Plugged In

by Patti M Valkenburg

  The results of research into brand recall, that is, the extent to which children are able to correctly generate and retrieve a brand name in their memory, seem to be age specific. Both the correlational and experimental studies suggest that advertising can influence brand recall, but only that of adolescents. For example, in one correlational study, researchers asked younger children (between the ages of four and twelve) to list as many brands of toothpaste (and other products) as they could. Although most of the brand names that the children listed were for heavily advertised products, the relationship between television viewing and brand recall was not significant.29 In a study involving children of up to eight years of age, researchers similarly found a correlation between television viewing and brand recognition, but not brand recall.30 A study among late adolescents (fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds), however, did yield a positive relationship between television viewing and brand recall.31

  The results of experimental research on brand recall generally concur with those of correlational research. For example, in one study, seven- and eight-year-olds and eleven- and twelve-year-olds watched a recording of the British version of American Idol in which the researchers had digitally inserted product placements. Half of each age group saw unhealthy branded food products (for example, Pepsi and Cheetos), and the other half saw healthy branded food products (Milk 2 Go, Dole fruit cups). The older children recalled more brand names than the younger ones. In both age groups, recall was particularly pronounced for the unhealthy brands, which may be due to the fact that most children were more familiar with the unhealthy than the healthy brands.32

  Brand Attitudes and Preferences

  Research on brand attitudes and preferences asks whether advertising can foster a positive attitude in children toward advertised brands (brand attitude) and whether they prefer certain brands to others (brand preferences). It is much more difficult to influence attitudes and preferences than recognition and recall. As discussed earlier in this book, even the very youngest children have distinct tastes. Many factors shape brand attitudes and preferences, including age, gender, media preferences, family environment, and susceptibility to peer and subculture influence. All of these factors predict children’s selective exposure to advertising and, as a result, the impact of advertising on their brand attitudes and preferences.

  Research on children’s brand attitudes and preferences began in the 1970s. In a correlational study, 755 children were asked how often they had seen a certain commercial for a Snoopy pencil sharpener as well as much how they liked the commercial and the pencil sharpener. Results indicated a significant positive correlation between exposure to the commercial and attitudes toward the sharpener. Interestingly, additional analyses revealed that whether the children liked the commercial had a greater influence on their preferences than the number of times that they watched it.33

  A large number of experiments have also investigated the effects of advertising on brand attitude and preference.34 Almost all of these studies involved showing children one or more commercials and then asking them how much they liked the advertised brands. For example, in one study, half of a group of seven- to ten-year-olds watched a videotape that included a commercial for Clearasil, and the other half watched the videotape without the commercial. Those who saw the commercial had a more positive brand attitude than those who did not. The effect was greater among girls, and occurred only with children who were unfamiliar with the Clearasil commercial.35 Girls evidently found a commercial for acne treatment more relevant than boys at that age, perhaps because they entered puberty earlier and were more concerned about their appearance than boys.

  In a comparable study, girls ages 9–10 watched a taped interview with Steven Spielberg. Half of them also viewed two lipstick commercials that had been inserted into the interview, whereas the other half viewed two diet soft drink commercials. A preliminary study had shown that the girls were interested in lipstick but not in the diet soft drink. The study revealed that the lipstick commercials had a positive influence on the girls’ brand attitude, whereas the soft drink commercials had no effect.36

  These studies and others like them indicate that advertising can positively influence brand attitude and brand preference—but this influence is not guaranteed. Instead, the extent to which youth find the advertising appealing or find the marketed content relevant and interesting to them can greatly enhance or reduce the effects. Children who find a commercial message appealing—particularly because it highlights content that is relevant and interesting to them—seem to ascribe a more positive attitude and a stronger brand preference to the marketed brand. On the other hand, when the content is unappealing or seems inapplicable, brand appeal and preference are unaffected.

  Purchase Request Behavior

  While brand awareness and brand appeal are important, advertisers ultimately want children to purchase their brands. Since children do not always have the opportunity to buy things for themselves, and since assessing purchase behavior can be quite complex, researchers often gauge “purchase intention” by looking at what children ask their parents to buy for them. A considerable body of research has addressed purchase request behavior, but far fewer studies have looked at the relationship between advertising and such behavior.

  In a notable study that took place during Christmastime, young children were asked what they wanted Santa Claus to bring them. During the same period, the researchers studied which commercials were being aired on television and the frequency of children’s television exposure. Results indicated that children who were exposed to more commercials had significantly more of the advertised products on their wish lists.37 Other studies exploring the correlation between advertising and request behavior have similarly shown that children who are exposed to more commercial messages ask their parents for products more often.38 Importantly, these findings are not limited to younger children. Several studies have shown that commercial messages increase purchase intention among teens, particularly when these messages rely on content that they deem appealing.39

  Experimental studies have likewise focused on purchase behavior. In one study, a group of three- to five-year-olds and their mothers watched a cartoon into which food commercials had been inserted. Another group of the same size watched the same cartoon but without the commercials. Afterward, the mothers took their children grocery shopping. The group of children who had watched the cartoon with the commercials asked for products more often than the group of children who had not.40 Similarly, in an experiment on the effect of product placement, children watched a scene from the movie Home Alone. Half the children were shown the scene with a product placement by Pepsi, and the other half without a product placement. Afterward, the children were given a choice between a can of Coca-Cola and a can of Pepsi. Sixty-two percent who had seen the product placement chose Pepsi, as opposed to 42 percent of the children who were not exposed to the Pepsi product placement.41

  Unintended Advertising Effects

  Advertisers have clear goals for the content they create. They want their target audience to know who they are, to find their brands appealing and preferable to competitive brands, and ultimately to purchase them. And while, overall, the literature indicates that advertisers are able to meet these goals among youth, there are unintended consequences of advertising that they typically pay less attention to. Academic researchers, however, have often asked about these unintended consequences, paying particular attention to materialism, parent-child conflict, and unhealthy eating.

  Materialism

  Consumer cultivation theory, an adapted version of George Gerbner’s cultivation theory, assumes that advertising promotes ideas and values that differ from our own experience of the world. If we are frequently exposed to the ideas and values promoted in advertising, we will gradually adopt them as our own. According to this theory, advertising communicates the ideology that ownership is important and that it gives us access to beauty, happiness, success, and other desirable qualities.42 Giv
en this proposition, scholars have asked whether advertising does in fact lead to increased materialism among youth.

  Overall, the research indicates that advertising increases materialism among youth. For example, most of the existing correlational work has shown a positive relationship between advertising and materialistic attitudes in children and adolescents. Like most effects of media, the correlations are small to moderate, varying from r = .13 to r = .32.43 Most of these studies, however, could not solve the chicken-or-egg dilemma (see chapter 7), which means that they could not decisively assess whether exposure to advertising leads to materialism or whether materialistic children pay more attention to advertising. A recent longitudinal study by Suzanna Opree and colleagues, suggests that direction of the relationships points more from advertising to subsequent materialism than the other way around.44 This finding has been supported by experimental research showing that advertising can be a cause of materialistic values of children and adolescents.45 But as with most other media effects, it is plausible that not all children are equally susceptible to the effects of advertising as a source of materialism. Up to now, no research has shown which children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of advertising on materialism. This is an important question for future research.

  Parent-Child Conflict

  As we discussed, advertising may encourage children’s purchase request behavior. This is an expected, intended effect of advertising. But if children make too many requests or are too demanding, parent-child conflicts may arise, which we regard as an unintended effect of advertising. Thus far, at least five correlational studies have examined the relationship between television advertising and parent-child conflicts, and each one found that exposure to advertising correlates with a rise in parent-child conflict.46

  The same findings are supported by one of the few experiments examining the effect of advertising on parent-child conflicts. In this experiment, two groups of four- and five-year-olds watched a videotape of a television program for preschoolers. One of the videotapes included a commercial for an appealing toy, while the other videotape did not. Afterward, the children were asked which product they preferred, a tennis ball or the toy featured in the commercial. The researchers added that their mothers preferred the tennis ball. Children who had viewed the videotape that included the commercial were more than twice as likely (46 percent) to go against their mother’s wishes as children who had not (21 percent).47

  Overweight and Obesity

  Overweight and obesity in childhood have become a worldwide crisis. The World Health Organization reports that worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980, among adults and youth. For example, nearly forty-two million children under the age of five were overweight or obese in 2013.48 If current trends continue, this number is expected to rise to seventy million by 2024.49 And while the increases have been particularly dramatic in developing countries, developed countries have experienced similarly high rates of growth. For example, 29 percent of boys and 30 percent of girls younger than twenty in the United States are overweight or obese, as are 26 percent of boys and 29 percent of girls in the UK, and 34 percent of boys and 29 percent of girls in Greece.50 Children who are overweight (10–20 percent higher than normal weight) or obese (20 percent or more above normal weight) are a matter of grave concern for public health officials, since these conditions can lead to diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, joint problems, depression, and many other health issues.

  Unhealthy food—fast food, soft drinks, potato chips, candy—accounts for a large proportion of the products being marketed to children. In the United States, researchers have found that nearly 25 percent of all ads targeting youth focus on unhealthy content. And of this content, nearly 90 percent feature products that are high in fat, sugar, or sodium.51 In another worrisome finding, a cross-national study carried out in eleven countries on three continents reported that between six in the morning and ten at night, children watch an average of twenty-eight commercials an hour, five of which advertise unhealthy food products.52 These high percentages are the reason why people often hold advertising responsible for the epidemic of overweight and obesity among children. As unhealthy foods become increasingly marketed online, public concern has grown, leading to numerous investigations into the relationship between advertising and overweight or obesity in childhood.

  Researchers have posited three potential hypotheses to explain why advertising may lead to large weight gains in youth.53 The first is the advertising-effect hypothesis, which states that exposure to food advertising incites a longing to eat. The second hypothesis is the activity-displacement hypothesis, which states that media use is displacing more active pursuits like playing outside and sports, which help in the fight against obesity. The third is the “grazing” hypothesis, which suggests that children are more likely to snack when watching television. The media themselves often promulgate the idea of snacking and viewing. As figure 9.1 shows, photographs or movies showing children or families watching television together frequently feature a bowl of potato chips or popcorn.

  Figure 9.1. In media portrayals, television viewing and snacking seem to be inextricably connected. (Brand X Pictures/Thinkstock)

  Researchers have found support for all three hypotheses. Dutch researchers showed that the time children spent watching commercials was correlated with an unhealthy diet, supporting the advertising-effect hypothesis. This result was also supported by a study of American youth that found a positive longitudinal relationship between exposure to soft drink and fast food advertising and consumption of these foods.54 In the same Dutch study, the activity-displacement hypothesis was supported, too: children’s television viewing time was found to be negatively related to playing outside, which suggested that television viewing displaced more active pursuits. Finally, support for the grazing hypothesis comes from a study showing that children increased their consumption of snacks when watching a cartoon episode with commercials that promoted unhealthy foods.55

  All in all, most studies have shown that advertisements for unhealthy food can lead to unhealthy eating, excess weight, and obesity, although the reported effect sizes are typically small. An important explanation for these small effects is the complexity of the causes of obesity. Although advertising for unhealthy food products has increased dramatically in recent decades, children’s physical, social, educational, and commercial environments have also changed significantly. Children are less physically active today because they seek their entertainment mainly indoors, in their bedrooms. Parenting styles have changed, and today’s parents are much more likely to agree to their children’s requests.56 And many stores display candy, potato chips, and other “fun food” products on lower shelves, where children can easily spot them and select them when they go shopping with their parents. All in all, today’s children grow up in an “obesogenic environment” in which they easily consume too many calories or get too little exercise, which makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint the unique effect of advertising on the growing obesity trend.

  Child Development and Advertising Effects

  Thus far, we have seen that youth are affected by advertising, but the role of development has been largely omitted from this conversation. The one exception is research on the effect of advertising on brand recall, which suggests a smaller effect on younger children than older children. That said, we know from earlier chapters that development is a key predictor of media consumption and media effects, and so we would expect that development also matters when it comes to the effects of advertising.

  Indeed, there is convincing work to suggest that young children are more susceptible to the effects—intended and unintended—of advertising than older children. In particular, research has established that advertising has a greater effect on younger children’s brand attitude, request behavior, parent-child conflicts, and obesity. Younger children are also more likely than older children to think highly of an advertised brand if they enjoy a commercial for that brand
.57 Unsurprisingly, then, advertisers are particularly keen to produce attractive commercials for young children. Younger children are more likely than older children to make purchase requests of their parents in response to appealing commercials. This is largely because young children, who have less experience with products, are less likely to subject them to systematic and critical evaluation. For example, they are not yet capable of weighing the advantages and disadvantages of an advertised brand and comparing it to another brand—which is key to reducing or mitigating advertising effects.

  This process of weighing the advantages and disadvantages of an advertised brand is an important aspect of advertising processing. In general, advertising—like entertainment—can be processed in different ways. To explain advertising processing, scholars have developed models such as the elaboration likelihood model of Richard Petty and John Cacioppo58 and the heuristic-systematic model of Alice Eagly and Shelly Chaiken.59 In 2010, Moniek Buijzen and colleagues adapted these adult-focused models for a study of how children process advertising.60 Like the adult models, this youth-focused model assumes that under certain circumstances, children process advertising systematically and critically (systematic processing), under other circumstances superficially (heuristic processing), and under yet other circumstances, unconsciously and automatically (automatic processing). Thus far, work with this model indicates that young children mostly tend to process advertising heuristically and automatically, that is, without thinking critically or considering counterarguments. Older children and adolescents, however, are able to rely on more systematic processing, at least when they are motivated to do so.