Parental awareness of new online advertising techniques targeting children: an exploratory study of American parents

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to examine what parents from across the USA know about online advertising/marketing tactics directed at children, their familiarity with these tactics and what they believe about the appropriateness of using these promotional methods to target children. Design/methodology/approach The online survey company Qualtrics was used to collect data from 500 parents in the USA. Parents had to have at least one child between the ages of 5 and 14 to participate. To ensure socio-economic diversity, half of the participants had an associate degree or more of schooling while the other half of participants had some college or less. Participants were given vignettes describing 11 different online advertising/marketing tactics and were asked how familiar they were with each tactic, whether they could identify the tactic by name, at what age they believed their child could understand the promotional intent of the tactic and the age that they thought it was ethical to use this tactic with children. Findings The results revealed that parents were only moderately familiar with many of these advertising/marketing tactics and had difficulty identifying most of them by name. In addition, parents reported that, on average, most 11-year-old children would understand the purpose of these marketing approaches and that it was ethical to target children with them. Originality/value The results of this exploratory study offer researchers some key insights into how American parents perceive online advertising that targets children.

Parents’ literacy on mobile advertising aimed at children: a cross - cultural approach

“…Furthermore, and in relation to the third research question, referring to the differences between countries, although parents' knowledge of mobile advertising exceeds 50% in Colombia and Mexico, there is a significant lack of knowledge in these countries about whether children know what this type of advertising is. These results are partly consistent with those reported by Lapierre and Choi (2021), in that parents, in a non-probabilistic sample in the USA, showed a moderate familiarity with most of the tactics used in digital advertising. The range of mean scores in that study was between 2.95 and 3.49, which is similar to those obtained for several of the items surveyed in this study (e.g.…”

“…This call is all the more necessary when it is noted that the results of this and other recent studies indicate that parents in general report moderate awareness of these mobile advertising tactics. It should also be considered, in the process of formulating educational programs, that there is a possibility, as Lapierre and Choi (2021) suggested, that parents may not be fully motivated to want to improve their levels of digital literacy in general. Therefore, it would be interesting to validate hypotheses based on results such as that of Newman and Oates (2014), regarding the fact that parents do not consider the mobile phone to be an advertising medium comparable to television.…”