Content Analysis of Children's Television Advertising Today

Eliana Shiao Tseng
The University of Texas at Austin

Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction

Literature Review

Purpose and Research Questions

Methodology

Results and Discussion

Limitations and Suggestion for Future Research

References

Abstract

The 1950s dates the modern era of children's television programming, when a deal between struggling television network ABC and Disney brought The Mickey Mouse Club and Disneyland into children's afternoon television programming. Advertising at that time appealed generally to the personal gain of the consumer in the case they decided to purchase the sponsored product. Over the next 15 to 20 years, children's television became an industry by itself. Investigations on the content of children's television advertising grew in importance after the genesis of television advertising directed to children. Content analysis was the research methodology generally employed to explore the environment of children's television advertising. Much has changed since the last content analysis of children's television advertising was published. Children of the 1990s grew up accustomed to the rapid changes in the technology and to the evolution of the Internet. Therefore, the purpose of this study to answer the following research questions: (1) How much advertising is presented during children's television programming? (2) What types of products are promoted to children in this new environment? (3) What are the promotional strategies used to target the children market? (4) What is the overall form of presentation used in current children's television advertising? (5) How are disclosures communicated to children?

Introduction

The 1950s dates the modern era of children's television programming, when a deal between struggling television network ABC and Disney brought The Mickey Mouse Club and Disneyland into children's afternoon television programming (Schneider 1987). At that time, what is known today as Saturday morning daypart did not exist, and television networks were still to realize the value of the children's market beyond their potential persuasive influence in the family's decision of buying a television set (Schneider 1987).

Advertising at that time appealed generally to the personal gain of the consumer in the case they decided to purchase the sponsored product. It was very common for the advertiser to show ads in which the child would acquire superhuman strength by eating a specific breakfast cereal, or would leave a group of friends in choking clouds of dust by running with the sponsored sneakers. Toys ads of that time were sponsored by unknown brands, which would generally end up becoming famous after making deals with the television station. Mattel, Hasbro and Fisher-Price were some of these toy manufacturers that became famous with these deals. At about the same time, today's traditional cereal companies, Kellog's, General Mills, and Trix, moved into the market (Alexander et al. 1998).

As a result, over the next 15 to 20 years, children's television became an industry by itself. By the 1960s, both broadcasters and regulators realized the growing impact of television on children. Throughout this history of children's television advertising, researchers have criticized in different ways the use of television commercials directed to children. By the 1970s, the criticism generally felt into two categories: (1) the persuasive nature/function of advertising and the possible hidden messages believed to be part of the advertisement, and (2) the specific content of the advertisement per se (Winick et al. 1973).

Winick et al. (1973) argued that while advertising directed to children stimulated their materialism and consumption, it also encouraged conflicts with their peers and parents for the same materialistic matters. They further advocated that, because children have not yet fully developed reasoning abilities, they are unable to evaluate the conveyed message, which could contain non-rational or unrealistic information that could be deceptive. Children, therefore, should be protected from advertising.

Investigations on the content of children's television advertising grew in importance after the genesis of television advertising directed to children (Alexander et al. 1998) in conjunction with the development of marketing to children during the 1950s (McNeal 1987). Content analysis was the research methodology generally employed to explore the environment of children's television advertising. Albeit content analysis was a relatively new methodology for consumer research in the 1970s, it was already broadly used in other research areas such as political science, journalism, social psychology and communications research (Kassarjian 1977).

Thus, in addition to provide valuable information for both academic researchers and marketers, content analysis of advertising directed to children turned necessary to evaluate and clarify the degree of veracity of the previously mentioned criticism.

Literature Review

The majority of the studies on children's television advertising environment goes from the 1970s onward (Alexander et al. 1998). There was so little study on this topic during the 1950s, that Pecora (1995) called this period the "prehistory" of the research on children's television advertising. Investigations on children's television advertising continued in very low level throughout the 1960s; it was only after the increase in the concerns of public policy that, during the late 1960s and most of the 1970s, a great number of academic research on children's television advertising was published (McNeal 1991).

While marketers and advertisers heightened their interest in the child market during the 1980s, research on children's television advertising of that period consisted mainly on replications and extensions of previous studies. However hardly noticed due to the amount of trade publications marketers supplied on this issue, the lack of involvement by academicians on children's research during this period reduced the amount of publications on this topic (McNeal 1991). These researches generally found small differences from previous studies.

Studies from the 1950s focused primarily on children's recall of television advertising (Brumbaugh 1954), buying habits (Guest 1955), influence on parental purchases (Munn 1958) and so forth. The only content analysis of children's television advertising of this decade was done in a recent study from Alexander et al. (1998).

Major findings of Alexander et al.'s study were that the standardized timing of programs and advertising were not existent. The tendency towards standardization of program and advertising length occurred gradually through the end of the decade. Another finding is that the product types advertised hadn't yet evolved to the four major types of product advertised in current society: toys, cereals, candy and snacks and fast foods. Finally, both adults and children were target of the products advertised.

Concerning the 1970s, Winick et al. (1973) and Barcus (1975) demonstrated that, over the decade, while the total commercial time averaged from 12 to nine minutes per hour, the average number of commercial announcements maintained basically the same. In addition, contrary to the 1950s, the products advertised to children during the 1970s were limited to basically the four types previously mentioned: toys, cereals, candies and snacks, and fast foods. Male voiceovers accounted for the great majority of ads coded, and animated characters seldom appeared (Barcus 1975). Moreover, the main promotional appeals during the 1970s were fun and happiness (Atkin and Heals 1977, Doolittle and Pepper 1975). Finally, audio disclaimers were used more frequently than video, and simultaneous (both audio and video) disclaimers were much less frequently used (Barcus 1975).

As mentioned earlier in this paper, studies in the 1980s provided little publication to the field of children's television research (McNeal 1991). Investigations of this decade focused generally on Saturday morning children's television (Condry, Bence and Scheibe 1988, Stern and Harmon 1984). While nearly all of the findings were considerably similar to the ones of previous decades, in examining the use of disclaimers in children's television advertising, Stern and Harmon (1984) found out that the two major product categories using disclaimers were breakfast (cereals) followed by toys.

Further, Bush, Hair Jr. and Bush (1983) extended Barcu's (1975) investigation on the use of animation in television advertising and found out that, whereas animation is primarily used to aim at the children's market (Barcus 1975), it is also used to target the adult population. However, Callcott and Lee (1994) verified that it is during the children's programming that the majority of animation is employed, especially in the commercials for cereals, candies, games and toys.

Given that the television environment of the 1970s and 1980s were basically limited to the monopoly of major networks, Kunkel and Gantz (1992) proposed an examination of children's television advertising in the multichannel environment of the 1990s to see whether and how this change impacted on children's television programming. One of the major findings was that the level of cable advertising was considerably low compared to network advertising. Nonetheless, while the overall advertising time was less in cable than in network, cable channels delivered a much diverse range of products in their advertising than did the network channels. In addition, the prevailing promotional theme was "fun and happiness" and approximately half of the ads presented at least one disclaimer. Finally, in terms of animation, differently from the environment of the 1970s, on which the majority of the ads were animated, more than half of the ads Kunkel and Gantz (1992) analyzed were presented in the form of live action.

Purpose and Research Questions

Much has changed since Kunkel and Gantz (1992) published their content analysis of children's television advertising. Children of the 1990s grew up accustomed to the rapid changes in the technology and to the evolution of the Internet. They were raised surrounded by video games, computers, consumer electronics, CDs, DVDs and other products alike (Paul 2001), which contributed to modifications in children's television programming scenario, demanding new marketing and advertising strategies to reach this market. Good examples of these changes are the technological advancements in the area of computer graphics, which turned animation into a more flexible and artistic tool (Callcott and Lee 1994).

In the view of these facts, this study proposes to examine the general changes in children's television advertising that occurred over the past decade, more specifically, to answer the following research questions: (1) How much advertising is presented during children's television programming? (2) What types of products are promoted to children in this new environment? (3) What are the promotional strategies used to target the children market? (4) What is the overall form of presentation used in current children's television advertising? (5) How are disclosures communicated to children?

Methodology

A content analysis was conducted in order to obtain the basic information needed to analyze the overall changes in the environment of children's television advertising. In order to assure objectivity and reliability of the research, this study followed Kassarjian's (1977) general guidelines for content analysis. According to Kolbe and Burnett (1991), benefits of content analysis consists on: (1) the unobtrusiveness of the communication evaluation, (2) the assessment of the environmental variables of the communication/message content, (3) the empirical onset or starting point of new research evidence on the nature of the communication, and (4) the ability to provide statistical information for multimethod studies. Further, this method proved to be a valuable technique for the understanding of children's television advertising in past studies (Alexander et al. 1998, Atkin and Heals 1977, Barcus 1975, Condry, Bence and Scheibe 1988, Doolittle and Pepper 1975, Kunkel and Gantz 1992, Stern and Harmon 1984, Winick et al.1973 ).

A convenience sample of 8 hours of children's television programming was videotaped in Austin, Texas, during a given Saturday morning in mid-November, 2001. The use of Saturday morning television was common in previous content analysis studies of children's television programming (Barcus 1975, Condry, Bence and Scheibe 1988, Doolitle and Pepper 1975, Stern and Harmon 1984).

The definition of what constituted children's programming was provided by TV Guide's Program Listings, which also determined the time-slot and the choice of the channels used in this research. After verifying the time slot that had children's programs scheduled the most, the researcher narrowed down to WB network and cable channel Nickelodeon, because among the major television networks, WB was the only one that provided a four-hour block of children's programs during Saturday morning television. The other two networks that had children's programs listed for Saturday morning, ABC and CBS, were discharged, because presented only 3 hours of children's programming each, but scheduled to air in different time-slots. Nickelodeon was chosen because it proved to be useful in previous research (Callcott and Lee 1994). Therefore, the sample consisted in 2 tapes of four hours each, taped from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., totalizing 8 hours of videotaping.

Categories analyzed in this study were adapted from previous content analysis investigations (Alexander et al. 1998, Callcott and Lee 1994, Kunkel and Gantz 1992). In order to assure the appropriateness of the categories presented in the coding instrument, a pre-test was done before the finalization of the coding sheet. Two coders were trained to analyze the commercials of both tapes. Coders were instructed to discharge incomplete spots, i.e., the first ad if the tape started with an ad and the last ad if the tape ended with an ad. Coders also excluded the coding of announcements of other television programs, announcements of tie-in promotions or give-aways related to the channel, announcements of public service or community service, and promotion of movies (unless the advertisement was promoting a CD, VHS or DVD). Each coder analyzed each of the tapes twice to estimate the intercoder reliability. Coding divergences were discussed and resolved before analysis continued. Duplication was not removed from the data so that all occurrences of the categories analyzed could be considered.

Each ad was coded for the following major product categories: non-computer or non-video-game related toys (dolls, remote-controlled toys, lego), computer or video-game related toys (software, video-games), cereals and breakfast food (waffles, cereals, syrups), snacks and drinks (candies, cookies, sodas), fast-food (hamburgers, pizzas, take-out restaurants), healthy-food and drinks (milk, juice, fruits), web-pages, CD/VHS/DVDs, shows and events, and other.

Each ad was also assigned a main promotional theme or appeal that best represented the promotional strategy used to persuade the target: fun/happiness (positive association provided by the use of the product), taste/flavor/smell (any association related to taste or flavor of the product), product performance (description of the features and capabilities of the product), product in social context (social situations surrounding the use of the product), action/power/speed (action and speed as the primary reasons for purchasing the product), appearance (improving personal appearance as the main reason for having the product), personal gain (any additional personal satisfaction for having the product), texture (how it feels when using the product), and other.

In considering the technical modes or forms of presentation, this research followed Callcott and Lee's (1994) suggestion of distinguishing between line drawings, i.e., traditional cartoon animation, and computer animation. Therefore, in terms of forms of presentation, ads were coded for live-action, cartoon or line drawing, computer animation, special effects, other, and any combination of the aforementioned forms.

Further, for the purpose of this study, disclosures or disclaimers were defined as any statement within the commercial that has the purpose of clarifying any misleading or deceptive message found in the advertisement (Stern and Harmon 1984). Disclaimers are commonly delivered in three forms: audio, video and the combination of audio and video. Because there is no standard format on the message content of the disclaimers (Kunkel and Gantz 1992), when coders interpreted a particular aspect of the ad as a disclaimer, they were instructed to transcribe the message into the coding sheet. Coders recorded up to two disclaimers per ad. For this investigation, in addition to coding the forms of disclaimers mentioned earlier, ads were also coded for the absence of disclaimers.

Finally, all the ads were coded for voiceover (male, female, both male and female, none, and other), duration in seconds (10, 15, 20, 30, and other) and product name.

Statistical tests were performed in order to analyze the data collected. Frequency runs were done over all variables to determine the overall characteristics of the advertising studied. Cross-tabulations with chi-square tests for significance were used to access the existence of possible relationships among the variables studied.

Results and Discussion

A total of 173 ads were coded, 83 from WB and 90 from Nickelodeon. Each coder analyzed each of the tapes twice, than compared the results to estimate the intercoder reliability. Intercoder reliability ranged from 85% to 97%. Because some of the categories were of interpretive nature, particularly theme/appeals and disclaimers, the 85% reliability was considered a fairly strong consistency (Kunkel and Gantz 1992). Coding divergences were then discussed and resolved before analysis continued. Duplication was not removed from the data so that all occurrences of the categories analyzed could be considered.

General Findings:

Voiceover:
Male voiceovers prevailed in both channels (76.6%), representing 86.7% of the spots from WB, and 63.3% of the spots from Nickelodeon. As it was expected, chi-square analysis found some relationship between the type of product advertised and the voiceover (X² = 123.890, df = 18, p < .01). The analysis also showed that male voiceovers were predominant in non-video-game related toy ads (66.7% of the non-video-game toy ads).

Product advertised:
Toys represented the great majority of products advertised to children (59% of the total ads). Non-video-game related toys represented 50.3%, while video-game related toys represented 8.7% of all product categories advertised to children. Nickelodeon presented a higher percentage of toy ads as compared to WB, 73.3% versus 43.4%, respectively. Other major categories of products advertised were CDs and DVDs (13.3%), followed by cereals and breakfast food (11.6%). Further, while previous studies indicated a reasonably high incidence of snacks ads, this study showed a considerably low incidence of snacks and drinks ads, with only 3.5% of the total ads analyzed from both channels.

Although it is not possible to directly compare the results obtained in this study with the results obtained in previous content analysis studies, due to some differences in methodologies, findings of this research concerning product categories suggest changes in the pattern of distribution of ads among the different categories of product as compared to previous studies. A first visible difference is the alteration of the major four product categories usually advertised to children: toys, cereals, candy and snacks, and fast-food. For example, in the Kunkel and Gantz (1992) study, the incidence of snacks and drinks advertisements was higher than of cereals and breakfast food (13.8% and 11.7%, respectively).

A second difference found in terms of products advertised is a reflection of the new technological advancements over the past decade, as CDs and DVDs were introduced as a major category of products advertised to children. Interestingly, with such changes in the market, it was expected a more even distribution between the ads of non-video-game related toys and video-game related toys than the one found in this study, because research showing that children of the 1990s were raised surrounded by video games, computers, consumer electronics, CDs, DVDs and other products alike (Paul 2001) suggests that the marketing of this type of products should be increased. Perhaps there is need of changing the definition of the toy category to see if the distribution may get more even. Another surprise concerning this same issue is the low incidence of web page ads (1.7% of total combined ads) other than a promotion of the web page of the own channel.

Following is a table with a summary of the distribution of ads across the different types of products.

Table 1: Types of Products Advertised by Channel (in % of Ads)

Other includes: Snacks & Drinks, Fast Food, Healthy-Food, Web-pages, Show & Events, and other products that didn't fell under any of the categories mentioned.

Promotional Strategies:
The prevalent theme/appeal was product performance, followed closely by fun/happiness (38.2% and 37.0%, respectively). Appeals based on product's taste/flavor/smell represented 12.7% of the ads. Action followed taste/flavor/smell with 7.5% of all ads analyzed. Differences were found between the channels. While the prevalent theme in Nickelodeon was product performance (53.3%), followed by fun/happiness (35.6%), fun/happiness comprised the prevalent theme in WB, representing 38.6% of the ads, while product performance represented 21.7% of the ads.

Research shows that there is a relationship between the theme/appeal used and the type of product advertised (Kunkel and Gantz 1992). The following table shows that, among all the ads that presented fun/happiness as the primary theme/appeal, the same percentage of 35.9% were of non-video-game related toys, and CD/VHS/DVDs. Snacks and drinks comprised 7.8% of all the fun/happiness ads. Virtually all the ads featuring action appeal were non-videogame related toys. In addition, all the ads that featured product performance as the primary appeal were toys; 77.3% were non-video-game related toys and the remainder of video-game related toys. Finally, the great majority (90.9%) of all ads featuring taste/flavor as primary appeal were cereals and breakfast ads.

Table2 : Promotional Strategies by Product Type (partial table)

Analysis of the other way around was also interesting. Among all the non-video-game related toy ads, 26.4% had fun/happiness as a primary theme, while 58.6% had product performance and 14.9% had action as the primary theme/appeal. In addition, all the video-game related toy ads had product performance as a primary theme/appeal, and all cereals and breakfast products had taste/flavor as their primary appeal. Finally, CDs and DVDs were another category of products that relied entirely on the fun/happiness appeal, as all of their ads featured mainly this appeal.

These results suggest a change in the promotional strategy of marketing and advertising to children. In previous studies (Kunkel and Gantz 1992), even though fun/happiness was the second most used appeal among toy ads (product performance was the first), it was still the predominant appeal among the total ads combined. Results of this study, however, show that fun/happiness and product performance had an almost even persuasive role among the ads, as they presented a close percentage of appearance (37% and 38.2%, respectively).

In addition, these findings suggest a tendency of marketers reaching children through a rational, rather than an emotional appeal. This does not mean, though, that the sole strategy becomes serious and totally realistic nor that the child will be protected from deceptive messages. In the cereals and breakfast food ads, even though taste was the great majority of the theme/appeals used as a persuasive message, animation of totally fictitious characters were used as means of communicating the "rational" message.

Forms of Presentation:
The great majority of ads analyzed presented some live-action (approximately 80.3%). Among these ads, nearly half of them were composed exclusively by live-action, i.e., 39.3% of all ads from the data collected were presented entirely in live-action, while approximately 41% of all ads analyzed presented a combination of live-action with some form of animation (note that these percentages do not include the incidence of combination of 3 or 4 different forms of presentation in one ad, as seen in Table 3).

A total of 11.6% of the ads analyzed were purely animated: 9% of in the form of pure cartoon, 1.2% in pure computer animation, and 1.2% in pure special effects. Of all the ads analyzed, 49.1% presented some kind of combination among the forms of presentation; 43.3% of the ads analyzed presented a combination of two forms of presentation, while only 5.8% of all the ads presented combinations of more than two forms of presentation.

Table 3: Frequency Distribution of Observed Forms of Presentation

Further, 44.8% of all non-video-game related toy ads were presented solely in live-action, while the remainder presented combinations of different forms of animation. All video-game related toy ads presented some kind of animation; 60% of all the video-game related toys presented a combination of 3 or 4 different forms of presentation. Animation was also popular among cereal advertisements, 45% of all cereal ads were fully line-drawn, an additional 45% of the ads presented some kind of animation, and the remainder of the cereal ads (10%) was presented entirely in live-action.

Over 60% of all the ads coded in this study presented some kind of animation, contrasting with Kunkel and Gantz's (1992) study, in which the great majority of ads were totally non-animated. Interestingly, at the time of that study, most of toys ads were non-animated, even though cereals were already somehow animated.

Some differences between the analyzed channels were found: while 63.9% of all WB ads presented some kind of animation, 57.8% of all Nickelodeon ads were somehow animated. The following table shows the distribution of the ads among the forms of animation.

Table 4: Distribution of Forms of Presentation between WB and Nickelodeon

While these findings showed a gradual increase in the use of animation, they also demonstrated a significant growth in the popularity of these techniques to reach children, particularly in toy and cereal ads. These facts confirm Callcott and Lee's (1994) content analysis in which they found out that animation was very common among products that appealed to children, especially games, toys and cereals.

These results also suggest a developing tendency of marketers and advertisers to employ some form of animation in children's television advertising, in order to effectively catch children's attention during commercial programming. They further confirm that the technological advancements, especially in computer graphics, allow a greater flexibility, variability and creativity in the elaboration of advertisements. On the other hand, the practice of taking advantage of the improvements in computer animation and special effects suggests that marketers are experiencing an increasing challenge to capture children's attention, compelling them to be even more creative, particularly because children of the 1990s grew up accustomed to technology, consumer electronics and video-games, therefore requiring new and improved ways of reaching them.

Disclaimers:
Overall, the majority of ads coded presented at least some kind of disclaimer (70.4% of the total ads). However, WB presented a lower percentage of disclaimers as compared to Nickelodeon (55.4% and 84.5%, respectively). Chi-square analysis found a relationship between the disclaimer and the product advertised (X² = 139.23, df = 27, p < .01), therefore suggesting that the difference in the percentages of disclaimers found in both channels may be due to the differences of the products advertised, an issue that was mentioned earlier in this paper. Table 5 shows the distribution of different types of disclaimers between the channels.

Table 5: Use of Disclaimers (in %)

Disclaimers were prevalent mainly among toy and cereal ads. 39.1% of all the non-video-game related toy ads presented only an audio disclaimer, 5.7% of them presented only a video disclaimer, while 47.1% of these toy ads presented both audio and video disclaimers. The combination of audio and video disclaimers was particularly popular in video-game related toys, in which 86.7% of the ads present both forms of disclaimers. Finally, cereal ads used audio disclaimers considerably more than other types of disclaimers, as 75% of cereal ads employed only audio disclaimers.

The most frequent disclaimers' contents found in the data were: "each sold separately," "batteries no included," "some assembly required," "rated E for everyone," "Windows 95 or higher required," "part of this complete breakfast" among others. As previously noted, coders were instructed to code up to two disclaimers per ad, therefore there were some possibilities of missing a few not so obvious disclaimers.

The type of the content of the disclaimers suggests a need of a new definition of what characterizes a disclaimer. In the ads coded for this study, some statements such as "toy comes with all the parts seen here" are ambiguous and of interpretive nature, in that it is not clear whether these forms of statements constitute a disclaimer or not. The formal definition for disclaimers is any statement within the commercial that has the purpose of clarifying any misleading or deceptive message found in the advertisement (Stern and Harmon 1984). In the example mentioned, to characterize the content and define it as whether of deceptive nature or not, depends a lot on the interpretation of the coder.

Another observation concerning the content of the disclaimer is the emergence of new wordings not mentioned in previous studies. Statements such as "rated E for everyone" or "Windows 95 or higher required" were common among video-game ads. This means that the appearance of new products, particularly video-game related toys contribute to a more careful display of messages and an improvement in terms of the numbers of disclaimers presented in an ad. In addition, other disclaimers such as "you put it together" is an indicative of the trends in changing the ways in which disclaimers are conveyed to children, with simpler language, more accessible to their understanding.

Total Advertising Time:
The total advertising time considering the 8 hour programming from both channels was of 1 hour, 9 minutes, and 25 seconds, and it was distributed relatively the same between both channels (35 minutes and 55 seconds in WB, and 33 minutes and 30 seconds in Nickelodeon). The average length of advertising per hour decreased from 12 to 9 minutes during the 1970, to an average of 9 to 8 minutes per hour today. Interestingly, the distribution of the advertising time into the duration of ads was considerably different between channels. While the majority of WB spots had a 30 second duration (73.5%), Nickelodeon had its ads equally distributed between 15 and 30 second spots (48.9% each). This explains the fact that even though Nickelodeon had a total advertising time less than WB, it presented a total number of ads higher (83 ads in WB compared to 90 ads in Nickelodeon).

Limitations and Suggestion for Future Research

Following, is a summary of the major findings of this content analysis study. The first finding was that, similarly to previous studies, male voiceovers were still predominant in advertising. The second major finding concerned the changes in the pattern of products advertised to children. During the 1950s, products advertised to children had not developed into the major product categories (toys, cereals, snacks and fast-food). This research suggested a new pattern of products advertised to children, possibly caused by the introduction of new products, resultant of the technological advancements of the past decade. Further, changes in the promotional theme/appeals were noted. They switched from personal gain (during the 1950s), to fun and happiness (during the 1970s) and, now, to product performance. In addition, the average length of advertising per hour decreased from 12 to 9 minutes (during the 1970s), to an average of 9 to 8 minutes per hour today. Finally, it was possible to note a change in the usage of disclaimers, both in terms of form and incidence.

Limitations of this study include the fact that the study employed convenience sample, which restricts the generalizability of the results. Further, both the date and time of the videotaping are not representative, which turn it difficult to compare the results with previous studies. Finally, the videotaped television programming was limited to Austin.

Some suggestions for future research are valid to mention. As a partial replication of past studies, this research adapted several variables from previous content analysis of children's television programming. However, this research showed that there is a need of a better definition of some variables, as some of them were too old, and others were introduced. Moreover, for a better understanding of the variables studies, it is suggested that the next research isolate them in order to study each of them with more details. This research was limited to a simple overview of the general changes over time.

Another suggestion to assess children's television advertising is the study of toy ads only, since they seem to be representative of the children's advertising. In this study, the researcher could also examine the major brands that promote toys, and focus more on the disclaimers each of the brands offer for their toy ads. Finally, in considering disclaimers, it is strongly suggested a review of its definition, as disclaimers still present no standard format, turning, therefore, some statements of the ads ambiguous.

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