Elsevier

Appetite

Volume 62, 1 March 2013, Pages 190-193
Appetite

Short communication
Children’s recognition of advertisements on television and on Web pages

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2012.04.002Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper we consider the issue of advertising to children. Advertising to children raises a number of concerns, in particular the effects of food advertising on children’s eating habits. We point out that virtually all the research into children’s understanding of advertising has focused on traditional television advertisements, but much marketing aimed at children is now via the Internet and little is known about children’s awareness of advertising on the Web. One important component of understanding advertisements is the ability to distinguish advertisements from other messages, and we suggest that young children’s ability to recognise advertisements on a Web page is far behind their ability to recognise advertisements on television.

Highlights

• We summarise children’s understanding of advertisements. • Many advertisements aimed at children are for food and drink. • Children can identify TV advertisements by 6 years of age. • New research shows children cannot identify Web advertisements until much later. • Therefore children may be more vulnerable to Web marketing.

Introduction

Much advertising is aimed at children and young people because children have a great deal of spending power, and because they influence a large proportion of family purchases (Gunter, Oates, & Blades, 2005). Compared to adults, children purchase a very narrow range of products such as food, beverages, toys, clothes and entertainment, and therefore marketers of these products often target their advertising at children and young people. Kovacic, Harbour, Liebowitz, and Rosch (2008) estimated that in 2006 in the United States, 44 companies spent over $1.5 billion promoting food and drinks to children and young people. Given the large sums spent on marketing such products it is not surprising that in many countries the greatest proportion of television advertising aimed at children is for food and drink products (Gunter et al., 2005).

Many of the food and drinks aimed at children are ones that might be considered as unhealthy ones because they have a high fat, salt and/or sugar content (‘HFSS’ products). The very large sums spent on marketing such products are clear evidence that advertising is an effective way of promoting these products to children. Hastings et al. (2003) carried out an extensive review of the research on food advertising to children and concluded that such advertising had a significant effect on what children chose to eat.

Section snippets

Effects of television advertising on children

The effect of food advertising on television has been demonstrated by Halford, Gillespie, Brown, Pontin, and Dovey (2004) who showed children typical television advertisements for food, and then on another occasion showed the same children a similar number of advertisements that did not promote food. After seeing the advertisements on each occasion the children were allowed an unlimited amount to eat. Following the food advertisements the children ate more food, and less healthy food, than they

Children’s awareness of television advertising

Children’s awareness of television advertising takes several years to develop. The most important developments are two significant stages in children’s understanding. The first stage is when children can identify an advertisement, in other words when they can distinguish an advertisement from other television content. The second stage is when children realise that an advertisement has ‘persuasive intent’ in other words that an advertisement tries to convince them that a particular product is

Advertising to children in new media

The Internet has become an important part of children’s lives and therefore an increasing proportion of the money spent on advertising to children has been spent on marketing on the Web, and like television advertising aimed at children Web advertising includes many food and drink products that are unhealthy (Moore, 2006). There has been little research into the effects of Internet advertising on children, though some aspects of Internet advertising, like advergames (which are interactive games

Recognition of Web page advertisements

To find out at what age children could identify advertisements on the Web we invented a number of Web pages (Ali, Blades, Oates, & Blumberg, 2009). Each Web page included several images with associated text, and some of the pages included images that were advertisements. The advertisements were invented ones, but were closely based on advertisements found on actual web sites that children might visit, and included wording that was typical of such advertisements. The Web pages were printed for

Conclusions

Concerns about food marketing on television have led some governments (like the UK government) to ban unhealthy food advertising in programmes aimed at young children (Ofcom, 2006). It would seem an extension of such policies to limit or control food advertising to young children on the Internet, but doing so would, because of the international scale of the Internet, be a much more difficult task than restricting television advertising in a single country.

An alternative approach would be to

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  • Food advertising towards children and young people in Norway

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    Citation Excerpt :

    A large proportion of their advertising budgets are spent on reaching this audience through everything from television, radio, the Internet and magazines to product placement, packaging and sponsorship of idols and heroes (e.g. Hastings et al., 2003; Hastings, McDermott, Angus, Stead, & Thomson, 2006; Gram, 2004; Wietcha et al., 2006; Kelly, Smith, King, Flood, & Bauman, 2007; Nord, 2008; Cairns, Angus, Hastings, & Caraher, 2013; Han, Powell, & Kim, 2013). It is an indisputable fact that this type of marketing also influences children's choices (e.g. Mehta et al., 2010; Mink, Evans, Moore, Calderon, & Deger, 2010; Blades, Oates, & Shiying, 2013; Cairns et al., 2013; Halford & Boyland, 2013). A Norwegian study showed for instance that three out of ten 8- to 19-year-olds agreed that they often asked or nagged their parents to buy things they had seen advertised.

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