ABSTRACT
In the relatively short space of 50 years, children’s lives have been transformed by the easily accessible moving images of television and video, which have blurred the lines between reality and fantasy, between fact and fiction, and between entertainment and commercial communication. Quite a lot of research has been done on the social effects of these media on children (for a review see John, 1999, and for longitudinal evidence about children’s behavior after the introduction of TV in St. Helena, see Charlton, Davie, Panting, Abrahams, & Yon, 2001). Yet the research literature presents contradictory evidence aboutwhether thesemedia exert a negative or positive effect on children’s understanding of the world (Sheppard, 1994). In turn, apart from studies of smoking initiation, almost no research has been done on how TV-and film-mediated understanding affects children’s choice of the branded goods commonly displayed within programming. Product placement, or the appearance of branded goods within entertainment, is not strictly subliminal communication, as suggested in the film review cited at the beginning of this chapter, because products usually have exposure times measured in seconds rather than
milliseconds, often with some verbal labeling. However, as Erdelyi and Zizak (this volume) point out, subliminality was initially understood to be an inaccessibility to consciousness, in which case product placement may be considered to be subliminal. Its effects are taken to be tacit or implicit because recollection of the brandsmay be unreliable or unavailable. If the effect is subliminal-unconscious influence on choice-then there is a need to understand how it works on children, whose cognitive defenses against the possibility of such influence have not been developed.
