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Young children in China and the UK have difficulty recognizing advertisements on search engine pages

Yuan Fu, Mark Blades, Caroline J. Oates

Background: Most research into children’s understanding of advertising has been about television advertising aimed at children. There has been little research into children’s awareness of web advertising.

Methodology: This paper investigates children’s ability to recognize advertisements on search engine pages in mainland China and in the UK. A total of 256 children aged 6-12 years from schools in mainland China and in the UK were tested to examine how well children of different ages could recognize search engine advertisements. Experimental materials comprised 34 invented web pages similar to the output pages of web searches. Half the pages contained picture-based advertisements, and half contained text-based advertisements.

Results: We found that children’s ability to recognize the advertisements improved with age, but children could only recognize most of the advertisements at 12 years of age. This age is much older than when children can recognise television advertisements. We emphasise that young children have difficulty recognizing advertisements on search engine pages.

Conclusion: We suggest that search engine pages need to identify advertisements more clearly and that advertising guidelines and regulations need to take into account the difficulty that children have in distinguishing advertisements from content.