Sponsor Disclosure and Adolescents

Businesses have turned to online content creators to augment advertising for their products and services. These online content creators include individuals who post videos (Vloggers) to user-shared video websites, such as YouTube (YouTubers), and/or post content to social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. These “influencers” have garnered millions of viewers that can include children and adolescents. Yet, these young viewers may not be aware that advertising has been embedded in the on-line content, and thus is sponsored. 

In their recently published research article, Van Reijmersdal et al. (2020) evaluated the impact of the timing of sponsorship disclosure on the attitude of children, ages 10-13 years old, concerning the commercial content of videos posted to social media. These researchers monitored visual attention with eye tracking software by measuring the eye fixation time on an area of interest created around the disclosure. If shown before a video began, the disclosure captured the attention of these adolescents twice as long than if the disclosure was simultaneous displayed with the video. Most likely, a disclosure that is shown at the same time as the start of a video loses its messaging impact because of the competing audiovisuals of the video. Thus, embedded advertising decreases sponsorship transparency and individuals may not be able to differentiate informational from commercial content if the disclosure is not present before the start of the video.  

Adolescents who recognized that the videos were commercial, whether the disclosure was before or during the video, developed a more critical attitude concerning the brand. These findings may inform future federal trade commission policies concerning truth-in-advertisings with special regard to advertising to children and adolescents on social media.