With engaging visuals, catchy slogans, attractive merchandise, and popular celebrities, it's no wonder that kids are enthusiastic consumers of both the products and the messages that ads provide. Everyday, children can find hundreds of advertisements on billboards and bus stops, in magazines and newspapers, on the radio, television, and the Internet. Clearly, advertising has an enormous amount of power to shape kids' attitudes, beliefs, and values. This special influence makes it important to explore how advertisers present race and class. On the other hand, kids who watch shows that routinely stereotype people of color have less favorable attitudes toward those who may be different.
Advertising has the same ability as television programming to impact children's perceptions.
Commercials appear with great repetition, telling us what products will improve our lives and to what we can aspire. By offering roles for kids to admire or reject, advertising can tell children who is important and what they can become. Over the past two decades, many advertising firms and in-house marketers have developed positive, successful ways to address diversity with openness and respect. In this issue, Media Now presents advertising practices that skillfully address the images of race and class children glean from commercial content. Changing Times During the 1980s and 1990s, motivated by economic and demographic trends and by growing consciousness, many advertising agencies began a significant shift toward culturally-inclusive marketing.