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The Children's Market: characteristics, trends and strategies
As part of its ongoing commitments under the Children’s Plan, the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport commissioned an independent assessment of evidence relating to the impact of the commercial world on children’s well-being. The assessment examined children’s commercial world in the broadest sense, not limited to a focus on advertising and took account of the beneficial aspects of children’s engagement with commercial activities, as well as potentially problematic outcomes. CRSP and the Department of Social Sciences were commissioned to undertake a review of the marketing and advertising industries strategies towards children and young people. These findings are available as Appendix H, Children and Marketing, in the published report.
Background to the research
Overarching question
How are the marketing and advertising industries targeting and engaging children and young people and how has this been changing over time? In particular, how are the industries responding to the opportunities and challenges presented by the rapid growth and increasing versatility and integration of digital media?
Key research questions
- How do children and young people fit into the profile of the marketing and advertising world?
- What are the spending patterns of the marketing and advertising industries? How is expenditure distributed across different media and forms of promotion?
- What mechanisms and strategies do the marketing and advertising industries use to target and engage children and young people?
- How are the marketing and advertising industries currently regulated – what gaps exist and what issues does this raise?
All of these issues can look at how trends have been changing over time. The research will focus on ages 0 – 19.
Background
Children and young people play a double role in the consumer economy, as the target market for an increasing range of dedicated goods (including games, toys, clothes, magazines and media) and as potential advocates for more general household brands. Learning how to be a discriminating consumer is an essential life skill but there is mounting concern that the ubiquity of contemporary advertising and marketing to children is commandeering the range of social and imaginative spaces that established definitions of childhood define as central to the discovery of personal potential and social responsibility. This increasing ‘commercialisation of childhood’ is often attributed to parallel changes in the organisation of media, retailing, public spaces, and public services. With the arrival of multi-channel services, advertising on television, the central domestic medium used by children, has increased in volume and become more diverse, with sponsorship and product placement integrating promotion into programming and merchandising initiatives associating programmes with an expanded range of good. With the advent of Web:2, based on broadband connections, the Internet, the second major domestic medium, allows advertisers and marketers to harness the peer-to-peer interactivity of social networking, game playing, and synthetic worlds. The increasing popularity of video games and the migration of the Net which multi-function cell phones offer further options for reaching children. These innovations in media have been accompanied by shifts in the organisation of public social spaces. The proliferation of shopping malls and galleries and the increasing popularity of theme parks offer extended opportunities for promotional events and ‘presence marketing’. Museums, libraries and other public cultural institutions have also become more hospitable to commercial sponsorship and public-private initiatives. Schools have opened their corridors to advertising and vending machines and incorporated product-related teaching materials into the classroom. These various developments have generated increasing commentary, debate, and research but, as yet, there is no comprehensive, authoritative and accessible summary of, what we know, what we need to know, and the policy issues posed. The review proposes to fill this gap.
Review Method
The review will be framed around the four main questions above and based on six main sources of relevant material:
(1) trade and industry sources - company reports, trade and professional magazines, conference proceedings, market reports.
(2) Official sources - government statistics, parliamentary debates, select committee reports, and reports by regulatory bodies in both the UK and European Union.
(3) Academic Journals dealing with children, media, consumption, advertising, marketing, and business.
(4) Other Reports produced by voluntary agencies and civil society organisations.
Project Team
Alan France, Graham Murdock, Joanne Meredith, Kim Perren, Liz Sutton, Viet-Hai and Thahmina Mannan.
Sponsor
Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport
Publication
France, A., Meredith, J. and Murdock, G. (2009) Appendix H - Children and Marketing in Buckingham, D. (2009) The Impact of the Commercial World on Children's Wellbeing: Report of an Independent Assessment. DCSF: Nottingham.
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