Children's processing of new advertising formats: how to improve children's dispositional and situational advertising literacy?

Compared to traditional advertising formats, contemporary advertising is characterized by a more subtle, less intrusive commercial nature. Commercial messages are now frequently integrated in or merged with highly entertaining and fun media content, which distract the users from systematically and critically processing the content. This makes it difficult for consumers, especially young consumers with limited advertising literacy, to evaluate the persuasion attempt critically. Not only do children have a limited general knowledge of advertising (i.e dispositional advertising literacy), they also have difficulty to actually apply this knowledge when confronted with advertising (i.e. situational advertising literacy). To be able to activate their advertising literacy when confronted with (new forms of) advertising, children need certain coping skills, as well as a number of cognitive, emotion regulation and moral capacities. As studies focusing on strategies to improve the situational advertising literacy of children remain scarce, the current presentation will focus on the interrelationships between dispositional and situational advertising literacy to investigate how children can be assisted in their recognition and critical processing of (new) advertising formats. We hereby refer to Friestad and Wright’s (1994) ‘if-then’ procedure (i.e. “if people are made aware of a persuasion attempt, they then have to figure out how to effectively manage their response to this attempt”) in order to reflect on how we can help children to 1) realize that they are confronted with advertising in order to 2) be able to process it in a critical manner. However, for children, this second step may not follow automatically from the first step when confronted with new advertising formats. Research shows that recognition of advertising does not automatically lead to a critical evaluation. Therefore, we reflect on how these two steps can be linked successfully and automatically. A suggestion proposed by this paper is the use of automatic and implicit tactics such as persuasive intent priming and implementation intentions to improve children’s associative network and learn them to cope with advertising. Besides reflecting on specific strategies that can be used to improve children’s dispositional and situational advertising literacy, this presentation will also reflect on children’s processing of advertising formats and the challenges for their advertising literacy in the contemporary advertising environment.

Publication year:2015

Accessibility:Open