All across America, in the streets, newspapers, magazines, homes, as well as in schools and businesses are advertisers' mass marketing tools, usurping freedoms from children and their parents and changing American culture. Virtually an entire nation has surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for selling. Advertisers, within the constraints of the law, use their thirty-second commercials on television to target America's youth to be the decision-makers, convincing their parents to buy advertised foods, drinks, toys, and other products. Inherent in this targeting, especially of the very young, are the advertisers fostering the youth's loyalty to foods, creating among the children a loss of individuality and self-sufficiency, denying them the ability to explore and create but instead often encouraging poor health habits assimilated from eating fast food. The children demanding promoter's products are influencing economic hardships in many families today. These children, targeted by advertisers, are so vulnerable to trickery, are so mentally and emotionally unable to understand reality because they lack the cognitive reasoning skills needed to be skeptical of advertisements (Guber 21). .
Children spend thousands of hours captivated by various advertising tactics and do not understand subtleties. Though commercial promoters in America's free enterprise system are regulated because of societal pressures, they also are protected in their rights under freedom of expression. This allows a company to unfairly target America's youth, regardless of the very young's inability to recognize the concept of advertising persuasion. In the free enterprise system, the advertiser's role is to persuade consumers to buy their products/services. They are given a product/service and are required to use their best creative effort to make this product desirable to the intended audience (Krugman 37). .
Because of this calculated and what many deem manipulative way of enticing the target audience, the food industry is charged with several ethical breeches, which focus on a lack of societal responsibility (Bush 28).