For children special processing abilities are needed to have mature understanding of advertisements. On the one hand, they must be able to make a distinction between commercial and non-commercial content, although, great number of studies examining young children (under the age of four) indicate that they, unlike adults, do not consistently distinguish programmes from advertisements even when program/advertisement separation devices are used. According to the report of the Task Force on Advertising and Children (2004) as children reach the age of 4-5, they are able to make a categorical distinction between commercials and other programmes, but mainly on the basis of affective ("advertisements are funnier") or perceptual ("ads are shorter") cues only (4).
On the other hand, the second crucial ability in the understanding of advertisements is the realization of the marketer's persuasive intent and the application of that knowledge in children's comprehension of advertising messages but this occurs only at the ages of 7-8 years on average. This is the time, when they start to watch advertisements from a different perspective and they realize that the advertisers try to persuade their audience to buy their products.
If we want to examine how advertisements affect children, we need to look into the theories of cognitive development, the differences of children's understanding of commercial content at various stages of their life as the success of any advertisement depends on the attention children pay to the advertisements, how well they can recall the content and how they well comprehend the marketer's intent, and last but not least, how ads influence their purchasing behaviour ( Calvert 214).
Reference to Smith (1995) reveals that, from a point of view of parents, the way that advertisers present messages is very important because these messages influence children's ability to make judgements concerning certain products and brands.
