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This paper aims to investigate how social media usage by children determines their interactions with consumer brands. The paper also examines the nature of the processes evident.

A qualitative approach was implemented using both paired and single in-depth interviews of New Zealand children (both boys and girls) in the age group of 11-14 years. The data were analysed by thematic analysis of the interview transcripts.

The study demonstrates that children use three main processes – discerning, reacting and forming – when interacting with brands on social media. Each of these processes has different levels of interaction episodes depending on the amount of social media activity by each child. Discerning has noticing, a lower level of interaction and identifying which uses already internalised brand knowledge. Reacting consists of describing and evaluation which involves more active interaction resulting in opinion formation. Forming can involve a distant “watching” interaction or a more active relating behaviour when children are using multiple social media platforms.

The study identifies three key modes of brand interaction behaviour when young consumers use social media, which each have two interactions. The implication for marketers, parents and policymakers is that there is a range of behaviours, both passive and active, that children show when interacting with consumer brands when using social media.

The current study offers a way to deepen the understanding of how children approach online communications with brands in the social media context. The research finds that the children’s use of social media is more active and dynamic than previously thought, giving rise to connections with brands that are meaningful to the children. Specific codes of practice for online brand marketers may be necessary so that children are helped to understand the commercial intent of brand practices on social media.

The findings shed light on the range of interaction behaviour of young consumers, and such information provides insights into how children acquire brand knowledge, react to social media communication and decide the value of such communication for themselves. Brand marketers have a role to play in ensuring their brand communications practices avoid deception and clearly indicate commercial intent.

Investigating how children individually process brand information in a social media context provides insights into their interaction behaviour. These findings show differing levels of interest in both brand and social media activity amongst children.

Social cognitive theory suggests that children may have more favorable attitudes toward food products promoted by media characters who are similar to them, in terms of factors such as age, gender and race-ethnicity. This paper aims to profile the characters in food and beverage websites and apps for children and examine whether the healthfulness of promoted products varies as a function of character background.

This study includes two parallel content analyses focused on websites and apps that were produced by America’s top selling food and beverage companies.

There were very few child-targeted websites and apps, but those that existed were replete with media characters. These websites/apps tended to feature media characters with diverse gender, age and racial–ethnic backgrounds. However, marketing featuring adult and male characters promoted particularly unhealthy foods.

American food companies, many of whom signed voluntary self-regulatory pledges through the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, should make a more concerted effort to refrain from featuring appealing media characters in child-directed new media marketing. Whether conscious or not, it seems as if food marketers may be leveraging characters to appeal to a wide audience of children of varied demographic backgrounds.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this manuscript is the only research to focus specifically on the demographic profiles (i.e. gender, age and race-ethnicity) of characters in food websites and the nutritional quality of the products they promote. It is also the first to systematically examine media characters in food apps in any capacity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine mothers’ social media accounts that focus on children’s fashion. The authors probed children’s fashion photo practices as representations of the mothers’ extended self and the kind of childhood representations produced by the social media accounts. They also investigated mothers’ perceptions of children’s privacy when engaging in sharenting – the sharing of information about children or parenting online.

The study is based on 16 semi-structured interviews with Finnish mothers who had Instagram accounts focusing on children’s fashion.

Children’s fashion photos play a diverse role in mothers’ identity work. The photos can be used to express a mother’s taste and aesthetic skills, to express values, to fit into peer groups and to store memories of oneself and the children. Through the photos, representations of the prevailing Finnish childhood ideals, such as authenticity, naturalness and playfulness, are reproduced. The mothers perceived the children as part of their extended self and justified sharenting with mother- and child-centered arguments.

Through shedding light on the practices of social media fashion photography, this paper provides insights into how commercialism and social media shape cultural expectations for both motherhood and childhood. The paper contributes to previous research on sharenting, extending it to the context of fashion photography.

This paper aims to investigate how, where and when parents are mediating their children’s media activities and with which particular device. It also explores whether parents are identifying specific help in this area and questions where they might seek advice (should they need it). Furthermore, it investigates parents’ views regarding a pilot, free online TV channel dedicated to advice through discussion with experts, parents and children.

This small-scale study uses charts and semi-structured interviews to explore the views of parents/carers to better understand lived experiences in relation to mediated digital parenting in the home. The methodology was also designed so that findings will inform further production of relevant content for a video-based resource.

Although this study was limited in duration and scope, the results clearly support earlier research (Livingstone, 2018a, 2018b; Ofcom, 2017) regarding the desperation parents feel through not being able to access appropriate advice in the way they want it. Furthermore, findings provide overwhelming support for the potential benefits of relevant predominantly visually-based online content/advice.

The study raises questions about the empowerment of parents/carers in their own digital skills as a way of transferring confidence to their children, in navigating their way through the educational and social affordances and online safety issues through the use of accessible filmed content.

The findings show that issues, such as online safety and related behavioural pressures, remain key for parents and that there is an increasing need for more targeted support and ways to empower parents/grandparents with skills to enhance children’s digital agency. Furthermore, it offers an insight into ways in which styles of “enabling mediation” in the digital age may be analysed and reveals some of the day to day challenges parents face.

Addressable television is an interactive medium that blends online data personalization with traditional TV content to better address individual consumers and improve advertising outcomes. Drawing on the persuasion knowledge model (PKM) and the influence of presumed influence (IPI), this paper aims to examine parents’ beliefs about the nature and persuasive intent of addressable TV advertising targeting their children, and the intervening influence those beliefs have on the parents’ intentions to purchase the advertised products.

The study used an online survey design to examine the influence that addressable TV ads targeting children have on parents’ consumer behaviors. In total, 196 parents of children aged 3 to 12 completed the study. The majority of respondents had one (23%) or two (40.3%) children were primarily in two-parent (73.5%) or one-parent households (21.9%), and 79.6% indicated that they were mothers. Respondents were 23 to 41 years old (M = 37, SD = 8.03); dominantly Caucasian (77.5%; 16.8% African American); had an education of less than a college degree (65.3%); and a median household income of $50,000–$75,000 (73.5%).

Findings from this study indicate beliefs that a TV ad personally addressing their children positively influence parents’ purchase intentions, and this influence is partially mediated by perceptions of children’s susceptibility to the ad and perceptions of the likelihood of children’s purchase requests. Beliefs in children’s susceptibility to an ad’s addressability alternatively negatively mediates parents’ purchase intentions when not sequentially mediated by beliefs in the likelihood of children’s purchase requests.

Currently, there is little published research related to parents’ perceptions about the effects of personalized advertising targeting their children in general, and none that consider addressable TV advertising or the indirect influence this targeted advertising has on parents. Thus, this study provides important insights for scholars interested in theoretical implications related to addressable TV advertising, as well as practitioners seeking to enhance addressable TV advertising outcomes.

This study aims to examine adolescents’ social media environment connected to unhealthy food marketing. As social media have become a ubiquitous part of young people’s everyday lives, marketers have also shifted their focus to these channels. Literature on this phenomenon is still scarce and often takes a quite narrow view of the role of marketing in social media. Furthermore, the experiences of the adolescents are seldom considered.

Using a sociocultural approach and netnographic methodology, this study presents findings from a research project conducted in Finland. The data consist of both social media material and focus group interviews with adolescents.

The findings elaborate on unhealthy food marketing to adolescents in social media from two perspectives: sociocultural representations of unhealthy foods in social media marketing and social media influencers connecting with adolescents.

The study broadens and deepens the current understanding of unhealthy food marketing to adolescents taking place in social media. The study introduces a novel perspective to the topic by looking at it as a sociocultural phenomenon.

This study aims to center on understanding how stakeholder engagement processes improve online child protection in telecom companies. The literature review and findings shed light on the management of networks to identify, prevent and mitigate the adverse impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs)[1] and to find opportunities in terms of new policies and services development.

Three multinational telecom companies were analyzed with a qualitative focus combining three research tools: the analysis of 81 corporate reports, self-administered questionnaires and semi-structured interviews.

Firms establish a collaborative network with a large number of stakeholders such as public authorities, non-governmental organizations, educational institutions, representatives of families and expert researchers. The outcomes of these networks range from the development of new products and services (filters, child safety software and protection apps) to the co-creation of new corporate policies with a high social impact (self-regulation, sectorial codes, awareness initiatives and reporting).

This study outlines guidelines for the industry in identifying, engaging and making decisions in a collaborative way when managers have to engage with multiple stakeholders regarding child protection. The academic debate and the empirical findings have many practical implications for ICT companies whose users are children and teenagers.

Despite its significance, stakeholder management is underexplored in the literature of protection for young people. The academic field and the professional arena appear to have little to say regarding how executives manage engagement processes.

This paper aims to set out to demonstrate the need for an integrated model that was titled, after the famous optical illusion (Hill, 1915), “Like My Wife and Mother-in-Law”, addressing three prevalent definitions of consumers’ communities: subculture, neo-tribe and brand community. It shows how it is only the use made of insights gleaned from all three that can faithfully describe the world of local and global meanings found in a computer game-based consumer community of children.

The analysis relies on a semiotic analysis of this computer game’s contents as well as on information obtained by a way of ethnography performed among group members, 9-11-year-olds. The combination of methods proves appropriate in tackling this model’s complexity, allowing to describe the interaction offered by the game, and the type of conduct attending it, online as well as offline.

Like the optical illusion where one can see two images in a single picture, this analysis shows that the participant children demonstrate complex, conflictual attitudes to the website’s effort to market subscriptions and products. Despite the game’s high popularity among children, a tension was identified between developers’ intentions and the game’s nature in practice.

Previous works seek to describe the experience of a given consumer community by opting for one of the three definitions. Unlike this approach, the author intends to show how the three-dimensional model offers a richer view of the consumers’ experience. Communicating this view may also prevent marketing misguided approaches when targeting consumer communities, based on a single-dimensional characterization of audiences.

Advertising through the videogame has become one of the most effective and prevalent channels of advertisement, especially via pop-up ads – appearing on the screen that interrupts children’s gaming activity. Despite its importance, the effectiveness of pop-up ads and its advertising value in online videogames (O-VGs) to predict children’s inspired-to behavior remains scant. This study aims to investigate the underlying factors that explain the relationship between the four dimensions of pop-up ads and perceived advertising value, which further predicts children’s inspired-to behavior.

Data from 196 parents who observed their children while playing O-VGs, were analyzed using Smart-PLS. As the respondents are parents, the authors took extra precautions to ensure that the findings are valid.

Results showed that perceived irritation and incentives of pop-up ads do not affect children’s advertising value, whereas perceived informativeness and entertainment of pop-up ads positively impact perceived advertising value among children. Besides, children’s perceived advertising value of pop-up ads in O-VGs predict their inspired-to behavior.

This study contributes to children’s inspired-to behavior via empirically studying the perceived advertising value as a potential deriving source of inspiration. Finally, the study provides information for developers/advertisers about why and under what circumstances children perceived advertising value affect inspired-to behavior.

This paper aims to investigate children’s experience as consumers of video games and associated digital communication technology, and the role this experience may play in their evolving senses of identity.

Qualitative depth interviews and discussions were conducted in a convenience sample consisting of 22 children of both genders aged 6-12 years, parents and video games company executives in the southwest of the UK. The fully transcribed data sets amounting to some 27,000 words were analysed using discourse analysis.

The findings revealed the heightened importance that the knowledge of video games plays in children’s strategies for negotiating their nascent sense of identity with regard to peer groups, family relationships and gender identity. Video games were not only a leisure activity but also a shared cultural resource that mediated personal and family relationships.

The study is based on an interpretive analysis of data sets from a small convenience sample, and is therefore not statistically generalisable.

This study has suggested that there may be positive benefits to children’s video game playing related to aspects of socialisation, emotional development and economic decision-making. An important caveat is that these benefits arise in the context of games as part of a loving and ordered family life with a balance of activities.

The study hints at the extent to which access to video games and associated digital communications technology has changed children’s experience of childhood and integrated them into the adult world in both positive and negative ways that were not available to previous generations.

This research addresses a gap in the field and adds to an understanding of the impact of video games on children’s development by drawing on children’s own expression of their subjective experience of games to engage with wider issues of relationships and self-identity.