Because of their avid use of new media and their increased spending power, children and teens have become primary targets of a new “media and marketing ecosystem.” The digital marketplace is undergoing rapid innovation as new technologies and software applications continue to reshape the media landscape and user behaviors. The advertising industry, in many instances led by food and beverage marketers, is purposefully exploiting the special relationship that youth have with new media, as online marketing campaigns create unprecedented intimacies between adolescents and the brands and products that now literally surround them.
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Today’s children and teens are growing up in a ubiquitous digital media environment, in which mobile devices, instant messaging, social networks, virtual reality, avatars, interactive games, and online video have become ingrained in their personal and social experiences.
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A large infrastructure of market research firms, advertising agencies, trend analysis companies, and digital strategists is continually monitoring how children and teens engage with new media.
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The exploding popularity of social media and the emergence of marketing strategies designed for those popular networks have made young people particularly vulnerable to interactive advertising.
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The rise of smartphones and elaborate mobile marketing campaigns has proved especially effective in reaching young people, as have interactive games and other immersive media.
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In the hands of fast-food, snack-food, and soft drink companies that target children and adolescents, the new marketing landscape raises particularly critical issues in light of the current obesity crisis.
In 2009, McDonald’s collaborated with the blockbuster movie Avatar on an elaborate multiplatform cross-promotion campaign designed to “drive mass awareness and traffic” to its fast-food restaurants around the world. The campaign incorporated a variety of touchpoints—including television, restaurant displays, packaging, toys, and social media—designed to reach and engage young people throughout the contemporary media landscape. At the heart of the campaign, according to McDonald’s, was “an immersive digital experience centered around Pandora, the mythical planet of Avatar, ” whose purpose was to “immerse you in an extraordinary, technology-driven journey that’s sure to ‘Thrill the Senses’.” Avatar “Thrill Cards” on Big Mac packages could be placed in front of a Webcam or cell phone camera to activate McDonald’s-branded McD Vision software, enabling users to enter the virtual Pandora-themed online worlds and play an interactive Pandora Quest game. Codes placed in Happy Meal toys gave children access to special features on the Web site, an effort designed to further integrate their offline and online experiences for marketing purposes. The goal of the campaign was to drive “deeper engagement with the brand,” ultimately leading to “repeat purchases of iconic products, such as the Big Mac.”
In many ways, the Avatar campaign represents an extension of McDonald’s long-established pattern of marketing through movie cross-promotions and toy tie-ins, a practice that has raised concerns from public health experts and advocacy groups. As these campaigns have moved further into the digital realm, however, they have morphed into something distinctly different. The forms of advertising and marketing to children through new media depart in significant ways from the more familiar commercial advertising and promotion in children’s television. Today’s contemporary marketing efforts are increasingly multidimensional—simultaneously and purposefully integrated into a range of social media and online applications: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, gaming, and mobile communications.
The interactive media are ushering in an entirely new set of relationships, breaking down the traditional barriers between content and commerce and creating unprecedented intimacies between children and marketers. Unlike television, where children’s exposure to commercials is limited to brief intervals during the times when they are viewing the programs, digital marketing is now woven into the fabric of young people’s daily experiences, integrated not only into their media content but also into their social and personal relationships. Young people are not just viewing content but also inhabiting media environments where entertainment, communication, and marketing are combined in a seamless stream of compelling sounds and images.
These trends have significant implications for young peoples’ health and well-being. Parents, health professionals, and policy makers need to understand the changing nature of marketing in the digital era, how it differs from traditional forms of advertising directed at children, and how it is influencing young people’s behaviors. Marketers are developing and implementing a new generation of marketing techniques, many of which operate below the level of parental or public awareness and push the boundaries of appropriateness. For those seeking to raise awareness or educate the public, tools that simplify media creation, such as creating a video by using Adobe Express, can be powerful assets to communicate complex topics through engaging visual narratives.
This article provides a brief overview of the growing digital media and marketing landscape, focusing on 4 important developments that are shaping marketing strategies and techniques. It highlights techniques that are used by fast-food, snack-food, and soft drink companies to target children and adolescents, which raise particularly critical issues in light of the current obesity crisis. The trends and practices discussed, however, are emblematic of a paradigm shift in contemporary global advertising and are used by a wide variety companies, promoting not only food and beverages but also toys, clothing, entertainment, and brands popular with young people. Several important issues raised by these developments that require further study are identified and current policy developments aimed at addressing some of the emerging digital marketing practices are highlighted.
The expanding media and marketing landscape
Today’s children and teens are growing up in a ubiquitous digital media environment, in which mobile devices, instant messaging, social networks, virtual reality, avatars, interactive games, and online video have become ingrained in their personal and social experiences. Members of this generation of young people are, in many ways, living their lives online. Several factors—the growth of the Internet, the proliferation of digital media platforms and content, and, in particular, the rapid penetration of mobile phones—have triggered a jump in media time for children and teens.
According to a 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, young people now spend more than 7.5 hours daily consuming media. When multitasking behaviors are included, this means that today’s youth “pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those daily 7.5 hours national average—an increase of almost 2¼ hours of media exposure per day over the past five years.” The increase in media consumption has been the most significant among African American and Hispanic youth, who have approximately 5 more hours of media exposure per day than the aforementioned national average for youth. These differences remain even after statistical controls are included for other demographic factors, such as age, parent education, or whether a child is from a single-parent or two-parent family.
Marketers seek not simply to expose young people to ads but to foster ongoing engagement—by encouraging them to interact with, befriend, and integrate brands into their personal identities and social worlds. In some cases, this includes offering incentives to encourage youth to participate in developing new products, designing packages, and creating online advertising that they then distribute among their friends.
The digital marketplace is undergoing rapid innovation as new technologies and software applications continue to reshape the media landscape and user behaviors. Four major developments are particularly critical in the growing arsenal of tools used by companies targeting children and teens: (1) the growth of interactive games and increasing sophistication of augmented reality and other immersive features of digital media, (2) the rapid explosion of social media and the emergence of marketing strategies designed for those popular platforms, (3) the further development and proliferation of data collection and profiling techniques, and (4) the rise of smartphones and mobile marketing. In each of these areas, companies are harnessing a new generation of marketing techniques to reach and influence young people.
Using Web analytics, conversation targeting, and other new forms of digital surveillance, marketers can now track individuals—including youth—online, across media, and in the real world, monitoring their interactions, social relationships, and locations. Increasingly, these various forms of analysis can take place in real time, following users’ movements and behaviors from moment to moment and in the process assessing their reactions to marketing techniques. As a result, marketing messages can be tested, refined, and tailored for maximum effect.
A large infrastructure of market research firms, advertising agencies, trend analysis companies, and digital strategists is continually monitoring how children and teens engage with new media. Market researchers use the expertise of an increasingly diverse array of specialists in sociology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience to explore youth subcultures and conduct motivational research. A considerable amount of contemporary market research is focused on identifying ways to tap into the critical developmental stages of childhood and adolescence. Researchers are tracking how young people are integrating digital technologies into their lives and identifying social and psychographic subcategories based on sophisticated new data gathering and data analysis techniques.
Marketers are not just tapping into these new patterns but also actively cultivating and promoting them to foster ongoing relationships and ubiquitous connectivity with brands. Digital campaigns can be highly complex, combining mobile, online video, interactive television, and social networks and creating a powerful multiplier effect by spreading messages extensively throughout and among social groups. Major media companies are now offering cross-platform marketing opportunities, where, in a single buy, advertisers can target customers across a company’s media properties, online and offline. Increasing consolidation within the entertainment media, advertising, and technology fields further enhances the ability of companies to deploy a variety of advertising and brand promotion strategies across a wide spectrum of media properties so that connections to brands are uninterrupted.
Children and teenagers continue to be a lucrative market for advertisers, with advertising time on TV and new media platforms generating record sales. Young people between the ages of 8 and 15 control over $40 billion in spending annually. Children are also using new media technologies at an earlier age and spending increasing amounts of time engaged in an expanding array of new platforms, including virtual worlds, interactive games, and mobile apps. As Adweek reported, “80% of kids under the age of 5 use the Internet weekly, and 60% of kids 3 and younger are now watching videos online.” Approximately 10% of 6 to 8 years olds, 23% of 9 to 10 year olds, and 41% of children ages 11 to 12 are social network users, according to eMarketer. Today, by age 11, “half of kids have cell phones,” according to research released this year by LMX Family/Ipsos OTX. That same report, explained Advertising Age, noted that “pre-schoolers [are] adopting digital habits or being exposed to new devices even faster than tweens, a sign of the speed with which digital technology is reshaping media and marketing habits for the youngest children.” As discussed later, teens are among the most active users of cell phones for a variety of applications, including text messaging and video.
Social media marketing
Online social networks are among the most popular digital media platforms for young people, with more than three-fourths of US online youth ages 12 to 17 participating in them. Social media resonate strongly with many of the fundamental developmental tasks of childhood and adolescence, such as identity exploration, social interaction, and autonomy. They provide an accessible, user-friendly template for creating and expressing a public and private persona in cyberspace. Many teens rely on social networks to seek help for their personal problems, explore their own sexual identities, find support groups for handling emotional crises in their lives, and sometimes talk about things they do not feel comfortable or safe discussing with their own parents.
Social media platforms provide digital marketers with a palette of new interactive techniques. They give marketers access to the relationships among individuals and communities in ways never before possible. Marketers routinely monitor and tap into what is known as the social graph , the complex web of relationships among individuals facilitated and tracked online. Using a host of new techniques and measurement tools, social media marketers can know the breadth and depth of these online social relationships as well as how they function, understanding who influences whom, and how the process of influence works. Social media marketers can now—on an almost second-by-second basis—track and analyze the online behaviors and expressions of consumers, including individuals or sources of greatest peer influence.
By its nature, social media marketing is designed to facilitate, accelerate, and in many ways automate the process of brand or product endorsement among young people whose lives and social interactions are linked and monitored online. Viral marketing is a core principle of social media advertising. By tapping into the online social graph, marketers can orchestrate elaborate, instantaneous viral marketing campaigns, identifying individuals who are most likely to create their own user-generated marketing messages among their wide circle of social relationships and providing incentives to encourage brand promotion. Social media marketers use a variety of incentives, such as contests, prizes, and free products, to encourage individuals to create and promote ads that are distributed among friends and acquaintances online. The practice is expanding to an array of new platforms—including blogs, mobile phones, and online video and games. For example, PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew DEWmocracy campaign used Facebook and other social networking platforms to create a multilayered effort combining a variety of digital techniques. Users and fans of the brand were invited to participate in a crowd-sourcing project to come up with names for new versions of the popular soft drink and vote on the best ones.
Marketers have developed strategies to take advantage of the special relationship between young people and social networks. An entire infrastructure has emerged—from specialty advertising agencies to tracking and measurement services to third-party developers—to facilitate social media marketing. Spending for such marketing was predicted to reach $10.3 billion in 2011, up 41.4% from $7.3 billion in 2010. By 2015, social media spending is expected to reach $29.1 billion.
Social media marketing
Online social networks are among the most popular digital media platforms for young people, with more than three-fourths of US online youth ages 12 to 17 participating in them. Social media resonate strongly with many of the fundamental developmental tasks of childhood and adolescence, such as identity exploration, social interaction, and autonomy. They provide an accessible, user-friendly template for creating and expressing a public and private persona in cyberspace. Many teens rely on social networks to seek help for their personal problems, explore their own sexual identities, find support groups for handling emotional crises in their lives, and sometimes talk about things they do not feel comfortable or safe discussing with their own parents.
Social media platforms provide digital marketers with a palette of new interactive techniques. They give marketers access to the relationships among individuals and communities in ways never before possible. Marketers routinely monitor and tap into what is known as the social graph , the complex web of relationships among individuals facilitated and tracked online. Using a host of new techniques and measurement tools, social media marketers can know the breadth and depth of these online social relationships as well as how they function, understanding who influences whom, and how the process of influence works. Social media marketers can now—on an almost second-by-second basis—track and analyze the online behaviors and expressions of consumers, including individuals or sources of greatest peer influence.
By its nature, social media marketing is designed to facilitate, accelerate, and in many ways automate the process of brand or product endorsement among young people whose lives and social interactions are linked and monitored online. Viral marketing is a core principle of social media advertising. By tapping into the online social graph, marketers can orchestrate elaborate, instantaneous viral marketing campaigns, identifying individuals who are most likely to create their own user-generated marketing messages among their wide circle of social relationships and providing incentives to encourage brand promotion. Social media marketers use a variety of incentives, such as contests, prizes, and free products, to encourage individuals to create and promote ads that are distributed among friends and acquaintances online. The practice is expanding to an array of new platforms—including blogs, mobile phones, and online video and games. For example, PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew DEWmocracy campaign used Facebook and other social networking platforms to create a multilayered effort combining a variety of digital techniques. Users and fans of the brand were invited to participate in a crowd-sourcing project to come up with names for new versions of the popular soft drink and vote on the best ones.
Marketers have developed strategies to take advantage of the special relationship between young people and social networks. An entire infrastructure has emerged—from specialty advertising agencies to tracking and measurement services to third-party developers—to facilitate social media marketing. Spending for such marketing was predicted to reach $10.3 billion in 2011, up 41.4% from $7.3 billion in 2010. By 2015, social media spending is expected to reach $29.1 billion.
Data collection and behavioral targeting
Data collection is at the core of contemporary digital marketing; individual consumers are tagged with unique identifiers when they engage with online services, and then tracked, profiled, and interactively targeted for personalized marketing and advertising as they navigate the Web. Advertisers and marketers have developed an array of sophisticated and ever-evolving data collection and profiling applications, honed from the latest developments in such fields as semantics, artificial intelligence, auction theory, social network analysis, data mining, and statistical modeling. Powerful analytical software mines data from Internet, Web, and social media applications, identifying patterns of user behavior to help craft and refine marketing strategies.
Growing investments in online marketing and data collection companies are expanding the field’s capacity to deliver advertising based on harvesting individual users’ online data. Vast amounts of user data are now regularly mined and stored in behavioral targeting warehouses and other databases—and used in an instant to update online targeting profiles. Individual consumers are being bought and sold via online advertising exchanges and other services so they can be targeted with interactive advertising.
Youth can be lured to any site for advertising targeting using video, music, or other applications. Data are collected online from youth through a variety of techniques. For example, contests, sweepstakes, “free” offers, and “point” schemes can deliver detailed information on particular users (name, address, e-mail address, cell phone number, and so forth). Immersive interactive applications, such as games, online video, and so-called rich media, are often designed to engage in data capture—including personal details as well as user-response metrics.
Passive data collection, through the use of cookies, IP addresses, and other data that the industry considers nonpersonally identifiable, enables marketers to effectively track and target individual users. Increasingly, data collection and targeting are not restricted to individual Web sites but are able to follow individuals across the Web and on mobile phones. In many cases, behavioral and other information that have become part of a person’s profile can be sold to third parties, without an individual’s knowledge or consent.
In 2009, the Wall Street Journal conducted an investigation of 50 Web sites popular with US children and teens, discovering that more than 4000 cookies, beacons, and other pieces of tracking technology were placed on the computers of those who visited the sites. “Marketers are spying more on young Internet users than on their parents, building detailed profiles of their activities and interests,” the Journal found. Eight of the Web sites in the survey were owned by Viacom’s Nickelodeon, and an average of 81 tracking tools were installed on the computers that accessed those sites. Another study found that approximately half of the leading children’s online sites engaged in forms of behavioral profiling, and most sites tracked a child’s actions on Web sites.
Mobile marketing
Mobile and location marketing are quickly reshaping the entire advertising landscape. Mobile devices are nearly ubiquitous; smartphones enable access to a rich array of Internet applications, including those taking advantage of global positioning systems; local advertisers have new, inexpensive tools to deliver advertisements on mobile phones and in stores; and social networks are expanding their enterprises into the mobile arena through ventures, such as FourSquare, Gowalla, and Facebook’s own location-based services. Mobile video provides marketers with the ability to target advertising formatted for devices and users with increasing precision and offers a variety of formats to promote brands, collect data, and drive viral messaging.
Smartphones that provide for ready Internet access and deliver multimedia services account for 40% of mobile phone subscriptions in the United States and were predicted to become the dominant type of cell phone by the end of 2011. Many lower-income consumers use their mobile phones instead of traditional landlines, and many of these phones have some form of Internet access. Mobile phone use has risen dramatically among children and teens. As a 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study noted, “Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in [cell phone] ownership among 8- to 18-year-olds: from 39% to 66%…. During this period, cell phones… have become true multi-media devices: in fact, young people now spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their cell phones (a total of :49 daily) than they spend talking on them (:33).”
Children ages 6 to 12 use their cell phones to surf the Internet, download applications, update their social networks, and send and receive text messages. Nielsen reported, “Children begin downloading apps on a parents’ phone at an average age of 9 years old,” and parents explained, “30% of the apps on their phones were installed by their kids.” Children of color are particularly avid users of mobile and other new technologies. As a recent study explained, when African American and Hispanic children own mobile phones, they “spend more time talking, texting and using media on cell phones than white children.” Lower-income black and Hispanic children, the study notes, “consume more digital media overall than their higher-income white peers.”
Teens remain quintessential early adopters in their use of mobile phones, avidly embracing a variety of Web applications and communication tools. Nielsen reports that teens ages 13 to 17 watch more video via their phones than any other group (approximately 7 hours and 13 minutes per month each, on average, compared with the next highest group—18–24 year olds—who averaged 4 hours and 20 minutes per month during the second quarter of 2010). Text messaging has grown dramatically among teens, who “on average [are] sending or receiving 3339 texts a month,” according to the Nielsen Company. “No one texts more than teens (ages 13–17),” adds Nielsen, with female and male teens averaging 753 minutes and 535 minutes a month, respectively.
Mobile marketing techniques have been designed to harness the rich interactivity available on a small screen, incorporating a range of different direct-response actions and taking advantage of impulsivity, social connectivity, communications, and location. This approach also reflects and supports emerging styles of consumption behaviors, such as collaborative consumption. For example, applications have been created that enable a mobile user to connect seamlessly to a brand message through several special brand units that allow engaging in click to call, click to video, click to SMS, and so forth. These new interactive, call-to-action formats foster instantaneous results, such as the delivery of mobile coupons through text messaging, scanning barcodes, or clicking on banner advertisements. Mobile landing pages—Web sites designed specifically for mobile Internet use—can be designed (via testing) to facilitate the desired brand responses. An array of methods to measure how users interact with mobile campaigns is used to assess their effectiveness.
Mobile apps have enjoyed spectacular popularity in recent years, with more than 300,000 new apps appearing between 2008 and 2010 and more than 10.9 billion downloads worldwide in 2010 alone. According to one industry estimate, global app downloads will reach 76.9 billion in 2014, with revenues approaching $35 billion. Many of these applications will be either advertising supported or advertising related. For example, the location-based game MyTown, which gives points for checking in at stores, reported that quick-service restaurant chains (including Subway, McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza, and Wendy’s) made up 8 of the top 10 places favored by its users.
With the phenomenal growth of mobile technologies and their rapid integration into young peoples’ lives, mobile marketing has grown exponentially during a short period of time. The ubiquity of mobile phones gives marketers unprecedented ability to follow young people throughout their daily lives, delivering highly enticing marketing offers that are designed to trigger impulsive behaviors and linking point-of-influence techniques to point-of-purchase opportunities, thus short-circuiting the possibility of reflection or deliberation.
These powerful and intense forms of digital marketing are also completely integrated into teen social relationships and daily, minute-by-minute communications, adding the element of peer influence to what is already a powerful combination of multiple marketing appeals. Mobile marketing has also brought a convergence of other problematic techniques: offering a steady stream of immersive environments through video and interactive games; extending Facebook and other social networks onto a new, ever-present platform; and merging sophisticated data collection and behavioral profiling techniques with location tracking and path-to-purchase metrics.
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