UF Study: Even Savvy Kids Are Won Over By Entertaining Commercials

June 22, 2000

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Kids aren’t nearly as savvy about advertising as they seemingly should be, considering how much TV they watch, University of Florida researchers have found.

Even older children don’t apply their knowledge of advertisers’ intent to sell a product, partly because they are distracted by the entertainment aspect of commercials, the study shows. The findings are scheduled to appear in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

David Mick, editor of the Journal of Consumer Research and a professor of commerce at the University of Virginia, said the findings help support previous research that parents should be careful about how much television they expose their children to.

“If they’re going to let their children watch TV, they should talk about what they’re watching,” he said.

UF marketing researchers Elizabeth Moore and Richard Lutz studied the reactions of children, ages 7 to 11, to both commercials and product sampling. That combination has previously been overlooked in research about children and advertising, Lutz said.

Lutz, professor of marketing in the UF College of Business Administration, said in-depth interviews, in which children were asked to discuss the connection between advertising and products, yielded some unexpected findings.

“The older children were not thinking about advertising as a source of information so much as … a source of entertainment,” Lutz said. “They were consuming commercial(s) … the same way they might consume regular television programming entertainment.”

He said that means while older children possess the skills to view ads critically, they usually don’t. “The fact that they switch into this mode of being oriented toward entertainment means that they let down those cognitive defenses that they have available to them,” Lutz said.

He said younger children may even gain more information from commercials because the entertainment effect is not as prevalent.

“For younger kids, it’s actually a more literal, functional sort of thing,” Lutz said.

Most advertisers are already aware of the entertaining effects of commercials, but the study serves as solid documentation of it, Lutz said, adding that the study tells consumer watchdog groups something new.

“This might suggest that [advertising] influences are a little stronger than we were anticipating, even as children mature cognitively because of this previously unrecognized entertainment effect,” Lutz said.

The researchers’ goal was to learn what happens when children get information from both advertising and product experience. Seventy-two children in groups of 7- and 8-year-olds and 10- and 11-year-olds participated in the study based on food products. They were shown videotapes of commercials or given products to sample, or a combination of the two. Later, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 38 other children to evaluate their findings.

Although the researchers expected younger children to be more susceptible to the influence of advertising, Lutz said, the study found the total impact of advertising was greater for older children. He said with younger children, their attitude toward a commercial had direct impact on what they thought of the brand when they sampled it.

“With the older children … there was an additional indirect effect where the more they liked the ad, the more they tended to accept the information that was conveyed about the brand or even how they evaluated the experience itself,” Lutz said. “That led us to believe that having entertaining advertising has a pretty strong effect for these older kids, even though we would have anticipated the opposite.”

Mick said Moore and Lutz’s study is pioneering.

“It’s one of a few studies that looks at the combination of advertising and consumer experience with a product instead of looking at the two separately,” he said. “They’re the first who have done this in the context of kids.”