Program-Commercial Discrimination

In their earliest years of television viewing, children do not yet recognize that there are two fundamentally different categories of television content: programs and commercials. Most children who are younger than four to five years of age exhibit low awareness of the concept of commercials, frequently explaining them as if they were a scene in the adjacent program. When this confusion diminishes, children first recognize the difference between programs and commercials based on either affective cues (e. g. “commercials are more funny than programs”) or perceptual cues (e. g. “commercials are short and programs are long”).

Most children’s television shows include program-commercial separation devices (e. g. “We’ll be right back after these messages”) whenever a commercial break occurs. However, several studies indicate that these separators generally do not help child viewers to recognize advertising content. This likely occurs because most separation devices are not perceptually distinct from the adjacent programming that surrounds them; in fact, many separators feature characters who appear in the show that the commercial has just interrupted.

Popular program figures are frequently used in advertising that is directed to children. When an advertisement includes one of the same characters who is featured in an adjacent program, the practice is known as “host-selling.” For example, Fred Flintstone appearing in an advertisement for “Fruity Pebbles” cereal that is shown during a break in the Flintstones cartoon show would be considered host-selling. A study by Dale Kunkel (1988) shows that this type of advertising makes the task of discriminating between program and commercial content particularly difficult for young children.

In sum, a substantial proportion of young children do not consistently discriminate between television program and commercial content. By about the time they are four or five years of age, however, most children develop the ability to distinguish between these two types of content quite well at a perceptual level. Still, this ability is only the first of two critical information processing tasks that young children must master in order to achieve mature comprehension of advertising messages.