation in particular was defined. The object is children’s audiences, shown as a recipient and a mediator in advertising communications, and advertising examples with childhood images in them. The main ideas of the study are to determine the types of appealing for children in different contexts, to outline the state of legislative and ethical regulation of children involved advertising in Ukraine, to conduct questionnaires for children and youth in order to identify the general attitude to advertising phenomena depending on age and gender (within the boundaries of the city of Kharkiv and the Kharkiv region). Besides, the ideas of the thesis are to study the stereotype formating role, including gender ones, of advertising samples and its influence on children’s audience; to highlight the most popular advertising images among children and youth; to identify the methods used in children’s advertising, which are the basis of interaction with the audience.
In the first section «Theoretical and Methodological Principles of the Study» the works of Ukrainian and foreign scientists who studied issues related to the children’s audiences and advertising communications are examined and systematized. The concepts of «advertising», «advertising communication», «audience», «child», «childhood» are developed from the views of various scientists and different scientific perspectives. The definition of «children’s audiences» was reformulated and improved, based on the above-mentioned concepts. The peculiarities and specifics of involving children in advertising processes are emphasized, as well as the possibility of a pathogenic impact of advertising on children’s audiences. This section examines both legislative and ethical framework of governing the use of children and childhood images in advertising communications. In addition to the legal and ethical documents which control advertising and its interaction with children, laws and codes that directly protect children from a possible harmful media influence and that can be extended to advertising activities are considered here.
The second section of the dissertation «Advertising Through the Eyes of Children’s Audiences (Based on the Questionnaire)» is devoted to the questioning of children’s audiences on advertising phenomena within the boundaries of the city of Kharkiv and the Kharkiv region. The methodology of the research and the peculiarities of preparatory process are presented here. The focus is on the specifics of conducting questionnaires among children’s audiences which is the whole contingent of nine schools, pupils of 1–11-ths grades, and on the processing of a large number of questionnaires (totally 5028 polled schoolchildren, aged from 6 to 18) with the help of technical means and mathematical actions. The results are presented according to age, the degree of education and gender separately. The aim was to determine the changes in answering the suggested questions in aging children; to show this tendency in quantitative terms in detail, as well as to see if the results are different for male and female audiences, respectively, taking into consideration the age of respondents.
The third section «Creative and Functional Dimension of "Children’s" Advertising in the Ukrainian Media Space» focuses on three types of advertisements: the most attractive advertising for children; the most memorable advertising for them; advertisements with childhood images, and advertising messages targeted toward children and youth. Also, advertising videos which contain childhood images are examined to determine the whole reason why children are involved (attraction of attention, persuasion, manipulation etc.). The most attractive advertisements for primary school children, which consider them as target audience (advertisings of toys, games, constructors etc.), are depicted on the basis of questionnaire’s responses.
Key words: advertising communication, advertising priorities, advertising strategies, advertising, age, children’s audiences, children’s preferences, creative-fuctional aspect, gender, male and female audience, questionnaire, recipient and mediator in advertising communication, Ukrainian media space.
