Liselot Hudders

How advertising literacy training affect children’s responses to television commercials versus advergames

This study examined childrens advertising literacy level for traditional versus embedded advertising formats by comparing their cognitive and affective advertising literacy level for television commercials vs. advergames. The study also explored how cognitive and affective advertising literacy further attenuate advertising effects by investigating the mediation impact of cognitive and affective advertising literacy on the relation between the ads format and the purchase request. Third, the study investigated how an advertising literacy training session moderates these effects. The results of this experimental study showed that advergames lead to a higher purchase request rate among children than television commercials. However, only affective but not cognitive advertising literacy mediated the effect of the advertising format on purchase request. In addition, a training session was shown to accelerate childrens cognitive (but not their affective) advertising literacy for advergames, but not for television commercials.

Marketing through Instagram influencers: the impact of number of followers and product divergence on brand attitude

ABSTRACT Findings of two experimental studies show that Instagram influencers with high numbers of followers are found more likeable, partly because they are considered more popular. Important, only in limited cases, perceptions of popularity induced by the influencers number of followers increase the influencers perceived opinion leadership. However, if the influencer follows very few accounts him-/herself, this can negatively impact popular influencers’ likeability. Also, cooperating with influencers with high numbers of followers might not be the best marketing choice for promoting divergent products, as this decreases the brands perceived uniqueness and consequently brand attitudes.

Shedding New Light on How Advertising Literacy Can Affect Children's Processing of Embedded Advertising Formats: A Future Research Agenda

Advertisers are continuously searching for new ways to persuade children; current methods include fully integrating commercial content into media content, actively engaging children with the commercial content, and increasing the number of commercial messages children are confronted with at one moment in time. This poses a challenge for how children cope with embedded advertising. This conceptual article aims to develop a theoretically grounded framework for investigating how children process embedded advertising. More precisely, it sheds light on previous research and conceptualizations of advertising literacy and provides suggestions for future research. The article examines conceptual and methodological issues and discusses the need for research on how to improve childrens coping with embedded advertising by emphasizing the value of persuasive intent priming and implementation intentions. To conclude, future research directions are discussed regarding strategies to strengthen childrens coping skills and their dispositional (i.e., associative network consisting of cognitive, moral, and affective beliefs related to advertising) and situational (i.e., actual recognition of and critical reflection on advertising) advertising literacy.

Disclosing Brand Placement to Young Children

ABSTRACT In spite of the EUs prohibition on brand placement in childrens programmes, it is argued that children may still be exposed to this advertising format in many occasions. Consequently, and as children may have even more difficulties than adults to distinguish the commercial content from the editorial media content in which it is embedded, an advertising disclosure may be necessary to enable them to cope with brand placement. Entailing two one-factorial between-subjects experiments, the current article examined how different types of brand placement warning cues influenced cognitive advertising literacy and the attitude toward the placed brand, among children between 8 and 10 years old. In a first study, it was investigated how these outcomes were influenced by warning cues with different perceptual modalities (no vs. auditory vs. visual cue, N = 98). The results showed that a visual warning cue was more effective than an auditory warning cue (vs. no warning cue) in addressing cognitive advertising literacy. However, this higher cognitive advertising literacy could not account for the effect of the visual warning cue on brand attitude. In a second study, it was examined whether the effectiveness of this visual warning cue was influenced by the timing of disclosure (cue prior to vs. during media containing brand placement, N = 142). Additionally, it was tested whether the effect of the cue on brand attitude could be explained by cognitive advertising literacy if childrens sceptical attitude toward the brand placement format was taken into account. The results showed that cognitive advertising literacy was higher when the cue was shown prior to than during the media content. This cue-influenced cognitive advertising literacy resulted in a more positive brand attitude, but only among children who were less sceptical toward brand placement. This positive relation disappeared among moderately and highly sceptical children. These findings have significant theoretical, practical and social implications.

Using games to raise awareness

Serious mini-games are promising tools to raise awareness. They motivate and enhance players interest in a particular topic, and only require a small time-investment. The games should focus on a single concept or learning goal and should be carefully designed. This study therefore explores the usefulness of informant design when developing such serious mini-games. Informant design is a framework that involves stakeholders at different stages of the design process depending on their expertise, which maximizes the value of their contributions. When developing awareness campaigns, various stakeholders, with different goals, need to be involved. Therefore, this paper suggests the use of informant design to increase the support of every stakeholder. The informant design framework provides an excellent design methodology for games as it is very flexible in time, place and number of participants in the co-design activities. The current study shows a case study indicating the usefulness of informant design when developing serious mini-games to increase advertising literacy among adolescents. Serious mini-games provide an interesting alternative to complex serious games.Informant design can increase the involvement of various stakeholders.A method to use informant design is provided.

Ethical and Sustainable Aspects of Meat Production; Consumer Perceptions and System Credibility

Although meat consumption is still on the rise globally, meat consumption has been heavily contested in recent years. This is prompted by a range of environmental and ethical issues associated with the production and consumption of meat. Issues arise concerning the economic costs of meat production, potential harmful effects on human and animal welfare, and on the environment. This chapter elaborates on these issues, identifying positive as well as negative aspects, and discusses different systems that may ensure transparency and sustainability in meat production. The chapter concludes with some future avenues for more sustainable meat production and discusses implications for various stakeholders.

Beliefs, intentions, and beyond: A qualitative study on the adoption of sustainable gastrointestinal nematode control practices in Flanders’ dairy industry

Emerging anthelmintic resistance emphasizes the need for sustainable control approaches against gastrointestinal nematode (GIN) infections in cattle. The uptake of diagnostic methods for sustainable control could enable more informed treatments and reduce excessive anthelmintic use. Unfortunately, the adoption of such methods remains relatively poor. A better understanding of farmers motivations and behaviour would help to develop applicable advises and communication strategies for sustainable worm control strategies. A previous study created a general model for adoption intention of GIN diagnostics on dairy farms and measured the most important factors driving this intention (Vande Velde et al., 2015). The current research aimed to dig deeper into this model for the beliefs underlying these factors, and to identify additional factors impelling this specific behaviour. Data were collected through 22 semi-structured interviews with dairy farmers. Using analytic induction analysis, data were moved between deduction and induction. Results show that the adoption process of diagnostic methods for GIN occurs through three different phases: adoption intention, actual adoption and maintenance. Low infection awareness and low priority (top of mind) of the disease are important barriers for adopting sustainable GIN control. Secondly, farmer behaviour is guided by two important social norms: the opinion of their veterinarian and their fellow farmers. However, farmers hold an incongruent relationship with both norms throughout different stages of behaviour: they do not value other farmers opinions as a positive reference (intention phase), but follow and mimic their behaviour as a group (action phase). The veterinarian is seen as the most important positive reference, but also the responsible actor for GIN control. As such, the farmers do not hold themselves responsible for implementing sustainable control strategies. Thirdly, different types of motivations influence different sorts of behaviours. Sustainable behaviour such as use of diagnostics will be influenced by moral motives, while management behaviour such as treatment is raised by more economic motives. Finally, not only performing, but also maintaining behaviour is important to fully address the adoption of sustainable control. As such, to maintain the adoption on farm, planning could be an important contribution. These insights can be used by animal health organizations and industry by exploiting motivations, social norms and planning to encourage the uptake of diagnostic approaches in GIN control.

From persuasive messages to tactics: Exploring children’s knowledge and judgement of new advertising formats:

Despite that contemporary advertising is decreasingly about persuading children through persuasive messages and increasingly about influencing them through implicit tactics, little attention has been given to how children may cope with advertising by understanding and evaluating the new advertising tactics. Drawing on 12 focus groups entailing 60 children of ages 9–11u2009years, this article investigates children’s advertising literacy by exploring their knowledge and judgements (and accordingly reasoning strategies) of the new advertising formats. In particular, insight is provided into children’s critical reflection on the tactics of brand integration, interactivity and personalization in the advertising formats brand placement, advergames and retargeted pre-roll video ads on social media. It is shown that while children not spontaneously do so, they appear to have the ability to understand these tactics and form judgements about their (moral) appropriateness, thereby considering a wide range of societal actors.

Advertising targeting young children : an overview of 10 years of research (2006–2016)

ABSTRACT A review of 138 published academic articles was conducted to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of academic research of the past decade (2006–2016) on advertising directed to young children up to 12 years old. The research overview resulted in a conceptual framework comprising five research domains that were found to be most prominent. For each of these five domains, an overview, discussion and future research agenda is presented. We conclude that much of the research of the past decade included food advertising and its effects. Progress has been made in the domain of childrens advertising processing, specifically with regard to advertising literacy. Despite the growing importance of embedded advertising, many of the new ad formats remain neglected (e.g. native and mobile advertising). Additionally, only a few studies investigated which executional factors (e.g. humour) are effective in advertisements to target children and social influences are also less often considered.

Advertising literacy training: The immediate versus delayed effects on children’s responses to product placement

This paper aims to examine the immediate and delayed effects of advertising literacy training on children’s cognitive advertising literacy for an embedded advertising format, product placement and, subsequently, its persuasive effects. In addition, this study explored whether this effect is moderated by children’s general advertising liking. The study also investigated whether the effects of training were dependent on children’s ages.,The present study is conducted using a three (training session: control condition vs advertising literacy training with immediate ad exposure vs advertising literacy training with ad exposure after one week) by two (age: 7-8 years vs 10-11 years) between-subjects experimental design.,The results of the experimental study showed that advertising literacy training increases children’s cognitive advertising literacy for product placement for both younger and older children and both immediately and delayed (measured after one week). In addition, cognitive advertising literacy had an influence on the effectiveness of product placement (i.e. purchase request) when children’s general ad liking was low, though not when it was high. No moderating effects of age were found.,This study shows that advertising literacy training sessions can improve children’s cognitive advertising literacy for non-traditional, embedded advertising formats.,This study is one of the first to examine and confirm the immediate and delayed effects of advertising literacy training sessions on children’s cognitive advertising literacy for non-traditional advertising formats.