Your children’s smartphone games may be selling them stuff behind your back.
Some 95% of downloaded apps for kids ages 5 and under use at least one type of advertising tactic, according to a University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital study released Tuesday. These applications, many of which tout themselves as educational games, have pop-up video ads, characters persuading children to make in-app purchases and banner ads, researchers found. The study, published in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, looked at more than 135 apps.
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These marketing strategies were used in 100% of free apps analyzed in the study and 88% of apps that cost money, and they occurred at similar rates in both. Video ads were in a third of all analyzed apps and more than half of free apps.
In-app purchases, a way of making users (in this case, children) pay for an upgrade while they’re using the app, were present in one-third of all apps, and 41% of free apps. “Our findings show that the early childhood app market is a wild west, with a lot of apps appearing more focused on making money than the child’s play experience,” said senior author Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral expert and pediatrician at Mott.
Some of the games have hidden advertisements, while others interrupt play with a video that the children must watch to continue playing or earn credit in the game.
Children don’t comprehend marketing the way adults do, making them more vulnerable to advertising. “It’s very difficult for them to recognize advertising but it’s even harder to understand when it is embedded in game play,” said Josh Golin, executive director for Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a national advocacy coalition of healthcare professionals, educators and parents.
The organization sent a public letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking for an investigation of apps for young children. In it, the CCFC, along with the Center for Digital Democracy, argued these apps’ marketing practices — intended for parents but shown to young children — are unfair and deceptive to both. “Until we have a regulated app market for children, [parents] should ignore these things,” Golin said.
Many children aren’t capable of detecting “persuasive intent” in advertising until they’re at least 7 years old, according to a 2017 study “The Effect of Advertising on Children and Adolescents” published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Even if preschool-aged children can identify marketing, they may not be able to effectively defend themselves against it, the researchers noted.
“Children’s readiness to learn from their social world renders them vulnerable until they develop skepticism,” the researchers wrote. “However, even as adults, we may be capable of skepticism but still fail to use our critical-thinking skills at all times.”
Also see: This is what happens when you take phones away from teenagers
Advertising regulations do not directly touch on smartphone use or games, Golin said, even though children’s use of media platforms has grown dramatically in the last few decades.
Advertisers spend more than $12 billion a year to reach the youth market, and children view 40,000 commercials each year. The FTC enacted the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in 2000, focused on collection of personal information of children under 13 on the internet, but it does not regulate how advertisers can market to children online as it does in television.
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