Disclosing brand placement to young children

Abstract

In spite of the EU's prohibition on brand placement in children's programs, it is argued that children may still be exposed to this advertising format in many occasions. Consequently, and as children may have even more difficulties than adults to distinguish the commercial content from the editorial media content in which it is embedded, an advertising disclosure may be necessary to enable them to cope with brand placement. Entailing two one-factorial between-subjects experiments, the current article examined how different types of brand placement warning cues influenced cognitive advertising literacy and the attitude toward the placed brand, among children between 8 and 10 years old. In a first study, it was investigated how these outcomes were influenced by warning cues with different perceptual modalities (no vs. auditory vs. visual cue, N = 98). The results showed that a visual warning cue was more effective than an auditory warning cue (vs. no warning cue) in triggering cognitive advertising literacy. However, this activated cognitive advertising literacy could not account for the effect of the visual warning cue on brand attitude. In a follow-up study, it was examined whether the effectiveness of this visual warning cue was influenced by the timing of disclosure (cue prior to vs. during media containing brand placement, N = 142). Additionally, it was tested whether the effect of the cue on brand attitude could be explained by cognitive advertising literacy if children's sceptical attitude toward the brand placement format was taken into account. The results showed that cognitive advertising literacy was higher when the cue was shown prior to than during the media content. This cue-activated cognitive advertising literacy resulted in a more positive brand attitude, but only among children who were less sceptical toward brand placement. This positive relation disappeared among moderately and highly sceptical children. These findings have significant theoretical, practical and social implications.

The mediating role of advertising literacy and the moderating influence of parental mediation on how children of different ages react to brand placements

“…Moreover, only 13% of the children were able to answer all three questions measuring their understanding of brand placement correctly. Although these numbers are very low, this is in line with other research indicating that brand placement is a format that is difficult to recognize and understand, even among adult consumers (e.g., De Jans et al, ; De Pauw et al, ). Embedded advertising not only hides the commercial content into the media content, which makes it difficult to detect, it is also impossible to skip the commercial content without skipping the media content.…”

“…These positive mere exposure effects combined with a less critical stance may positively affect brand evaluations. This is also suggested by a recent research of De Pauw et al () showing that advertising literacy positively affects brand attitudes among young children when they are less skeptical towards the advertising format. In contrast, when children dislike the movie, feelings of reactance may appear.…”

“…This indicates the need for an advertising disclosure that helps the children to detect the commercial content. De Pauw et al () already provides some evidence for this as an advertising disclosure improved children's advertising literacy for brand placement. As the current disclosures that are used to disclose brand placement appear insufficient to activate adults' advertising literacy (Tessitore & Geuens, ), further research is needed to develop and test an advertising disclosure that helps children to detect brand placements.…”

“…No impact could be found of brand placement repetition on brand evaluations and brand choice. To conclude, experimental research showed that an advertising literacy training session (De Jans et al, ) and an advertising disclosure (De Pauw et al, ) improved children's advertising literacy for brand placement.…”

“…This makes brand placements a lucrative format compared to traditional television commercials. Although the effectiveness of brand placement has been shown extensively among adults (e.g., Van Reijmersdal, Neijens, & Smit, ; Verhellen, Dens, & De Pelsmacker, ), its persuasive effect on brand attitudes among children has mainly remained under the research radar (for an exception, see De Jans, Hudders, & Cauberghe, ; De Pauw, Hudders, & Cauberghe, , and Naderer, Matthes, Marquart, & Mayrhofer, ).…”