Celebrities such as Avril Lavigne can hire boutiques to promote their wares to impressionable tweens.īut is it intrinsically wrong for big business to persuade children to buy their products? Dubit's marketing director, Robin Hilton, believes not. When it comes to grooming young consumers, there is none slicker than, which teaches girls (17 million of them) how to dress up their doll avatars in designer labels such as DKNY, Heidi Klum and Jordache and go shopping in a golden plaza. The site was founded by teenagers who were funded through a young enterprise scheme. Marketers can collect data from children as young as 14 without consent and incentivise them to provide the email addresses of friends.ĭubit Informer, a service that rewards children for doing market research for brands such as O2, Sky, MTV, Nike and Mattel, insists on parental consent. Another 35% offered downloads and gifts in exchange for further data. About 85% of children's websites collect key information (email, postcode, date of birth, gender, age). In these environments, getting kids to market to kids is literally "child's play".ĭata collection is a major concern. Social networking sites and virtual worlds are full of hidden commercial messages in the form of fashion skins, social software and advertiser-funded content. Seeded blogging, advergaming, branded content, virals, product placement (forbidden on TV but standard in web dramas such as Bebo's Kate Modern), should be flagged as ads. Nairn believes that product microsites such as should be labelled as advertising. The internet is the second most complained about medium and yet most of the complaints received are "out of our remit - we couldn't deal with them", explains Lindsay Taff. The Advertising Standards Authority is all too aware of the issue. Dubit, however, points out that kids are not "obligated" to talk about products and can return them if they don't like them. In exchange for keeping the sought-after shiny pink gadget, her job description includes creating a fansite where she blogs about the product, taking pictures of her sales missions and posting them back to Dubit, where she is rewarded. "When an ad is dressed up as a game, a child doesn't have a choice."Ĭonsumer Kids introduces a case study: seven-year-old Sarah, who has been recruited through to act as a brand ambassador for Mattel and promote her Barbie MP3 player to schoolfriends. "There needs to be honesty, clarity and openness," says Nairn. They interviewed 3,000 children and 300 parents and found that brands are using loopholes to market directly to minors in digital environments, where advertising is not labelled as such, making it difficult for children to discern. The book's authors, Agnes Nairn and Ed Mayo (a campaigner for Fairtrade), set out not just to expose gaping holes in the regulatory systems but to research what effect overexposure to screens was having on children. This activity is helping to make them the fastest-growing marketing niche. The concern comes amid evidence that children are becoming increasingly technologised, spending an average of five hours a day in front of screens, partly on social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo, Digg and Hi5 and communities such as Stardoll, Club Penguin and Dubit.
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