Preventing Childhood Obesity

Childhood obesity is a serious problem within the United States. Finding solutions to this problem has seemed to be somewhat of a struggle. We see a wide range of advertisement campaigns nowadays trying to encourage children to become more active.

The ad that I analyzed was a commercial, which aimed at childhood obesity prevention. To help make this health issue more appealing to children, characters from Pixar’s film Shrek were used to promote “Get up an play. An hour a day.” In this ad, Donkey has a catchy jingle he is singing as he goes into kid’s houses that are lying around, not being active. Donkey is then joined by other Shrek characters at a playground site where they provide children with different ideas and activities that they can partake in to become more active.

By incorporating Shrek characters into the commercial, this helps appeal to the children’s ethos. Kids grow up striving to be just like their favorite cartoon characters from their favorite films, so when Shrek or Donkey are out exercising in different social environments, the kids will hopefully aspire to do what they do by going out and exercising. Also, children tend to believe just about anything when they are younger, so credibility in this sense comes more easily than say trying to convince an adult to get up and be more active.

Not only does the ad appeal to the children ethically, it also appears ethically to adults. The credibility from this ad comes at the latter part of the ad when the viewer discovers that this ad is actually a government issued ad. This government website provides any health information that an individual may have. The fact that it is a government obtained website also helps credit the site and company.

Pathetically appealing to children comes with little effort. If a child sees another child laughing and having fun, more times than none, the child wants to give it a try. In the ad, we see children being dragged out of their house and put into an active environment. When these children see all the fun that the other kids and Shrek characters are having, a sense of happiness appears on the kid’s faces through numerous smiles. Kids are curious creatures that are willing to give most things a go. For example, Puss in Boots begins dancing and a little girl begins to follow his move. This ad not only may have some of the childhood favorite characters but also it shows these characters interacting with children just like them. The whole mood of the ad is encouraging and uplifting; this can be implied with the number of positive responses that the characters get from the children and the number of smiles across the children’s faces. Not only does the jingle appear to help appeal to children, but they may also be drawn to the bright, vivid colors that are used, the activities that are being attempted, and the countless smiles.

Appealing to a child logically may be harder to come by than either ethos or pathos due to the lack of maturity of logic and reasoning. At a young age, children think they can eat whatever they desire, and that the unhealthy eating will do nothing to them since they are young. “I’m a child. I can do what I want” tends to be an excuse that most children use when consuming foods, but little do they know, the unhealthy eating leads to obesity. I think this ad takes an attempt at making a logical appeal to the audience by vaguely implying that outdoor exercise is fun. The pathetic appeals help the support the logical appeal. By seeing all the smiles and what looks like fun, one is left to infer that the outdoor activities and exercises that are being performed are in return fun.

When it comes to determining the success of this ad in relation to the intended audience, I believe that it does a decent job. As stated, pathos and ethos comes easier in a child based audience than appealing logically so providing some logical appeals within the ad may not be entirely necessary due to the lack of understanding amongst children. Receiving credibility from children comes with slight convincing, but by implementing Shrek characters to help portray the get active lifestyle, helps the cause more. Although the three types of appeals are not all recognized within the advertisement, I do not believe all three are necessary to consider this a successful ad given the intended audience.