Advertising in Children’s Audiovisual Content on YouTube

Abstract

Advertising on the web has taken new forms (Malin, 2011; Susarla, Oh & Tan, 2012). In this context, the unboxing of toys has emerged as a YouTube genre dedicated to unpacking, demonstrating and using toys, often with a fixed camera and with the voice of children or adults pretending to be one (Craig & Duncan, 2017; Marsh, 2015). In an ever-growing number of Internet users, particularly among children (Davies, Coleman & Livingstone, 2014), this kind of videos has permeated the web space. However, it remains unclear which are the crucial elements of their content that make them so appealing to younger audiences, and how they reach them (Moreno & Martínez, 2015). Using a mixed methods approach, this paper conducts a content and visual analysis of 20 videos that were found un-deliberately by using the keywords “Soy Luna”, a popular Disney Channel series. The main findings indicate that this type of content is presented as homemade short movies with no apparent advertising intentions; however, these are not produced by ordinary users or with no product placement intentions. Furthermore, these videos are pervasively and systematically linked to non-advertising content for children and do not include any form of warning or regulation. These results aim at provoking a debate on the audiovisual content available to children on everyday screens, and on how advertising is taking advantage of this captive audience, and whether or not they should make their intentions clear.