Media

Unintended Consequences

The most notable finding in our study was that children click website advertisements. Unfortunately, they often do so by mistake, thinking ads are just one more site element. In nine years of testing adults, we can count on the fingers of two hands the total number of times they’ve clicked website advertising. But kids click banners. They cannot yet distinguish between content and advertising. On the contrary, to kids, ads are just one more content source. If a banner contains a popular character or something that looks like a cool game, they'll click it. Pokémon, here we come. (Kids clicked on Pokémon characters even though they were simply featured in banner ads for other products, rather than as links to a Pokémon site.)

Advertising on the Internet, aside from being done poorly, is assumed to be more direct, so that the person viewing the advertisement is more likely to have an interest in the subject of that advertisement, and so is more likely to buy the product advertised. If ad clicks are accidents, and the clickers are children, and the products are for adults, then there is something seriously wrong here. Just whose eyeballs are being aggregated?

c.f. http://www.cme.org/children/marketing/index_mktg.html http://www.mediaandthefamily.org/research/fact/internetads.shtml http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ruleroad.htm http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/dotcom/index.html http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/policystmt/ad-decept.htm

6:35:14 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry, Law, Media