A review of the literature and meta-analysis was conducted by Martin (1997) and a more international picture began to emerge with papers by Bijmolt , Claassen, and Brus (1998) in the Netherlands, Chan (2000) in Hong Kong, and Oates , Blades , and Gunter (2002) in the UK. The framework was similar in all this early research where interviews were usually used and the research was discussed using Piagetian ideas as theoretical support that seemed to suggest 6–8-year-olds were beginning to understand advertising and before that time well nothing much of interest was happening. In 1999, Roedder John provided a magisterial review of the whole field of consumer socialisation 8 of which children’s understanding of advertising was a part and the new century seemed to herald a shift in what had become a standard paradigm of research in this field with a special issue on marketing to children in 2003 occupying half of the Journal of Marketing Management. In particular, Lawlor and Prothero (2003) explored children’s own construal of the function of advertising using a group discussion paradigm. It’s difficult however to work with preschool children using this procedure but 8–9-year-olds were quite able provide a coherent and sensible view of advertising from their (albeit junior) point of view and this theme was also pursued by Bartholomew and O’Donohoe (2003) with their ‘child’s eye view of advertising’. Even children’s own understanding of TV advertising regulations was explored by Preston (2000). He showed that ten- to eleven-year-olds were able to demonstrate some understanding of them together with the rhetoric of advertising. So the strict experimental paradigm had changed to include those exploratory procedures where children are free to discuss and give their own readings of advertising rather than being seen as subjects in psychology experiments.
In terms of theory development, Pine and Veasey (2003) argued that the framework of implicit and explicit knowledge would be useful in clarifying development in children’s understanding of advertising. Implicit knowledge is a level of mental representation that is hypothesised to be available at an early age that gradually unfolds into a more explicit form as the child grows up. Language is the usual way older children access and articulate the implicit representations but earlier explicit expression can be found in eye movements, pointing, drawing and so on. The explicit–implicit distinction has been introduced in this book before in Chapter 3 within the section Memory . In my opinion this distinction has a long history in psychology and I would suggest that the competence—performance distinction (Fodor & Garrett, 1966) is similar to explicit–implicit as are some of the ideas Vygotsky is associated with in his ‘zone of proximal development ’ 9 (Chaiklin, 2003). Essentially these are formulations of the same problem of explaining the gulf that often emerges between being capable of doing something and actually doing it. However making such a distinction is important as children can show signs, ‘glimmers of understanding’ if you like at an early age before being able to fully demonstrate an understanding or be able to articulate or explain it. Pine and Veasey (2003) also identified advocatory communication which is only and solely extolling the virtues of the brand or product, as a separate function of advertising and demonstrated that this was related to self-promotion. Young (2000) had established that understanding the promotional intent behind advertising emerged after 6 years of age by showing children from 5 to 9 years of age endings of ads which broke the advocatory rule as they showed the brand in a negative but amusing light. Each child could choose either a promotional, control, or negative-but-amusing ending to different TV commercials. Whereas 5–6 year olds predominantly chose the ‘funny ending’ older children tended to choose the promotional one with that choice becoming more frequent with age.
The rest of the literature up until the time of writing falls into two main camps. The first one which is characteristic of this century looked at advertising on digital media. Whereas TV spot advertising dominated the literature on children’s understanding of advertising in the twentieth century, more papers started to appear on how children managed to comprehend advertising in this new medium. The second explored theoretical developments in the field with particular reference to theory of mind findings in the preschool period (see section “Children’s Understanding of Other People” in Chapter 8). Gunter , Oates and, Blades (2005) published an excellent up-to-date review of the research on advertising to children at that time and in that collection they looked at theoretical approaches with an analysis of theory of mind (op. cit., pp. 62–80) and how that theory has a role to play in children’s understanding of the intent behind advertising. This was new and other researchers were not slow at seeing the opportunities such a theory possessed for explaining how children understand advertising. Moses and Baldwin (2005) argued that two skills that had been neglected in the literature so far and identified them as executive functioning and theory of mind, both having a role to play in any analysis of how children understand of advertising. Their paper included a good exposition of changes in what might be called the zeitgeist of developmental psychology where grand overarching theories like Piaget’s have gradually been replaced by contextualised explanations of particular tasks that confront the child in her ecology . There are two aspects to development in the child which I shall call ‘skills and how to manage them’ and the latter (managing them) refers to how executive function improves as the child becomes more skilled with a range of meta-cognitive functions dealing with goal setting, planning , inhibiting action, thinking flexibly, switching focus and generally implementing and achieving as she gets older. Moses and Baldwin argued that children in the preschool period can separate ads from programmes if the distinction between these two genres is clear. There was no problem in making this claim in the days when spot advertising dominated as, apart from the beginning and ending of the ad being signalled by separators, 10 ads were shorter than programmes and we would all agree that children can potentially use this perceptually based distinction in the preschool period to establish a difference between ads and programmes. However it is less clear if the younger children will recognise an ad shown online. Moses and Baldwin also claim that an understanding of the selling intent of advertising should also be found in principle in preschool children, as understanding the desires and intentions of others emerges early in the young pre-schooler’s understanding of folk psychology, their lay knowledge of other people’s thoughts, feelings and intentions. And yet if we hark back to Ward’s original work, commercial intent of advertising as measured by questions like ‘What do commercials try to do?’ suggest that a response that shows high awareness of the selling intent behind advertising is not very salient even by 11 years of age (Young, 1990, p. 79). We can conclude that although children are capable of relating advertising to selling they do not display this capacity when interviewed. 11 Moses and Baldwin although referring to research done in the first wave of work done on the child’s understanding of others’ intentions, beliefs and feelings, comes down firmly on second order theory of mind as the most likely candidate for explaining some of the other functions of advertising such as persuasive intent. The best source (at the time of writing) on what are called second order mental states is Miller (2009). Let’s take one popular example of basic theory of mind which is first-order false belief . Here the child realises that it is possible to hold false beliefs about events in the world and this awareness and understanding is part of a suite of skills that comprises a naïve or folk psychology of others. This acquisition occurs between 3 and 5 years of age and is a well-established milestone cross-culturally that has stood the test of time over 30 years of research. It is also seen as an essential part of the behavioural articulation of sociability in children as they tease, console and cooperate with each other. An example of a more advanced development is second-order false belief which consists of the realisation that it is possible to hold a false belief about someone else’s belief. It is a recursive process and follows, logically and psychology after the first-order version. This second-order belief is a key that enables us to glimpse a world of Machiavellian c
omplexity, the world of negotiation, lies, deception, interested and disinterested parties and persuasion and is the stuff of novels, soaps, films and other representations of the human condition. It includes of course advertising and marketing and while the developmental sequence is not as established as its better-known precursor, there is a respectable literature associated with it that Miller summarises and we know that it usually begins between 5 and 7 years of age. However 7 years is by no means the end of the story and persuaders in particular are adept at producing messages that appeal at all sorts of levels. Miller identifies a particular second-order intention of certain communications that would aid children a lot in understanding advertising and that is when he cites Moses and Baldwin’s own paper in saying that ‘they want me to think …’ may be critical for children’s success at understanding advertising (Miller op. cit., p. 768). However there are plenty opportunities for school age children to exercise these newly discovered second-order ‘mind reading’ 12 skills in hearing stories, watching films, reading magazines or books or joining in those pre-adolescent (and adolescent) conversations that begin ‘he thinks that I think that she’s a slag but she’s not really as she’s only like that ‘cos…’.
From their review of research Moses and Baldwin suggest that understanding the promotional function of advertising i.e. the brand should only be presented with biased information that shows it in a positive light, should be part of the repertoire of the child by 6–8 years of age. But predictions of the onset of an understanding of other functions of advertising, based on literature that explores young children’s understanding of mental states put the typical age when some understanding emerges earlier than that. Knowing that advertising is trying to persuade me should be there from 4–6 years. ‘Advertising gives me information and some of it is misleading’ should be understood sometime between 3 and 5 years. And even at 3 years children should be able to comprehend that advertising is trying to sell me something. As for telling ads apart from the rest of the programme fare, well that could be there first, maybe even in infants. The observed age norms are later than these dates and Moses and Baldwin argue that the gap between potential understanding and expressing that potential in actual behaviour is primarily the fault of limited executive functioning . This package of skills is mediated in the front part of the cortex of the brain and will be maturing until late in development so children are gradually getting better but it often takes until early adulthood until these skills mature. There is some room for optimism however as executive control skills can be improved and the authors cite evidence to that effect. Novices in the domain of advertising literacy can become experts and limit the executive deficits. Consequently for the young citizen of tomorrow a programme geared toward literacy in media including advertising and promotion in general can prove beneficial.
McAlister and Cornwell ’s (2009) paper comprises several studies but their literature review includes an interesting example of theory of mind as applied to children’s understanding of advertising. Their example of first-order understanding is of selling intent where the child will think ‘the advertiser wants me to buy’. In accordance with Moses and Baldwin’s account they also state that a second-order understanding would be thoughts about embedded mental states such as ‘the advertiser wants me to like the product so that I will want to buy it’ (McAlister & Cornwell, op. cit., p. 178) but this attainment is achieved later in the preschool period .
McAlister and Cornwell often talk of the ‘intentions of the advertiser’ in their paper and indeed the original model of the nature of knowledge children need to have to understand advertising (Friestad & Wright, 1994) identifies the source of the communication as one of three knowledge domains 13 that children should be competent in if they are to defend against advertising. It seems appropriate to introduce one my own contributions to this debate as it is concerned with the child’s awareness of where advertising comes from and the existence or otherwise of ‘the advertiser’. In order to do this I’ll talk about what I’ve called the ‘locus of meaning’.
The Locus of Meaning
There are certain minimal requirements for any communication system and I think I am not being controversial if I say there should be a source behind any communicative act, a receiver who hears, misreads, or ignores what is being said, and the message that is being sent. We can find this, with the addition of a medium through which communication operates in the original model of Shannon and Weaver (1949). There is a similar three part structure in Austin’s three basic senses in which saying something is doing something which are (as interpreted by Levinson, 1983, p. 236) the locutionary act or the sense of the sentence itself, the illocutionary act which is the conventional force associated with it such as a statement or promise, and the perlocutionary act or effects it might have on audiences. So the utterance ‘Fire!’ will have a different force on all three aspects depending on whether it’s uttered by an excited child at a fireworks display, to a firing squad, or the apocryphal voice in a crowded theatre. 14 Although these examples relate to speech, there is no reason why we cannot attribute them to other forms of communication in their visual, written or symbolic forms. So ‘the locus of meaning’ in my sense of the expression is where the conventional power of the communication lies. Is it the source, the audience or the text? Now religious texts, especially if they are assumed to have sacred authorship are pored over and interpreted by priests, a process known as exegesis, and one can say the locus of meaning of this particular form lies in the text. Other works and creative products of humankind are assumed to be the outpourings of special individuals whether they are visual artists like Leonardo or Michelangelo, writers like Shakespeare or Jorge Luis Borges, or musicians like Mozart or Beethoven. A good painting is produced by a good artist. Interestingly, the concept of author in the sense of to whom can be attributed the critics’ evaluation, was ignored in the early days of cinema. As it could be argued that the finished product was cooperatively put together there was a dispute over which member of that cast could be seen to be the author and this debate was elevated to the status of auteur (Fr.) theory by some critics. Eventually the director was chosen as giving his or her ultimate signature to the piece and cinema became a respectable genre and critics breathed a sigh of relief.
What of advertising? Although some directors cut their creative teeth on producing TV commercials (Obias, 2013), there are not many aficionados of this genre unless irony is seen as an acceptable critical mode of appreciation . The force of the commercial is located in its effects on audiences—to buy or to appreciate the power of the brand. Searle’s (1976) analysis of five types of utterance in terms of the kinds of action that the speaker is producing isolates directives as an attempt to get the addressee to do something which would of course include advertising which is intended to change a state of affairs. The locus of meaning of advertising lies both in the message, as it has to grab one’s attention and cut through the clutter of crowded media and the effect of the message of consumers . The question ‘who is the author?’ does not really arise.
Returning now to the debate, I have made a case I hope that advertising as a genre does not have an easily identifiable author. The more general critique though is that all media genres are different from the interactions between humans that are characterised by face-to-face interaction. What the child is learning and acquiring rapidly between the ages of three and five years are people skills. These are not immediately transferable as answers to the implied question ‘is the advertisement trying to make me believe in or trust or persuade me to buy this product/brand?’ and this is applicable to critical approaches to the purpose or function of all media. To my knowledge this has not been discussed in the literature. Also, there is a stronger case that advertising is different from other media genres that the child encounters just because the source is not identifiable as having a human agent or author.
Finally, there is an argument that not all children approach media in the same wa
y. I have emphasised ‘process’ as a virtue in this book, as a mental set that encourages questions on the lines of ‘where does this come from?’ or ‘what will the consequences be of doing that?’ and ‘thinking process’ is generally a good way to think. I’m not sure where this virtuous stance comes from although I have vague memories of schooldays when it was pointed out to me by an enthusiastic teacher that these regular lines on a hillside were mediaeval strip cultivation or that many navvies from Ireland died from cholera while digging these cuttings for the railways of the nineteenth century in Britain, using just pick and shovel. 15 Things change and not always for the better is a lesson in life. Unfortunately for many children this does not extend to the everyday life of watching TV and more frequently nowadays, monitoring one’s smartphone. In many households these are usually on while at least one member of the family is awake. In my opinion, the stifling of curiosity begins when we don’t have to search for answers by asking questions and conversations are just the call and response of clichés. My point is that curiosity is a necessary and vital part of understanding and that this attitude to one’s environment is sadly lacking in some children.
Digital Media
For most of the latter part of the twentieth century, advertising to children was primarily carried by television as this was the medium kids watched and even early in the twenty-first century Gunter , Oates , and Blades (2003) were able to give us a useful summary of the recent literature at that time. However the ascendancy of the internet as a medium for pretty much every genre including advertising means that we need to look at whether children understand advertising in this new format. This section will then act as a link into a further discussion on internet advertising and marketing to children in general.
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