The effectiveness of the Media Smart Program on promoting the critical thinking of children towards the use of celebrities in television advertising

Abstract

The aim of this project was to try to prove the effectiveness of the Media Smart Program in Portugal, a program that helps children to understand and be critical towards advertising. Until now, there were no quantitative studies about this subject in Portugal. Therefore, it was used a structured questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and an Observation in Media Smart Classes. The results suggested that this program was not effective in a short period of time since children might not have time to absorb the entire program. So, future studies should have this point into account.