Online Commerce
Kids don’t just see ads in media: more and more, they buy things right on their screens. This section looks at the ways that young people shop online and how they can be manipulated into spending.
Kids don’t just see ads in media: more and more, they buy things right on their screens. This section looks at the ways that young people shop online and how they can be manipulated into spending.
To help kids avoid the many traps and pitfalls set up by online marketers, parents and teachers need to become more informed about online marketing techniques and privacy issues – and then pass the information on to kids.
One of the most important recent developments in advertising to kids has been the defining of a "tween" market (ages 8 to 12).
Advertising: It’s everywhere. No, it’s not your imagination. The amount of advertising and marketing we are exposed to daily has exploded: on average, we see more than four thousand ads each day.[1] At the gas pumps, in the movie theatre, in a washroom stall, on stickers on fruit, during sporting events and plastered all over social media—advertising is pretty much impossible to avoid.
Kids are a highly desirable market for advertising: they control almost 150 billion dollars of spending in the U.S. alone and have a lifetime of spending ahead of them.
Kids are a highly desirable market for advertising: they control almost 150 billion dollars of spending in the U.S. alone and have a lifetime of spending ahead of them.
Parents of young children have an important role to play in protecting their kids from invasive marketing and in educating them about advertising from an early age.
Young Canadians today are growing up in a culture where gambling is legal, easily accessible – especially online – and generally presented as harmless entertainment.
Research shows that only a third of parents have discussed gambling with their children, perhaps because parents are generally unaware of their kids’ participation in these sorts of activities. It’s important to talk about it, though: research has found that family members' views about gambling are a major influence on how likely youth are to gamble.