Original title: When warnings fail and ads feel good: How advertising disclosures affect children’s understanding and feelings about narrative product placements
A product placementA brand or product shown inside entertainment content rather than in a separate advertisement. is a brand shown inside a story, rather than in a separate ad. Researchers tested how children responded when a story included a brand as part of its plot, with or without a warning about the placement. The warning did not increase children’s awareness that they were being persuaded. Story-linked products raised both children’s enjoyment and their ratings of the brand, while warnings reduced the enjoyment boost.
Imagine watching a school play where a character keeps using a particular brand of snack. You enjoy the scenes, but the snack also starts to seem appealing; a note saying the brand is being promoted might interrupt the fun without making you notice the attempt to influence you. In this paper, the play’s plot-linked snack stands for the story’s product placement, and the note stands for the advertising disclosure.
Children may enjoy a story with a product woven into its plot while also liking the brand more. A warning can dampen that enjoyment, but this experiment found it did not make children more likely to recognize or think critically about the advertising.
The abstract reports an experiment with 234 children, with a mean age of 8.10, but does not describe the specific media, brands, or disclosures used. It reports effects on children’s responses in this experiment; it does not establish how children respond to every kind of placement or warning.
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When warnings fail and ads feel good: How advertising disclosures affect children’s understanding and feelings about narrative product placements — Ines Katrin Spielvogel, Jörg Matthes, Alice Binder — Communications — doi:10.1515/commun-2025-0068
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.