 Welcome everyone once again. Let's talk about media and communication. So in the digital world, kids are constantly exposed to advertising, but are they really equipped to understand it? I've invited Sophie Borman from the University of Amsterdam and Wageningen University and Research to explore the concepts of advertising literacy and uncover the effectiveness of pictograms, those small symbols designed to warn kids about sponsored content. So Sophie and I will discuss Sophie's and colleagues' research study that investigated the impact of these pictograms on minors' advertising awareness and understanding. So the question really is here, how do we create really informed online consumers? Sophie, welcome to our episode. Thank you. Sophie, there is an ongoing debate now on how to create safe, transparent digital environment for minors and I believe this is where the relevance of your study lies into. Am I right? Yeah, definitely. I think children are exposed to a lot of advertising that is a bit hidden in content that they want to consume, that is influencer content. And we know that the idea is that children are particularly vulnerable to these types of hidden advertising tactics because they find it very difficult to recognize, especially because they have limited information processing capability and advertising literacy. Let's follow up Amir on that. You cite a regular article and you cite research showing that minors have limited information processing capacity which may in consequence limit their advertising literacy. So what was missing in the research specifically that you wanted to address? So we did some studies before in which we tried to develop different ways of creating transparency about influencer marketing and in one of these studies we created different pictograms, in cooperation with children and also by studying them and asking children about these pictograms. But in the end we found that we did an experiment in which we show children different influencer YouTube videos with these pictograms and we found that children actually rarely noticed them and therefore they didn't have a lot of effect. And we wanted to find out how can we increase this effectiveness of these types of pictograms because we did develop them together with these children so they should be quite effective. And we thought maybe we need to inform them and make them more familiar with these pictograms and maybe an awareness campaign can be helpful there because if children or if people are more familiar with pictograms we are more likely to notice them and then it's more likely that they have an effect. So we wanted to find out if an awareness campaign could increase the effects of these pictograms. Well then let us know what did you find and the insights of that. Yeah, so what we did is we tested two different pictograms and we created an awareness campaign informing children about these pictograms and what they meant and why they were used and we incorporated them in experiments and made children watch sponsored YouTube videos either with or without this awareness campaign. And what we found is three important things. One of them is that miners were actually quite capable of distinguishing these sponsored content in the videos when we asked them explicitly. So they do have some level of advertising literacy here which is something that we were very happy to see because we always think that they are very vulnerable but if we asked them then they were actually quite capable of understanding that there was advertising in the sponsored videos. And what we also found again is that the pictograms were hardly noticed and also had little effect on their conceptual and external advertising literacy. So they didn't increase recognition of advertising they didn't make the children more aware of the intent and they also didn't make them much more critical. But we did find that one of the pictograms actually made them less critical towards the influencer advertising which is something that we found before that usually children appreciate transparency so they appreciate these pictograms but they don't really care about the advertising that they are informing about. And most importantly I think we found that this awareness campaign did not necessarily lead to higher recognition of the pictogram so it didn't increase the attention to the pictogram which we hope to find nor did it enhance advertising literacy. What we did see is that this awareness campaign could really increase the understanding of the pictogram. So even though most of the children did understand in some way what the pictogram was trying to inform about this awareness campaign did increase this so they were more capable of understanding what the pictogram was trying to communicate to them. Let's talk about practical consequences of this either for children, for parents, for lawmakers so I'm curious to know more about that. Yeah so based upon our findings we argued that the way that these pictograms are used right now or the way that we try to communicate to children that there's advertising in videos is hardly effective because they don't notice them so we thought maybe an awareness campaign can help and I think we do see that there's some potential here because it does increase for instance the understanding but we need to find out this was just one exposure and only one exposure to the pictogram so I actually think that this study shows potential in using such an awareness campaign and also in using these pictograms but that it needs to be repeated and also the pictogram people need to be familiar with it and have to see it more often to really use this as information as a cue to think about what is it is this video advertising or not and what we also see is because this is something that we find in this study but also in previous research is that these disclosures, these types of pictograms they can be very useful but again they are often not noticed so what we say is if you want to create a safe and transparent digital environment for minors we should definitely use these disclosures to create transparency but we should also combine it with other ways of informing children and increasing their advertising literacy and making also influencers and advertisers more aware of their responsibility of clearly communicating what is going on and why some content is commercial and advertising and why others is not and what would you... sorry, you want to continue? Yeah and I also wanted to add that I think one very positive finding is that we did actually develop a pictogram that children understood and also appreciated so I think again I want to emphasize that I do really think that these types of disclosures, these pictograms do have potential here and that's especially if you create them together with children they can be very useful. And what would you recommend future research should focus on so more practical cases with children, other platforms what are we looking at now? I think one of the key here is to find disclosure implementations that actually attract the attention so should they be bigger, longer more repetition that is something that future research could investigate also using for instance eye tracking to see what people are looking at when watching these videos and definitely we focused only on YouTube videos here and we know that children are children spend a lot of time on TikTok as well and other social media so we can definitely extend it to these types of platforms but yeah I think main focus here should be improving attention to these types of transparency measures. This has been Sophie an episode very straight on point as we like it and we had to compress this conversation in one or two sentences in a punchline what would it be? I think in one or two sentences I think if you want to help children understand that some content might actually be commercial we need to transparently disclose this I think pictograms can be a way to do this but we definitely need to explore how and we need to make sure that people actually notice them. Alright Sophie, thank you very much. For those who are watching us on YouTube you can find all the resources, all the materials of this conversation including the study that Sophie just presented at the Let's Talk About Media and Communication website Alternatively, you can listen to this episode wherever you get your podcast, you have a newsletter you can subscribe in our website to keep in touch with our latest episodes and you can also follow us on Twitter at Kojitatiu LTA