01 August 2006

Advergaming or Unethical Marketing? You Decide.

Advergame is a term used to describe a product-placement strategy that uses digital game-like entertainments organized around images and references to specific products. A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation details the extent to which the largest food product advertisers on television are also creating online advertising aimed at children.

It’s Child’s Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children found that 85 percent of top food brands that target children through television ads also market to children online through the use of branded websites featuring advergames.

The study analyzed the websites of 82 food brands (from Kellogg's Pop Tarts and Hershey's candy to Oreo cookies and Burger King), and found more than 500 advergames. The web properties logged OVER 12 million site visits by children ages 2 to 11 during the three-month study. Only 18 percent of the advergames were identified as advertisements.

This is just one log on the fire in the debate over the role of food advertising as one of the causes of obesity among children. You may download PDF transcript here. The webcast link is here.

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi
Your article was more targetted towards advertising targetted at children. A recent posting of mine on "Advergaming" was a bit more general but it does put advergaoming in context.
Thought you might be interested.
Cheers
Paul Niederer

http://www.virtuallinks.net/?p=56

Jeux Sociaux said...

Yes it's clear than more and more adults are playing casual and social games trough social networks like Facebook. According to me the typical social gamer is a 35 year old woman. Thanks to this reason advergaming is not in direction of children only but for everybody. From 7 to 77 year old people according to a french expression ;)

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