As competition for kids’ interest increases into the holiday shopping season, critics of children’s digital advertising worry about unforeseen consequences.
Kids love YouTube as much as adults, giving advertisers another channel for reaching this coveted demographic, particularly in the all-important holiday shopping season.
Popular kid-oriented channels like EvanTubeHD focus primarily on “unboxing” newly purchased products and playing with them in an energetic manner. Millions of young children are drawn to channels like these partly because of their infectious enthusiasm but also out of curiosity regarding consumer goods.
According to consumer advocacy groups, even though watching others play is a natural inclination and can be a healthy component of child development, the product-focused nature of content blurs the line between sales pitches and innocent entertainment. “Ads should really be separate from the content,” says Caroline Knorr of Common Sense Media. “We think it’s really important to protect kids from deceptive advertising.”
As competition for kids’ attentions and their parents’ dollars increase into the holiday shopping season, critics of children’s advertising worry about the unforeseen consequences.
Same Argument, Different Screen
If contentions like these sound familiar, it is because they are a refrain from an earlier fight against unregulated advertising to children on TV. In response, Congress voted in the Children’s Television Act of 1990, which gave the Federal Communications Commission authority to regulate ad content on children’s shows while applying strict limits to the amount of ads kids were exposed to on a daily basis.
With the Internet and digital advertising though, all bets are off. “When it comes to advertising to kids, the rules for the Internet are fuzzier than the tightly regulated world of television, in large part because Internet advertising itself is always changing,” says Julia Greenberg of Wired. A lack of explicit oversight and a rapidly evolving digital media landscape make it tough to pinpoint specific bad actors or harmful practices in the long run.
Follow the Money
Another complication is channels such as EvanTubeHD and jeffmara that usually receive indirect ad revenue. Ads that run before the content may or may not be directly related to the products seen in the videos, but advertisers pay careful attention to the audience segments watching videos and respond by showing targeted ads. Ad revenue can mean big bucks for channel hosts with enough subscribers — the EvanTubeHD channel reportedly makes around $1.3 million a year.
However, sometimes the products themselves are supplied free by the manufacturer, such as Target supplying Evan with a host of toys depicting characters from the new Star Wars film for one of his videos. Ambitious toymakers like Moose Toys are short circuiting the process even further by providing incentives for children and parents to upload their own unboxing or playing videos featuring the Moose’s Shopkins line of products directly on the company’s channel.
Some toy brands are even going about the process backwards. Hasbro once sold the design rights to “Pie Face!”, a game they originally manufactured in the 1960s, in response to mild sales. After videos of people joyously playing the messy, tension-inducing game went viral, Hasbro quickly took notice of the toy’s sudden resurgence. They purchased the international distribution license from U.K. company Rocket Games in May 2015. Since then, million-view videos of channels like EvanTubeHD playing with the product have made “Pie Face!” one of 2015’s toy success stories.
Retailers Getting in the Mix
Retail brands like Toys R Us are taking notice of trends like these, too. Their holiday campaign this year features toys coming to life after stores close and unboxing other toys, much like the videos described above.
“[The campaign] speaks not only to our breadth of selection and expertise, but it is exactly what kids see when they walk wide-eyed into a Toys R Us store,” says Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Rich Lennox of the holiday’s creative strategy. “As consumers begin to make decisions on where to shop this holiday season, we wanted to clearly convey the unique value proposition we are offering through strong promotional messages — but ones that are delivered in a fun and engaging way.”
Clearly, the aims of marketers and concerned parents are not always aligned. Brands that tread the careful path set out for them by prior TV regulations stand a greater chance of having their messages heard without running afoul of parent expectations.
But at the same time, no one can dictate the type of content someone like Evan puts on his channel. In the end, it comes down to parents’ abilities to monitor their kids’ content consumption and discuss the reactions. Everything else is child’s play.