Steffi De Jans

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.

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.

The development and testing of a child-inspired advertising disclosure to alert children to digital and embedded advertising

Via three studies, this article aims to develop and test an advertising disclosure which is understandable for children (ages six to 12 years old) and which can alert them to different types of advertising in multiple media formats. First, cocreation workshops with 24 children (ages eight to 11 years old) were held to determine a selection of disclosure designs based on insights from the target group. Second, two eye-tracking studies among 32 children (ages six to 12 years old) were conducted to test which of these disclosure designs attracted the most attention when the disclosures were integrated into a media context. These studies led to the selection of the final advertising disclosure: a black rectangular graphic with the word Reclame! (i.e., Dutch for “Advertising!”) in yellow letters. Finally, a two-by-two, between-subjects experimental study (disclosure design: existing versus child-inspired advertising disclosure; advertising format: brand placement versus online banner advertising) with 157 children (ages 10 and 11 years old) was performed to test the effectiveness of the child-inspired disclosure by comparing it with existing ones. This study not only showed that children recognized, understood, and liked the child-inspired disclosure better than the existing ones, but they were also better able to recognize advertising after exposure to this child-inspired advertising disclosure.