Children and a changing media environment: investigating persuasion knowledge for integrated advertising formats

This study investigates the persuasion knowledge of children of integrated advertising formats, more precisely of product placement, advertiser funded programming (AFP) and advergames. Based on qualitative research with 42 children (between 4-12 years old) the results show that children have difficulties recognizing and understanding the persuasive intention of the integrated commercial content. Especially for product placement this seemed to be hard, for all age groups. The ad recognition and understanding of AFP was highest. For advergames the results show that children could recognize the ad embedded in the game, but had problems in understanding the underlying commercial intention of it