IGF 2020 WS #357 New profiles of marketing aimed at children in the Internet

Description:

Internet substantially changed the landscape of marketing in general in a handful of ways, whether by blurring the distinction among content and merchandising, by attracting the attention of potential consumers in other occasions than in the ancient traditional marketing platforms and, maybe even more remarkably, by making it possible to get more information from consumers in order to draw strategies and business models and alto tailor the advertisement to specific groups or even individuals. That’s a general landscape. When considering children as the target of advertising, however, more elements will need to be considered in contexts that previously not even easily related to marketing. As a consequence, several of the tools and rules governing marketing aimed at children would have to be adapted and others eventually created. Children, throughout their development into adults, have different degrees of cognition regarding theirits capacity to recognize a marketing argument. Only slowly they became able to differentiate it from the general discourse, and if that was one reason for justifying a certain degree of control on marketing practices on social communication media, to implement similar tools to the diverse landscape of information available in Internet becomes much more difficult. Several factors add to this difficulty: children are addressed in several news ways and moments, such as in YouTube videos, games or by connected toys and assistants. The platforms and applications business models based on the monetization and commercial exploitation of children's use and experience in the digital environment, the eExposition to the Internet with no supervision or mediation by parents grows and the social isolation imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and hyperdigitalization scenario makes it substantially harder to keep children off screens and, consequently, away from being marketing targets.