Young Children's Ability To Recognize Advertisements in Web Page Designs

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71
The
British
Psychological
British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2009), 27, 71–83
q 2009 The British Psychological Society
Society
www.bpsjournals.co.uk
Young children’s ability to recognize

advertisements in web page designs
Moondore Ali1, Mark Blades1*, Caroline Oates1

and Fran Blumberg2
1
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
2
Fordham University, New York, New York, USA
Identifying what is, and what is not an advertisement is the first step in realizing that an
advertisement is a marketing message. Children can distinguish television advertise-
ments from programmes by about 5 years of age. Although previous researchers have
investigated television advertising, little attention has been given to advertisements in
other media, even though other media, especially the Internet, have become important
channels of marketing to children. We showed children printed copies of invented web
pages that included advertisements, half of which had price information, and asked the
children to point to whatever they thought was an advertisement. In two experiments
we tested a total of 401 children, aged 6, 8, 10 and 12 years of age, from the United
Kingdom and Indonesia. Six-year-olds recognized a quarter of the advertisements,
8-year-olds recognized half the advertisements, and the 10- and 12-year-olds
recognized about three-quarters. Only the 10- and 12-year-olds were more likely to
identify an advertisement when it included a price. We contrast our findings with
previous results about the identification of television advertising, and discuss why
children were poorer at recognizing web page advertisements. The performance of
the children has implications for theories about how children develop an understanding
of advertising.
Children in most countries are exposed to many thousands of advertisements every year,
including advertisements directed specifically at them, and advertisements aimed at
adults (Gunter, Oates, & Blades, 2005). The frequency of advertising in most societies
has raised many issues about its effects on children. These include concerns that
advertising encourages materialistic attitudes that may be in conflict with traditional
social values (Chan & McNeal, 2004) or may lead to parent-child conflict (Buijzen &
Valkenburg, 2003). Other concerns relate to the content of advertising, for example, the
negative effects that advertising unhealthy food products can have on children’s diet and
well-being (Dixon, Scully, Wakefield, White, & Crawford, 2007; Halford et al., 2008;
* Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Mark Blades, Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10
2TN, UK (e-mail: m.blades@sheffield.ac.uk).
DOI:10.1348/026151008X388378
72 Moondore Ali et al.
Hastings et al., 2003), or the influence that adult advertisements may have on children
by creating positive attitudes towards products like alcohol (Nash, Pine, & Messer,
2009). However, almost all the research related to the concerns about advertising has
focused on television advertising (Gunter et al., 2005) and there has been little research
into the effects of advertising in other media on children.
Another issue, which has also been researched almost entirely with reference to
television advertising, is when children develop a full awareness about the persuasive
nature of advertising (Kunkel et al., 2004). Children develop a progressively more
sophisticated awareness of the purpose of television advertising over a number of years.
Very young children have little understanding of the purpose of advertisements and
when asked the reason for advertisements young children will either say they do not
know, or that advertisements are to provide a convenient break between programmes
(Oates, Blades, & Gunter, 2002). From about the age of 5 or 6 years children appreciate
that television advertisements are a source of information (for example, children realize
that a television advertisement can tell them what toys are currently available in a shop).
However, 5- and 6-year-olds do not appreciate the persuasive nature of advertising, and
are likely to accept an advertising message as an unbiased source of information (Gunter
et al., 2005). After about 7 or 8 years of age children do start to appreciate the persuasive
intent of advertising, and realize that the purpose of television advertising is to persuade
people to buy products or spend money (Kunkel et al., 2004).
Before children can understand the purpose of advertising they must be able to
identify what is and what is not an advertisement. Distinguishing ‘spot’ advertisements
on television (the short commercials that occur within or between programmes) from
programmes is an early achievement. Levin, Petros, and Petrella (1982) showed 3-, 4-
and 5-year-olds a video that included, in random order, 10 second extracts from
television advertisements (for children or adults) and from programmes. Children
watched the video and were asked to say whether each extract was a ‘commercial’ or a
‘programme’. The 3- and 4-year-olds identified three-quarters, and the 5-year-olds
identified nearly all, of the advertisements for children. The children’s ability to
recognise the advertisements for adults was only slightly poorer than their ability to
recognise the advertisements for children. In other words, 5-year-olds were competent
at identifying television advertisements. This finding has been replicated in other studies
(Butter, Popovich, Stackhouse, & Garner, 1981; Gaines & Esserman, 1981; Stephens &
Stutts, 1982; Stutts, Vance, & Hudleson, 1981).
If children can successfully distinguish television advertisements by the age of
5 years this is some time before they appreciate the persuasive nature of
advertisements at about 7 or 8 years of age (Blosser & Roberts, 1985; Butter et al.,
1981; Kunkel et al., 2004). As young children have little awareness of the purpose of
advertising, their success in distinguishing advertisements probably depends on
recognising features that are typically associated with television advertisements as a
particular genre among other viewing experiences, rather than on recognizing them
as marketing messages.
Levin et al. (1982) suggested cues like jingles, voiceovers, or the pace of an
advertisement could have helped children distinguish extracts from programmes and
advertisements in their experiment. Such cues are internal to the advertisement; other
internal cues include information about prices, or qualifying text statements – the ‘small
print’ (Muehling & Kolbe, 1999). In the course of typical television viewing additional,
contextual, cues may also help children identify advertisements. Contextual cues
include the contrast between the content of an advertisement and the surrounding
Recognizing web page advertisements 73
programme (Kunkel, 1988; Wilson & Weiss, 1992), the presence of separators between
programmes and advertisements (Dorr, 1986), the short length of advertisements
(Palmer & McDowell, 1979) and the fact that television advertisements are usually
grouped together.
All the research into the recognition of advertisements has been about television
advertising, because until recently television was the most frequently used way of
marketing to children (Gunter et al., 2005). But other media, particularly the Internet,
have become important alternative ways of reaching a child audience (Fielder,
Gardner, Nairn, & Pitt, 2008; Henke, 1999; Nairn & Dew, 2007; Neeley, 2007). This is
especially so in countries, like the UK, that have restricted television advertising
aimed at children. As yet there has been little research into children’s awareness of
non-television advertising. We therefore carried out two studies to determine
whether 6- to 12-year-olds could identify advertisements on web pages. Children
were shown printouts of several invented web pages that were based on the design
and content of actual web pages aimed at children. Some of our web pages included
advertisements, and the children were asked to point to whatever they thought
was an advertisement.
As discussed above, we know that children can correctly identify television
advertisements by 5 years of age, and if the ability to distinguish advertisements is
independent of a particular medium we expected even the youngest children in our
study might be able to recognize the Internet advertisements. However, as we have
pointed out, children probably distinguish television advertisements on the basis of
various internal and contextual cues. Such cues are less common on web pages, and
therefore young children may have greater difficulty distinguishing an advertisement on
a web page than in other media.
One cue that can be used to identify an advertisement is price information.
Approximately half the advertisements we showed children included a price and half
did not, and we expected that, overall, advertisements with prices might be easier to
identify than ones without prices. Although most children in the UK receive pocket
money from about 6 years of age (Furnham, 1999, 2001) and have some experience of
making purchases from this age, young children’s concept of money and the
relationship between prices and products is limited (Bonn & Webley, 2000; Damay,
2008; Gunter & Furnham, 1998). It is not until about the age of 7 or 8 years that children
begin to appreciate that a particular product has a specific price, but even at this age
some children cannot offer a reason for the price of a product (Berti & Bombi, 1981;
Leiser, Sevón, & Lévy, 1990). Therefore, if price provided a cue for identifying an
advertisement we expected it would be a more effective cue for older children, who
have a better appreciation of the concept of price.
The prices that we included on the web pages were ones such as: £9.99 or
£16.99. These prices were typical of the ones we found on web pages aimed at
children at the time of this experiment. We expected the children aged 8 years and
above to be able to read such numbers and be familiar with the currency signs (£).
However, not all 6-year-olds are competent at reading 3 or 4 digit numbers (Nunes
& Bryant, 1996) and although 6-year-olds in UK schools are often introduced to
currency signs through play activities that involve shopping and toy money, they are
not formally taught about currency signs until 7 years of age (Department for
Education & Employment, 1999). The 6-year-olds’ more limited ability to read prices
was a further reason why we expected this age group to benefit less from the
inclusion of a cue like price information.
EXPERIMENT 1
Method
Participants
There were 161 children in three groups: 57 6-year-olds (mean age 6 years 7 months, age
range 6.0 to 6.11), 53 8-year-olds (mean age 8 years 7 months, age range 8.0 to 8.11), and
51 10-year-olds (mean age 10 years 5 months, age range 10.0 to 10.11). The children
were from three schools in Sheffield, UK. All the children spoke English as their first
language. All the children had access to a computer at school, and 49% of the 6-year-olds,
89% of the 8-year-olds, and 96% of the 10-year-olds had used the Internet at school. Most
of the children had a computer at home (6-year-olds, 79%; 8-year-olds, 87%, and 10-year-
olds, 92%), and the majority of children said that they had used the Internet at home
(6-year-olds, 58%; 8-year-olds, 64%, and 10-year-olds, 96%).
Materials
Twenty-seven pages were prepared, using Adobe Photoshop. Each page was composed
of material and backgrounds taken from, or similar to, actual web pages, and each was
designed to look like a typical page that children might see on the Internet, including the
distinctive boundaries of the current Microsoft Explorer frame. Each page was divided
into nine areas. The layout varied on each page to avoid the pages looking artificial or
repetitive (see Figures 1 and 2). Each page included themes and pictures that were
expected to be attractive to children, for example, the web page in Figure 1 included
Figure 1. Example of web page with two advertisements (top right and bottom right).
Figure 2. Example of web page with one advertisement (middle right).
outdoor and camping scenes, and the page in Figure 2 included pictures of games and
dinosaurs. Other pages had themes like railways, planes, food, animals, insects, hobbies,
and magic tricks. All the pages were printed in colour on A4 sheets of paper
(21 cm £ 29.5 cm).
Nine of the 27 web pages included two advertisements (for example, in Figure 1
these were placed at the top right and the bottom right) and 9 of the pages included one
advertisement (for example, at the middle right in Figure 2). The positions of the
advertisements were counterbalanced so that they occurred equally often in each of the
nine positions on the page. All the advertisements were approximately the same size,
and all were adapted from advertisements found on Internet pages aimed at children.
The advertisements included ones for foods, toys, games, clothes, books and DVDs.
Fourteen of the advertisements did not include a price for the items advertised. The
other 13 advertisements included information about price (e.g. ‘for only £16.99’ ‘our
price £9.99’). As far as possible the position of advertisements with and without prices
were counterbalanced across the pages. Nine of the web pages did not include any
advertisements at all. The pages without advertisements were included so that children
would not assume that there was always at least one advertisement on a page, because
we thought that such an assumption might lead to children guessing.
The 27 web pages were shown to 20 adults (undergraduate Psychology students,
aged 18–20 years). The pages were shown in random order and the adults were asked to
point to any advertisements that they saw. Eleven adults identified all 27 advertisements
correctly, 8 identified 26 advertisements, and 1 identified 25 advertisements correctly.
There was no pattern to the very few advertisements that were missed by the adults,
because no advertisement and no position on the page were missed more than once or
twice. The adults never incorrectly named a non-advertisement as an advertisement.
Given the good performance of the adults (98% correct overall) we concluded that all
the advertisements were all equally recognizable.
Procedure
Children were tested individually in a quiet room in their school. As a practice task
children were shown a printed copy of a web page that included one advertisement, and
they were asked if they could see an advertisement. If the child said yes he or she was
asked to point to the advertisement. Children then saw a second web page as practice.
None of the children had any difficulty understanding that the task was to point to a
specific place on the page. The two practice web pages were similar to, but not the same
as, the ones used in the experiment.
The children were then shown a stack of web pages and told, ‘There are 27 web
pages in this stack. Some pages have one advertisement on them, some pages have more
than one advertisement and some pages don’t have any advertisements. Now I’m going
to show you the web pages one by one. Please look at each page carefully’. For each
page the child was asked ‘Are there any advertisements on this page?’ If the child said
yes, they were asked to point to all the ones they thought they could see. The pages
were presented one at a time, in a different random order for each child.
Results
There were a total of 27 advertisements on the web pages. The mean number (and SD)
of advertisements that were correctly identified by each age group were: 6-year-olds,
7.65 (4.62); 8-year-olds, 15.23 (5.70), and 10-year-olds, 19.73 (5.12).
We carried out a 3 (age group: 6-, 8-, 10-year-olds) £ 2 (price: price present, price
absent) analysis of variance. There was a main effect for age, F(5,158) ¼ 7.29,
p , .01, and Bonferroni post hoc tests showed that there were differences
( p , .001) between all three age groups. There was no effect for price, but there was
a price £ age interaction, F(2,158) ¼ 7.29, p , .01. The means for each age group
were 6-year-olds, 26.6% with price and 30.8% without price (t(56) ¼ 2.14, p , .05);
8-year-olds, 54.4% with price and 58.2% without price (t(52) ¼ 1.51, p . .05); and
10-year-olds, 76.9% with price and 69.5% without price (t(50) ¼ 2.75, p , .01). The
interaction was therefore the result of the 6-year-olds identifying fewer advertise-
ments when they included a price, but the 10-year-olds identifying more
advertisements with a price.
If children incorrectly identified a non-advertisement as an advertisement we
labelled this a false positive identification. For example, if a child who was shown the
web page in Figure 1, incorrectly pointed to the central image and said that it was an
advertisement we scored this as a false positive error. Each of the web pages was divided
into 9 areas, and overall the 27 pages included 27 advertisements and 216 non-
advertisements. The mean number of false positives (out of a maximum possible of 216)
by each age group was: 6-year-olds, 22.07; 8-year-olds, 21.15; and 10 year-olds, 13.41.
There was a difference between the age groups, F(2,161) ¼ 5.4, p , .01, and Bonferroni
post hoc tests showed that the 6-year-olds ( p , .01) and the 8-year-olds ( p , .05) made
more false positives than the 10-year-olds. There was no difference between the 6- and
8-year-olds ( p . .05).
Discussion of Experiment 1
We note that adults were almost perfectly accurate in identifying all the advertisements
on the web pages that we used in Experiment 1, and that the adults never incorrectly
identified a non-advertisement as an advertisement (i.e. made a false positive judgment).
In contrast, the children performed poorly. The 6-year-olds identified only a quarter of
the advertisements, the 8-year-olds identified about half the advertisements, and the
10-year-olds identified three-quarters of them. All three age groups made false positive
identifications, and both the 6- and 8-year-old groups made more false positive responses
than correct identifications. The poor performance of the children, especially the
younger ones (6- and 8-year-olds) stands in contrast to children’s ability to identify
advertisements on television by 5 years of age (Butter et al., 1981; Levin et al., 1982).
The children’s difficulty in identifying web advertisements has implications for the
descriptions of how children develop an understanding of advertisements, and we will
consider these issues in the general discussion.
In Experiment 2 we repeated Experiment 1 with a sample of children (6-, 8- and
10-year-olds) in Indonesia. The primary purpose of Experiment 2 was to establish
whether the results from Experiment 1 generalised to a different sample. In Experiment
1 the oldest children (10-year-olds) were not at ceiling and therefore in Experiment 2 we
took the opportunity to include a further age group, of 12-year-old children.
If the results from Experiment 1 generalised we expected to find an age related
improvement in the ability of Indonesian children to recognize web page
advertisements. However, the proportion of children in Indonesia with experience of
the Internet was much lower than the proportion of UK children in Experiment 1 with
Internet experience. On the one hand if past experience of the Internet is an important
factor in recognizing advertisements we expected that the performance of each
Indonesian age group would be lower than the performance of equivalent UK age
groups in Experiment 1. On the other hand, some researchers have suggested that
children’s understanding of advertisements is more closely related to children’s age (i.e.
their cognitive development) than it is to their experience (Gunter et al., 2005). For
instance, children with learning difficulties demonstrate an awareness of television
advertising commensurate to their mental age (i.e. cognitive ability) irrespective of the
number of years (i.e. experience) they have had watching television advertising (Blades,
2007). If age is more important than experience for recognizing web advertisements we
expected the Indonesian children would perform at similar levels to the UK children in
Experiment 1.
In Experiment 1 only the 10-year-olds seemed to benefit from the inclusion of price
information, because they were the only age group that identified advertisements with
prices better than ones without prices. The presence of a price had no effect on the
8-year-olds’ performance, and unexpectedly we found that 6-year-olds recognized fewer
advertisements that included a price than ones that did not. In other words, the
inclusion of a price did not help the younger children to identify an advertisement. As
pointed out above, the younger children may have a less developed understanding of the
relationship between prices and products (Leiser, Sevón, & Lévy, 1990) and the 6-year-
olds may not always have recognized the numbers or currency signs as prices (Nunes &
Bryant, 1996). In Experiment 2 the UK prices were changed into Indonesia currency
(Rupiah) which was indicated by a currency sign (Rp). Currency signs are not explicitly
included in the Indonesian curriculum until the age of 8 years (Indonesian Department
of Education, 2006), which is slightly later than currency signs are taught in the UK
curriculum. As the younger UK children did not benefit from the presence of price
information we did not expect the younger Indonesian children would benefit either.
EXPERIMENT 2
Participants
Experiment 2 included 240 children in four groups of 60 children: 6-year-olds (mean age
6 years 3 months, age range 6.0 to 6.11), 8-year-olds (mean age 8 years 3 months, age
range 8.0 to 8.11), 10-year-olds (mean age 10 years 4 months, age range 10.0 to 10.11), and
12-year-olds (mean age 12 years 3 months, age range 12.0 to 12.11). The children attended
three schools in Jakarta, Indonesia. All the children had access to computers at school, and
sometimes used the Internet at school (5% of the 6-year-olds, 30% of the 8-year-olds, 27% of
the 10-year-olds, and 22% of the 12-year-olds). Most of the children had access to a computer
in their home (6-year-olds, 85%; 8-year-olds, 82%; 10-year-olds, 85%, and 12-year-olds, 87%),
and about a third of the children had used the Internet at home (6-year-olds, 37%; 8-year-
olds, 37%; 10-year-olds, 33%, and 12-year-olds, 52%). Compared to children in the UK
(see Experiment 1) the Indonesian children had as much access to computers as did the
UK children, but far fewer had used the Internet at either school or at home.
Materials and procedure

The 27 web pages from Experiment 1 were used in Experiment 2. All the text on the
web pages was translated into Bahasa Indonesian, and prices were changed into
Indonesia currency (Rupiah) which was indicated by a currency sign (Rp).
The procedure and scoring were the same as in Experiment 1.
Results
The mean number of advertisements (out of a maximum possible score of 27) correctly
identified by each age group were: 6-year-olds, 8.72 (4.16); 8-year-olds, 14.53 (4.61);
10-year-olds, 19.02 (4.77); and 12-year-olds, 20.97 (3.20). A 4 age group (6-, 8-, 10-, 12-year-
olds) £ 2 price (price present, price absent) analysis of variance was carried out. There
was a main effect for age F(3,236) ¼ 99.34, p , .001, and Bonferroni post hoc tests
showed that there were differences ( p , .001) between all age groups except between
the 10- and 12-year-olds ( p . .05). There was a main effect for price, F(1,236) ¼ 9.23,
p , .001, reflecting the fact that children identified advertisements with price
information (mean ¼ 60.7%) better than ones without a price (mean ¼ 56.6%), but as
shown by the age £ price interaction F(3,236) ¼ 11.27, p , .001, this effect was due to
the better performance of the two older age groups at identifying advertisements with a
price. The means for each age group were 6-year-olds, 28.9% with price and 35.5%
without price (t(59) ¼ 2.63, p , .05); 8-year-olds, 53.7% with price and 53.9% without
price (t(59) ¼ .06, p . .05); 10-year-olds, 75.9% with price and 65.36% without price
(t(59) ¼ 3.88, p , .01); 12-year-olds, 84.4% with price and 71.4% without price
(t(59) ¼ 5.50, p , .01).
The mean number of false positive identifications (out of a possible maximum of
216) for each age group were: 6-year-olds, 22.82; 8-year-olds, 13.58; 10 year-olds, 5.75;
and 12-year-olds, 5.17. There was an effect for age, F(3,236) ¼ 33.12, p , .001, and
Bonferroni post hoc tests showed that the 6-year-olds made more false positives than the
8-, 10- and 12-year-olds ( p , .001), and the 8-year-olds made more than the 10- and
12-year-olds ( p , .01). There was no difference between the 10- and 12-year-olds
( p . 0.5).
We compared the correct performance (out of 27) of the children from the UK and
from Indonesia in a 3 age (6-, 8-, 10-year-olds) £ 2 country (UK, Indonesia) analysis of
variance. As already reported above and for Experiment 1, there were significant
differences in performance between all three age groups, but there was no difference
between the performance of the children in the two countries F(1,335) ¼ .05, p . .05,
and there was no interaction between age and country F(2,335) ¼ 1.29, p . .05.
Discussion of Experiment 2
The results of Experiment 2 with Indonesian children were the same as the results from
Experiment 1 with UK children. There was an age related improvement in the children’s
ability to recognize the web page advertisements, and the mean number of
advertisements recognized by the 6-, 8- and 10-year-old groups in Indonesia and the
same groups in the UK was very similar. The similarity of performance was noteworthy
because the number of children in Indonesia with Internet experience was much lower
than the number of children in the UK with Internet experience. Despite the fact that
the Indonesian age groups included fewer children with Internet experience the
performance of children in both countries was almost the same. This finding provides
some support for the argument that age (i.e. cognitive development) is a factor in
recognizing advertisements irrespective of children’s specific experience with the
Internet. However, in the present experiments we were primarily concerned with the
age when children could distinguish advertisements from non-advertisements, rather
than on the role of experience per se. Further research would be needed to explore the
effects of experience on children’s ability, by selecting specific groups of children with
and without experience of a medium to investigate whether recognition differed
depending on experience of that medium.
Like the 6-year-olds in the UK, the 6-year-olds in Indonesia were poorer at
recognising advertisements with prices than without prices, and like the 8-year-olds in
the UK, the inclusion of a price did not have a beneficial effect on Indonesian 8-year-
olds’ ability to identify an advertisement. It was only by the age of 10 years that children
in Indonesia were better at identifying advertisements with prices (as were the 10-year-
olds in the UK). Therefore, the age related pattern of performance in the UK and in
Indonesia was the same, because in both countries children only benefited from the
presence of price information at the age of 10 years. We conclude that for younger
children price did not provide an effective cue for identifying an advertisement.
Taken together the results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that children have
difficulty identifying web page advertisements. The 6- and 8-year-olds were particularly
poor at identifying the web page advertisements. Even the 10-year-olds recognized only
about three-quarters of the advertisements. As the 10-year-olds were not at ceiling we
included 12-year-olds in Experiment 2, but there was no difference between the 10- and
12-year-olds in Experiment 2. Therefore the performance of even the oldest children
was not as good as adults who, as noted above, performed the recognition task almost
perfectly. We emphasise that the advertisements we included in the experiment were
taken from, or adapted from, advertisements on web pages aimed at children, and
therefore the children’s inability to identify them all as advertisements has implications
that we will consider below.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
We showed 6- to 12-year-old children printouts of invented web pages that included
typical Internet advertisements and asked the children to identify the advertisements.
There was an age related increase in children’s ability to identify the advertisements as
the 6-year-olds distinguished about one-third of the advertisements, 8-year-olds
distinguished about half, and the 10- and 12-year-olds distinguished about three-
quarters. Previous researchers have focused on children’s understanding of television
advertising and found that children can distinguish television advertisements
successfully by the age of 5 years (Butter et al., 1981; Levin et al., 1982). In other
words, children can identify television advertisements at a much earlier age than they
can distinguish advertisements on web pages.
There may be several reasons for this difference. Children have extensive experience
of television from a very early age (Kunkel et al., 2004), but will not usually have much
experience of the Internet until later. Nevertheless, we found that even 10- and 12-year-
olds were unable to identify all the web advertisements. This is many years after such
children would have been able to identify a television advertisement. We suggest that
this difference may be due to the different nature of television and web advertisements.
As we noted in the Introduction, television advertisements can be distinguished by a
number of internal and contextual cues, such as jingles, voice-overs, pacing, price
information, length, separators, and contrast with the surrounding programme (Gunter
et al., 2005). Most importantly, a television advertisement cannot be on the screen at the
same time as a programme. But many web advertisements are just part of a web page,
and the advertisement may include images and text styles that are not very different
from the ones that make up the rest of the page (Fielder et al., 2008) so there are fewer
distinct cues that can be used to identify a web advertisement.
One cue that is associated with some web advertisements is price information, and
we found that when an advertisement included a price the older children (10- and
12-year-olds) were more likely to identify it correctly. Older children have a better
understanding of the relationship between products and prices (Gunter & Furnham,
1998; Leiser, Sevón, & Lévy, 1990) and may have learnt the association between the
presence of a price and an advertisement from seeing advertisements in various media.
They may also have a developing awareness of consumerism and realize that advertising
and pricing are related aspects of selling products (Leiser & Halachmi, 2006; Thompson
& Siegler, 2000). We considered only one possible cue (the presence of price) and other
research, using on-line processing, would be necessary to identify other possible cues
(like animation) that children might use to identify a web advertisement.
The fact that children can identify an advertisement does not mean that they
understand the nature of advertising. A full appreciation of the persuasive nature of
advertising is not achieved until 7 or 8 years of age, which is at least 2 years after children
can consistently identify television advertisements (Kunkel et al., 2004). Therefore the
development of children’s understanding has always been described as recognition first,
then progressively more sophisticated awareness of advertising, until a full realization of
the persuasive intent of advertising is achieved (Gunter et al., 2005). However, this
developmental sequence has been based on research related to television advertising. As
we found, children who were old enough (10 and 12 years of age) to understand the
purpose of advertising could not always identify an advertisement in a web page design,
and therefore the assumption that recognition always precedes understanding may not
apply to media other than television. If children who are old enough to understand
the nature of advertising are unable to recognize advertisements this indicates that such
children lack the strategies needed to identify what is and what is not a web
advertisement. We have already suggested that the cues that might help children identify
an Internet advertisement are less obvious than the cues related to advertisements in
other media like television, and there is a further difficulty in the case of Internet
advertising because the whole of many web pages are advertisements (Austin & Reed,
1999; Fielder et al., 2008). Companies, institutions, and individuals create web pages to
promote themselves, their brand or their products and therefore most pages are in effect
advertising messages, and none of the content is neutral or unbiased. We do not know
when, or how, children reach a full understanding about the nature of web pages, but
given the increasing importance of the Internet in children’s lives it is an issue that
deserves more investigation.
An assumption that is found in the literature on television advertising is that when
children are aware of the persuasive nature of advertising that awareness allows them to
make a critical response, and such a response lessens the impact of the persuasive
message (see Gunter et al., 2005; Kunkel et al., 2004). This assumes that children know
they are looking at an advertisement, because only then can they generate a critical
response. If, as we found, children do not recognize an advertisement on a web page
they are unlikely to be able to generate a critical response. But if children do not
generate a critical response they may be susceptible to the effects of the Internet
advertising in the same way that they can be influenced by product placements. For
example, Auty and Lewis (2004) found that children who were shown a film clip that
included a Pepsi drink were, later, more likely to choose Pepsi to drink themselves even
though they did not recall seeing the drink in the film. Studies with adults have also
demonstrated that participants can develop preferences for products they have
seen advertised even when they are unaware that they have been exposed to the
advertisements (Perfect & Askew, 1994). Investigating the effects of unrecognised
advertisements on web pages is an important issue for future research, because
children’s increasing use of new media means that they are more likely to be exposed to
advertisements that they do not recognize as marketing messages.
Children’s difficulty in recognising Internet advertisements has implications for
regulation and for educating children about advertising. Most countries regulate the type
and frequency of television advertisements that can be directed at children and some
countries (like Sweden) ban television advertising aimed at young children (Gunter et al.,
2005). Although national governments can control the television advertising within
their borders, the Internet is an international medium that cannot be so easily regulated
(Neeley, 2007). If it is impractical to restrict the advertising that children may see on the
Internet, children could be made more aware of Internet marketing messages
through advertising literacy programmes. Such literacy programmes could make
children aware of the promotional nature of so much of the Internet, and help them to
develop effective strategies for recognizing web advertisements.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Kevin Durkin for helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper.
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Young Children's Ability To Recognize Advertisements in Web Page Designs

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Young children’s ability to recognize

Moondore Ali1, Mark Blades1*, Caroline Oates1

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Recognizing web page advertisements 73

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Recognizing web page advertisements 75

Figure 2. Example of web page with one advertisement (middle right).

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Materials and procedure

Recognizing web page advertisements 79

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Recognizing web page advertisements 81

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Recognizing web page advertisements 83

Indonesian Department of Education (2006). Model Silabus dan Rencan Pelaksanaan

Revised version received 29 October 2008

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