The relationship between advertising and childhood is complicated. Different studies have shown the links between the content of advertisements and children’s eating habits. If the little ones have an increasingly less healthy diet and abuse so-called fast food products, such as snacks, it is, in part, because advertising has surrounded them with messages related to it. In addition, the advertisements do not always respect, as other analyzes have shown, protected schedules and certain child protection measures.
But, equally, the ads have a significant problem in respecting gender stereotypes. Advertising, in general, has tried to correct the way it represents both women and men in recent years. Ads have become more diverse and presentations less skewed. Thus, in recent years, they have become fashionable from the advertising of female empowerment or the one that Mexico Mobile Database represents parents without falling into the cliché of the ‘clumsy father’ who does not even know how to change his baby’s diaper. Several giants in the consumer products industry have already made public statements about how they want to change ads and how to destroy stereotypes. Unilever did even a couple of weeks ago a public promise to improve diversity and representation in their advertising. In addition to avoiding gender stereotypes, you will also increase diversity among the population groups your ads represent. They seek to be more inclusive at all levels. 
But while all this is happening in advertising in general and especially in adult advertising (adults who, let’s not forget, are making consumer decisions based on how brands engage with different causes), what is happening with advertising for children? ? Are children’s products and their advertisements making decisions to bet equally on diversity and on eliminating gender stereotypes? There are success stories and concrete examples. The last Barbie campaigns have shown diverse Brother Cell Phone List profiles of women and have included children, going viral. The Toy Planet catalogs are also viral, which has been making catalogs for eight years away from stereotypes and which are going viral. “It is about breaking the sexist clichés in the toy sector and promoting the happiness of the little ones through play. Let them feel free to choose what to play with, what to play and who to play with!”, He explained this Christmas to El País Ignacio Gaspar, general director of Toy Planet.
These success stories, however, coexist with a less optimistic reality in the sector. Toy advertisements and the product presentation itself (and anyone who has entered a toy store in recent months will have seen it) continue to repeat gender stereotypes. A recent study by the Consell de l’Audiovisual de Catalunya (CAC), which has analyzed online toy advertisements, not only confirms the trend but also provides data that makes things even worse. Thus, almost 70% of the toy video advertisements published on the Internet not only perpetuate gender clichés, but also do so twice as much as they do on television. The investigation has focused on the toy ads served on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter and has taken the Christmas campaign as a brand. 68% of those ads repeated sexist views: 35% were on linear television. The data is also worse if you focus on just one scenario of online advertising. In videos featuring child influencers, 9 out of 10 pick up gender stereotypes.
Thus, these ads sell girls motherhood, care and a universe of pink and pastel colors, while for boys they sell worlds of action. The study has even noticed a divergence between how the protagonists of the ads are presented. If they are girls, they are overwhelmed by emotions (they laugh or cry). If it is them, they are ‘doing things’ (“they prepare, activate and win”). All this happens, they point out from the CAC, because of the control of what happens in internet advertising is much more relaxed than what happens in traditional media. “We see how advertising is moving from highly regulated media, such as radio and television, to a new digital environment,” says the president of the CAC, Roger Loppacher. “The result is that minors inadvertently receive an advertising impact of high intensity and a high presence of gender stereotypes, a fact that also has consequences in the perception that they may have in relation to male and female roles in our society, “he denounces. The analysis of the Catalan body is not the only one that has reached these conclusions. The Institute for Women has also presented a recent study that reaches very similar conclusions . In toy commercials, boys are policemen or pilots while girls are hairdressers. Boys are warriors and girls caregivers, repeating a classic gender cliché.