Cecilia Kang, “When is a kids’ online game actually an ad?,” The Washington Post, November 2, 2012
“If even the ad industry can’t agree on the definition of an online ad, who can?,” asks The Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang in this November 2 article highlighting the “increasingly thorny debate on how to monitor advertising aimed at children when they are confronted with so many new forms of marketing online.” Kang reports that both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Federal Communications Commission regulate traditional media but have thus far failed to restrict online advertising to kids, leading consumer groups to question the supposedly “lax oversight of digital marketing.”
“There is a great deal of research that shows children don’t distinguish
between content and advertising,” American University Communications
Professor Kathryn Montgomery was quoted as saying. “Now on digital, there is
the opportunity of more blurring of those lines, and the industry is pushing to
keep definitions of online advertising broad and unclear.”
In particular, Kang notes that even the industry’s Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) has sometimes struggled to distinguish among online entertainment, advertising and other forms of content. According to CARU, which refers unresolved disputes to the FTC, marketers still have “special responsibilities when advertising to children or collecting data from children online. They should take into account the limited knowledge, experience, sophistication and maturity of the audience to which the message is directed.”
But industry efforts to educate children about online advertising have apparently done little to appease critics like Georgetown Law Professor Angela Campbell, who recently filed a complaint with FTC over McDonald’s use of “tell-a-friend” features on its websites. “They have the strategy of reaching lots of kids by constantly bombarding them with brands,” she said. “They want children to develop positive emotions about their brands early on.” Additional details about Campbell’s complaint appear in Issue 451 of this Update.
