One of the main aims of commercial websites for children is to stimulate their brand conscience and attitude, or in other words: to develop a positive attitude toward a product or a brand. The final aim is to influence the buying intentions and/or the purchasing behaviour of the parents. (Children and youth are interesting for the commercial world today for two reasons: they possess a fair amount of (pocket) money themselves and they strongly influence the buying behaviour of their parents, as research by the CRIOC shows. Young children do not recognise what is advertising on TV as such, even though it is easy to distinguish between them and the rest of the programmes. On the internet, however, the boundaries between commercial practices and entertainment become even less obvious. And that's what the professionals are aiming for. Children often play for hours in a 'branded community' via the internet, where no distinction is made between entertainment and publicity. That way the internet offers a unique opportunity to make children acquainted with all sorts of branded products.

Contests and games are a magnificent means of attracting and holding the young visitors' attention. A large study, carried out in the USA, recently concluded that two thirds of the food companies that aim at children also encourage the young public to send e-mails to their friends. Their objective: to convince those friends to visit a website created by the company or to tell them about the product. Viral marketing techniques are applied to stimulate the sale of candy, fatty snacks, fast food, unhealthy breakfast cereals, etc. Viral games and other forms of gamevertising on the websites play a major part in that approach. 'How advertising is becoming a child's play' (http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/news/advertisingischildsplay.htm) is a summary of the survey. The study clearly shows how important food companies disguise commercial messages in online entertainment and how difficult it is for children to recognise this form of publicity, even for children that were warned by their parents about the exaggeration found in traditional advertising. Other research shows that more than 10 billion dollars per year are spent in the USA on food publicity aimed at children and youth. In the meantime, the part of advergaming in the different forms of publicity has increased. Click here for more details, examples and the report itself: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/7536.cfm.

This discussion is being held against the background of the debate about the increasing obesity and unhealthy eating habits among children and young people. Not only in the USA, but also in Europe, we hear more and more criticism of the use of publicity for the promotion of unhealthy child food. The Belgian consumer organisations, including the CRIOC among others, are working on initiatives in that field (publicity aimed at children, misleading and insufficient labelling, health claims on products, etc.).

Another aim of commercial websites for children is to collect market data. Children are asked to disclose personal information when they subscribe to a website and through all kinds of surveys: they have to fill in their name, age, gender, address, mobile phone number, mail address, preferences for consumer goods (for themselves, their friends and their parents), comments on the products and about the website, … Cookies and other technical tricks also help advertisers collect data. Contests and games are used because they are a simple and efficient means to gather sensitive private information. For example data are given in exchange for participation in a game or while playing the game. The pleasant framework of a game or contest makes it easier for the owner or manager of the website to get permission to use the gathered data further and to ask the participant to tick an 'opt-in' case (as is required by Belgian legislation).