This is Advertising! Effects of Disclosing Television Brand Placement on Adolescents

Sophie C. Boerman,Moniek Buijzen,Eva A. van Reijmersdal,Esther Rozendaal

doi:10.1007/s10964-016-0493-3

Sophie C. Boerman, Moniek Buijzen + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0493-3

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Abstract

As heavy media users, adolescents are frequently exposed to embedded advertising formats such as brand placements. Because this may lead to unwitting persuasion, regulations prescribe disclosure of brand placements. This study aimed to increase our understanding of the effects of disclosing television brand placements and disclosure duration on adolescents’ persuasion knowledge (i.e., recognition of brand placement as being advertising, understanding that brand placement has a persuasive intent and critical attitude toward brand placement) and brand responses (i.e., brand memory and brand attitude). To do so, an earlier study that was conducted among adults was replicated among adolescents aged 13–17 years (N = 221, 44 % female). The present study shows that brand placement disclosure had limited effects on adolescents’ persuasion knowledge as it only affected adolescents’ understanding of persuasive intent, did not mitigate persuasion, but did increase brand memory. These findings suggest that brand placement disclosure has fundamentally different effects on adolescents than on adults: the disclosures had less effects on activating persuasion knowledge and mitigating persuasion among adolescents than among adults. Implications for advertising disclosure regulation and consequences for advertisers are discussed.

Highlights

Adolescents are growing up in an increasingly commercialized media environment (Buijzen et al 2010)
These findings suggest that brand placement disclosure has fundamentally different effects on adolescents than on adults: the disclosures had less effects on activating persuasion knowledge and mitigating persuasion among adolescents than among adults
We tested whether disclosure leads to increased conceptual persuasion knowledge and increased attitudinal persuasion knowledge (H1 and H2)

Summary

Introduction

Adolescents are growing up in an increasingly commercialized media environment (Buijzen et al 2010). Advertising is omnipresent and is increasingly embedded into editorial content, such as television programs, games, movies, magazine articles, and websites. A popular example of embedded advertising is brand placement, that is, the paid inclusion of branded products or brand identifiers within mass media programming (Karrh 1998). The boundaries between advertising and editorial content disappear, making it unclear whether or not it is actual advertising (Cain 2011; Nebenzahl and Jaffe 1998). New regulations prescribing disclosure of the commercial nature of embedded forms of advertising including brand placement have been introduced both in Europe and the US to inform audiences (Cain 2011; Nairn and Fine 2008). Television programs in the UK and Belgium that include brand placement show a ‘‘PP’’ logo for ‘‘product placement,’’ and Dutch television programs show texts such as ‘‘This program contains product placement.’’

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