Recently I have been working on persuasive writing with my grade 3/4 community, and a discussion around advertising came up. I was very surprised to hear how much exposure students have to advertising, even in a world of streaming services with ad-free content. Naively, I thought that this consumption of advertising was mostly happening during the viewing of television shows, movies, and videos, but surprisingly a lot of students talked about ads that were embedded in their mobile apps. This lead me to my questions around advertising in mobile apps for kids. Firstly, I wondered how many kid-friendly mobile apps have advertisements placed throughout the application in some form or another (banner, whole screen, pop-ups, etc.)? And secondly, I wondered what type of advertisements (in terms of content) were kids being exposed to?
Below is a study from the University of Michigan from 2018 that was one of the first to look at advertisements in kid-friendly mobile apps. This claim to be “the first” to look at this component of the mobile world was shocking to me since mobile advertising isn’t something that is new to this landscape. Also, this study mentions the lack of restrictions and regulations that exist in the world of mobile app advertising. This lack of regulations and restrictions allows mobile app advertisers to use strategies such as gamification of ads to target their audience. I am curious to dive a little deeper into this topic to see if regulations and restrictions have evolved since the time of this study in 2018.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec523/files/2021/01/00004703-201901000-00004.pdf