This item is the archived peer-reviewed author-version of:
Shedding new light on how advertising literacy can affect children's processing of embedded advertising
formats : a future research agenda
Reference:
Hudders Liselot, De Pauw Pieter, Cauberghe Verolien, Panic Katarina, Zarouali Brahim, Rozendaal Esther.- Shedding new light on how advertising literacy can
affect children's processing of embedded advertising formats : a future research agenda
The journal of advertising - ISSN 1557-7805 - (2017), p. 333-349
Full text (Publisher's DOI): https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2016.1269303
To cite this reference: http://hdl.handle.net/10067/1395890151162165141
Institutional repository IRUA
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Shedding a New Light on How Advertising Literacy can Affect Children’s Processing of
Embedded Advertising Formats: A Future Research Agenda
Abstract
Advertisers are continuously searching for new ways to persuade children, thereby fully integrating
commercial content into media content, actively engaging children with the commercial content, and
enlarging the amount of commercial messages a child is confronted with at one moment in time. This
poses a challenge for how children cope with embedded advertising. This conceptual paper aims to
develop a theoretically grounded framework for investigating how children process embedded
advertising. More precisely, it sheds a light on previous research and conceptualizations of advertising
literacy and provides suggestions for future research. In particular, attention is devoted to conceptual
and methodological issues, as well as to the need for research on how to improve children’s coping
with embedded advertising, by emphasizing the value of persuasive intent priming and
implementation intentions. To conclude, future research directions are discussed regarding strategies
to strengthen children’s dispositional (i.e. associative network consisting of cognitive, moral and
affective beliefs related to advertising) and situational (i.e. actual recognition of and critical reflection
on advertising) advertising literacy, and their coping skills.
Keywords: Advertising literacy, children, embedded advertising formats, dispositional
advertising literacy, situational advertising literacy, implementation intentions, persuasive
intent priming
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Big companies such as Viacom, Hasbro, Mattel and Jumpstart have recently been fined
$835.000 for the illegal tracking of children’s websites (Brandom, 2016). A recent analysis of 72
websites targeting children revealed that no less than 179 data brokers track children’s behaviors
(Martijn & Tokmetzis, 2016), from which the resulting data are used by advertisers to target children
more effectively. This illustrates that advertisers are constantly searching for clever ways to persuade
children to buy their products or convince their parents to purchase them. Next to traditional television
commercials, advertisers currently focus heavily on the use of embedded advertising formats, both
offline and online. These formats (such as advergames or brand integrations in for instance music
videos or television shows) are characterized by a more subtle, less intrusive commercial nature.
Commercial messages are integrated in or merged with the media content, and interactively engage
their users with this commercial content. This has not only led to more entertaining and fun but also
more cognitively demanding advertising practices (e.g. simultaneous exposure to multiple
advertisements, or to both media and ad content) which distract the users from systematically and
critically processing the commercial content (Lee and Faber 2007; Panic et al. 2013).
Systematic and elaborate processing of commercial content will only occur when both
motivation and ability to process this content are high (Petty and Cacioppo 1986). In that case,
individuals will use previously stored knowledge to evaluate the message and formulate pro- and
counterarguments related to this message. An individual’s knowledge of and skills related to
persuasion (i.e. advertising literacy, in the context of advertising) comes into play here. Advertising
literacy refers to all advertising-related knowledge and skills children have (i.e., dispositional
advertising literacy) and their ability to recognize and critically reflect on advertising (i.e., situational
advertising literacy). More specifically, advertising literacy is assumed to function as a ‘filter’ or
‘radar’, enabling consumers to evaluate the persuasion attempt critically (Friestad and Wright 1994).
However, compared to adults, children’s advertising literacy is believed to be precariously
underdeveloped, and especially in the case of the current embedded advertising context (An, Jin and
Park 2014; Hudders, Cauberghe and Panic 2015; Verhellen et al. 2014). Children do not only have
limited knowledge about these embedded formats, but, equally important, the characteristics of these
formats also lower their ability and motivation to recognize the commercial content and critically
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reflect on it (Nairn and Fine 2008). First, their ability is lowered because commercial messages are
now integrated in an environment with huge amounts of information (i.e., children are simultaneously
exposed to media content and commercial message(s)). This information overload leads to a high
cognitive load (which is defined as the total amount of mental resources required to perform a certain
task (Paas and Van Merriënboer 1994)), and this requires a high level of self-regulation for children to
focus attention and distinguish relevant from irrelevant content. As the latter induces depletion of self-
regulatory resources, this implies that children will have more difficulties to critically reflect on
commercial content. Second, their motivation is lowered due to the fun nature of the new advertising
formats (as the commercial message is integrated in fun and exciting games, for instance).
This paper aims to develop a theoretically grounded framework for investigating how children
process embedded advertising, to provide guidance for future research. In particular, the paper
explains the crucial role of dispositional and situational advertising literacy in assisting children to
cope with advertising, and identifies strategies (using heuristic and automatic processes) that can
improve both literacies in an embedded advertising context. These strategies involve the learning of
skills needed to trigger specific heuristics which may in turn activate the relevant parts of the
associative network (dispositional advertising literacy), in order to successfully (and ideally
automatically) apply and use relevant knowledge when actually confronted with advertising
(situational advertising literacy). The paper provides a number of avenues for future research
following from the proposed conceptual model, and stresses the need to investigate further how
automatic mechanisms can be applied to improve children’s critical processing of embedded
advertising formats. In conclusion, the paper reflects on how these mechanisms can be implemented in
existing strategies that are currently used to improve children’s advertising literacy, namely
advertising disclosures, advertising literacy training sessions, and parental mediation strategies.
The focus of the paper lays on children under sixteen as this is the age that should match an
adult-like processing of advertising (John 1999). However, as sixteen-year-old children can be (and
are) different from e.g. six-year-olds when processing advertising, we emphasize possible age
differences throughout the manuscript and explain the antecedents and consequences of this age effect
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thoroughly. In particular, the paper deciphers the construct of advertising literacy in light of children’s
limited cognitive, emotional and moral abilities on top of the specifics of embedded advertising
formats that make it even more difficult to grasp advertising.
UNDERSTANDING HOW ADVERTISING LITERACY CAN AFFECT CHILDREN’S
PROCESSING OF EMBEDDED ADVERTISING - A CONCEPTUAL MODEL
Children’s Processing of Advertising
Buijzen, Van Reijmersdal and Owen (2010) developed a framework which explains children’s
processing of commercial content (PCMC model). In this model, a distinction is made between three
types of processing, i.e. systematic (high elaboration), heuristic (moderate elaboration) and automatic
(low elaboration) processing. According to the PCMC, the level of elaboration will depend on the fit
between required and allocated resources to process a persuasive message. High elaboration (and thus
systematic processing) will only occur when both allocated and required resources to process a
persuasive message are high. In the other cases, heuristic or automatic processing will occur. Heuristic
processing implies that people are influenced by simple decision rules (e.g. a high price implies a high
quality (Gigerenzer 2008)).
When automatic processing occurs, individuals are not elaborating the message elements, but
are seduced by peripheral cues. In this case, persuasion occurs in an implicit and automatic way,
through affect-based learning mechanisms, such as evaluative conditioning, mere exposure, and
preconscious emotional associations induced by the fun and entertaining media context (Chartrand
2005; De Houwer, Thomas and Baeyens 2001; Dijksterhuis et al. 2005; Evans and Park 2015). In fact,
the limited capacity model of message processing (Lang 2000) suggests that individuals only have
limited resources to process a message and that these resources need to be subdivided into three
underlying processes of information processing, namely message encoding, storage and retrieval.
Accordingly, the instances in which a child will process the media content in a systematic way will be