There are not many studies on advertising that cannot be described as spot advertising carried on television so we can look at them in some detail. Mallinckrodt and Mizerski (2007) were interested in advergames that children play online. As can be seen from the hybrid name, these are a particular kind of internet advertising where children play a video game within which there is a branded good, here a cereal (Froot Loops). The brand is very much central to the game and discretion is not on the agenda. For example the child is rewarded 10 points for successfully throwing a Froot Loop into the monster’s mouth but only 5 points for a piece of fruit. Success with fruit is met with a moderate ‘mmm’ sound from the monster, but a loud, satisfied ‘MMM’ greets a successful Froot Loop. Various assessments were made on a large sample of 5–8-year-old children (n = 295) using non-verbal techniques. The ones that interest us in this section are measures of ‘the source’ of the TV commercial, 16 and two questions assessing an understanding of the intent behind the commercial where three pictures were used in both questions. One measured children’s understanding of the intent that children should be using the product and consisted of three drawings; a child eating cereal, a child with her mother mixing ingredients, and children in a schoolroom with a teacher. The child eating cereal is the correct one. The other measure of intent required the child to circle either a drawing depicting a child playing tennis, a drawing of a girl next to her mum pushing a shopping cart holding a box of Kellogg’s Froot Loops cereal, as if just taken off the shelf, and a drawing of a child playing computer games. The one depicting mum and child and cart and product is the desired result from the advertiser’s point of view. Results showed that children got better at identifying the source with a spurt in improvement between 7 and 8 years of age. But even at 8 years of age only 40% of the children correctly chose the correct ‘source’ card and the average percentage of correct responses over all ages was 25%. For me this demonstrates the difficulty of framing advertising communication as having a ‘source’. To make this meaningful and to do justice to the implicit message that ‘branding adds value’, some iconic 17 representation of the brand is necessary yet the level of abstraction required to see that a logo with symbolic properties represented as an icon so that a brand adds value is probably beyond the understanding of many of these children anyway. There are two meanings of intent behind advertising that were looked at. One (eating) demonstrates consumption as the goal and the more immediate meaning of getting it to the checkout which is then followed by purchase then consumption requires an additional understanding of the ecology of the supermarket. Most children from six years of age thought that getting to buy the goods is the intention behind advertising and this increased with age whereas from five years of age about an average core figure of 47% chose eating the product as the intent and this didn’t really change much with age. Of course both questions were asked and the ‘correct’ answer that reflected the two kinds of intent was nested among other possible pictures. A quick look at these distractor items would suggest the ‘eating’ part of the process is more immediate for the child whereas the arrangement surrounding choice, purchase and (eventual) consumption requires more familiarity with the shopping experience and this might explain the pattern of the results.
Moore and Rideout (2007) set out to find and explore the websites associated with already heavily advertising foods to children in the USA. The vast majority (85%) of firms that advertised their wares to children on TV extended their promotional activities to associated websites. The authors mention (op. cit., p. 208) elaboration likelihood with the peripheral route as one route to persuasion that is available to children as their understanding of advertising is limited and they are motivated by games and understand them. Therefore (although they don’t state it explicitly) the motivation and ability to go down the game route means game-related playing will occupy the central route. I shall explore this further shortly. In addition, the authors argue that ‘affect transfer ’ can occur when the feel good factor induced by game playing is transferrable to the context including the brands themselves.
Although Moore and Rideout (2007) had set up the basics of a theory of internet advertising looking at games with embedded brands and Mallinckrodt and Mizerski (2007) have obtained some valuable data on how children understood such advertising, the critical experiment must be a design where each child is assessed on his or her understanding of both forms of advertising—in the one experiment. And that emerged some years later when Owen , Lewis , Auty , and Buijzen (2013) interviewed both 6–7-year-olds and 9–10-year-olds and asked them questions about both types of advertising. In fact the net-based advertising comprised various kinds of ‘non-traditional’ forms like brand placement , and programme sponsorship as well as in advergames and two examples were sampled and shown to each child while questions were asked about television advertising . The results were clear. Children demonstrate a more sophisticated understanding of television advertising compared with all the different kinds of non-traditional advertising. In addition the more ‘embedded’ the non-traditional advertising was, the less it was understood.
What can we conclude from this brief look at some of the papers on children’s understanding of digital advertising on the internet? Firstly that the age norm that is usually cited for television spot advertising (e.g. John , 1999, 2008) of 7–8 years of age is too young an age for embedded advertising on the internet and also that the extent of the embedding of the brand in the context of the game or narrative will affect their understanding. In order to proceed though I want to analyse what I will called the ecology of advertising and that affects the extent to which a central or peripheral processing route is chosen.
Children in the Ecology of Advertising
If you wanted to find what and where children viewed advertising directed at them then spot advertising on television was the predominant medium in the late twentieth century. The traditional format in the UK would be a group of several commercials separated from the context of the programme maybe by a dissolve or just a pause or an announcer using the expression ‘…after the break’. This might then provide an opportunity for viewers to talk, do something else, or leave the room. However children would often do other activities when watching TV and sample television, looking up from homework when the music signalled an exciting part for example, or the conversation on screen became interesting. So the opportunity for dividing attention and parking ‘watching TV’ while doing something else was there. But viewing was single screen 18 (often at the end of a fat cathode ray tube). Consequently processing an ad occurred in one definable place (what’s ‘on’ TV) often with the family in a domestic context. While watching TV occasionally other forms of advertising might make an appearance such as product placement in a film.
Nowadays the ecology has changed radically. For the older child there is the ubiquitous smartphone where access to the internet is available. Tablets and computers at home and school would also have internet access and the general style of consumption is one where services are delivered and universal access is possible and interaction is essential. Blogging and social media mean that media consumption is a shared experience where meanings are constructed by groups. Gaming and MMOG as well as MMORG 19 are adolescent and young adult pursuits and for the younger generation there are advergames (Goad, 2011).Whereas it is easy enough to specify where ads were 20 in the domestic viewing of TV of the latter part of the twentieth century described above, it is more difficult to describe viewing nowadays in the early part of the twenty-first century. The viewer and the viewed are often mobile and there is a complex nested interplay between other people, different attentional demands, sampling strategies and age-related competencies. Let’s take an older school child of today and work out his route to school. We meet him waiting for a morning commuter train about 0730 with a bunch of his mates. He has his smartphone out and is messaging expertly with one hand and successfully navigating through the crowds to achieve his first goal
, a seat with his mates or at least in a huddle in a corner. No success! He settles for a seat on the floor on his bag and a solitary game involving Mario Bros. and some advertising but keeps looking for his mates. On second thoughts, leave him there. The point however is: The advertising that impinges on our hypothetical school boy in 2018 is nested in a veritable Russian doll set of contexts and demands on our growing child’s (limited) attentional skills. The ad is in the game which is on the phone held by the boy in the moving train who is trying to go to his mates and the time left is limited as the stop to get off approaches.
Returning now to the less frenetic world of academic research on children and advertising the recognition that a dual process model might be suitable for children and how that might work is partly answered by two papers. The earlier one was by Te’eni-Harari , Lampert, and Lehman-Wilzig (2007) and they interviewed children from 4 to 15 years of age, first to create appropriate material for contrived advertisements that varied on the dimensions of; whether a weak or strong message was used, and whether the character endorsing was attractive or not. Once the material was put together participants were then asked about their attitude toward the brand, the advertisement and their intent to purchase. If the hypothesis that two routes were used was true then high and low involvement conditions would have had significant effects on these variables. This wasn’t the case although intent to purchase varied, but only by age, and attitude toward the advertisement varied by message type and age. So the experiment had worked in that predictable differences had been found but the authors concluded that children and early adolescents do not use the two routes for processing information. That seemed to close the door on the matter until McAlister and Bargh (2016) investigated dual processing in children from 3 to 6 years of age. Their argument was that although Te’eni-Harari et al. (2007) had found no effect that could be attributed to dual processes operating in children, there was still hope for the theory extending to younger ones as the procedures could be made more child-friendly. In addition there is a wide variation in executive skills in young children. In other words they expect that with a lot of re-tuning of the procedures involved in measuring dual processing of advertisements an independent assessment of executive function can be made. This was done and from the pattern of results McAlister and Bargh concluded that there were two routes operating. But the phenomenon was what I would call paradoxical at that age. Under conditions of low involvement then children are predisposed to feel favourably about an advertised product. This appears to be a natural tendency for preschool children . However they can be dissuaded (rather than persuaded) and the take home message for marketers was that under conditions of high involvement where the child is engaged with the ad and obviously interested in it then the child will judge both central and peripheral features positively. But for low involvement products the child shifts to her natural way of processing where the attention is paid to peripheral features which are non-essential parts of the basic message. They might be attractive packs adorned with character endorsement or attractive music, visuals and so on. So how to get to the very young child? 21 The argument is to cut back on peripheral cues and focus on putting all interest in the message. The central persuasive part needs to be coherent without distractions (op. cit., p. 222).
Nairn and Fine (2008) 22 argued that the introduction of digital marketing including ‘advergames’ create special problems for children concerning their comprehension of advertising intent. These problems are framed by using dual process models to explain what’s going on and the authors claim that advertising to children at any age is unethical if there is a disparity between the child’s explicit attitude toward a brand and the manipulated implicit attitude held by the child (op. cit., p. 459). My own understanding of how dual processing of advertising works is that if the child is playing an advergame and is involved with it, then ancillary information will be processed without awareness i.e. through a peripheral route and this information will possess a positive affective tone as the brand will be enhanced if it is not the focus of attention. The important part then should be the role the brand plays in the game as this effect will work only if the brand is not perceived as part of the game which in itself will take up most the child’s attentional resources. This is an important distinction and there might be a case that placing brands so that they are not the object of attention is the unethical principle. However we need much more research on how attention works in children throughout different ages in childhood before any firm conclusions can be made.
At the time of writing the latest set of papers on children and advertising were published in a special issue of the International Journal of Advertising in the latter part of 2014. They make interesting reading as three deal directly or indirectly with online advertising. A dual process model is assumed in Rifon et al. (2014). They make the valuable distinction between brand placement in video games where several different brands emerge as part of the livery of auto-racing cars say, and the advergame where only one brand or product is displayed on the website, but frequently and in various roles. Their summary of the evidence is that advergames do influence both brand recall and encourage a positive brand attitude in older children (op. cit., p. 482).
In conclusion, we are seeing more attention being paid to branded environments in the research on advertising to children in the context of child-oriented online advertising and marketing to children in general. In my opinion we need to examine carefully the concepts we use here with children. We know from the literature on central versus peripheral routes that there are large individual differences in preschool children in executive functioning and that one has to be careful generalising about the positive and negative effects, or ethical concerns about marketing whether it is for children’s consumption or social marketing to encourage or prevent particular behaviours, when looking at future research in this area. As virtual and augmented realities become more widely available and sophisticated they will have the potential to become kids’ toys in terms of reduced size and price and increase in ease of operation. Expect larger wrap-round visual fields, multi-sensory channel integrated input and more expressive and responsive playing kit. Conceptual clarity is essential and a simple dichotomy of peripheral versus central processing or fast versus slow processing will not be adequate. For example the visual field could be categorised into ongoing where the action and the motor response occurs, intermediate on the edge of that, and finally peripheral on the edge of the visual field. Where will the brand be? How will sound and maybe movement affect the proprioceptive system? And if we believe in embodied cognition then how will that feed into our theories?
Notes
1.Goal 4 of the United Nations Development Program is ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. Under the progress of Goal 4 in 2017 it was reported that, across the world, 61 million children of primary school age were still out of school. See United Nations (2017).
2.Piaget’s model of the acquisition of number does require us to accept a close relationship between placing symbols in one-to-one correspondence with object as a precursor to understanding the ordinal (e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.) and cardinal (numerosity as all the items in the set) values of items in a set.
3.There are two versions of John’s review, John (1999, 2008) and the latter updates the former.
4.This means that the neural circuits of the prefrontal cortex of the brain are susceptible over a relatively long period of time to being moulded by the experience of caregiving and consequently changed.
5.…or super-grans, dads, or whatever collective skills can be marshalled for supporting the child?
6.I’m using these terms deliberately as each of them frames the problem of the relationship between kids/children/younger people in different ways. As do these three ways of labelling the population we’re looking at here.
7.Basic set theory assumes that if we have two sets the conjunction is the overlap and
so on with other sets. So on that basis ads are entertaining AND attention-grabbing AND informative AND goods/services content AND promotional AND rhetorical.
8.Reprised and updated by John (2008).
9.This can be described using the idea of the distance between two levels of potential achievement. One is the developmental level as determined by independent problem solving where the child works on her own. The other is the level achievable in a problem solving context where help and guidance is provided by adults or more expert peers. The lower and upper boundaries of the ‘zone’ are the two levels respectively (Chaiklin, 2003, p. 2).
10.In the UK this used to be done with a white star shape.
11.Not an irreconcilable contradiction, as an implicit understanding can be represented mentally without it being expressed in gesture or spoken.
12.A term used by Simon Baron-Cohen—it’s meaning is more transparent than some terms used in this area such as ‘false belief’ and ‘theory of mind’.
13.The other two being the topic and the method of persuasion.
14.For the bemused reader: ‘Crying fire in a crowded theatre’ is the standard example used as reductio ad absurdum in debate on advocating unrestricted free speech.
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