Advertising to Children: A Qualitative Investigation of the Effect of Different Advertising Formats on Children's Attitudes towards Sports' Brands

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating the different advertising formats, which children are exposed to and how children perceive these formats, in addition to, drawing a comparison on how each of these advertising formats affect children's attitudes towards the advertised brand. The paper is an exploratory research that follows a qualitative approach by conducting in depth interviews with a convenient sample of 20 children and two focus groups to provide insights about children's exposure to different advertising formats and how they affect them. The findings showed that children are exposed to various formats of advertising such as TV, online advertisements, and product placement in games and movies and are attracted more to creative media advertising, which are the product placement techniques and that children have high influence on their parents' decisions, also they formulate their own brand preferences and the characteristics of the brand they want to own. Finally, children above 12 years can formulate critical arguments about the advertising formats and messages. This paper contributes to literature by providing insights and comparisons on how different advertising formats may have different effects on children. It is also conducted in almost unresearched context, which is  sports brands. It also provides insights from Egypt, which is likely to generate unique findings being an emerging market.