Marketing to Children Through Online Targeted Advertising: Targeting
Mechanisms and Legal Aspects
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04104v1
- Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2023 09:10:39 GMT
- Title: Marketing to Children Through Online Targeted Advertising: Targeting
Mechanisms and Legal Aspects
- Authors: Tinhinane Medjkoune, Oana Goga, Juliette Senechal
- Abstract summary: On YouTube, advertisers can target their ads to users watching a particular video through placement-based targeting.
We show that placement-based targeting is possible on children-focused videos and enables marketing to children.
In addition, our ad experiments show that advertisers can use targeting based on profiling (e.g., interest, location, behavior) in combination with placement-based advertising on children-focused videos.
- Score: 1.1279808969568255
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: Many researchers and organizations, such as WHO and UNICEF, have raised
awareness of the dangers of advertisements targeted at children. While most
existing laws only regulate ads on television that may reach children,
lawmakers have been working on extending regulations to online advertising and,
for example, forbid (e.g., the DSA) or restrict (e.g., the COPPA) advertising
based on profiling to children. At first sight, ad platforms such as Google
seem to protect children by not allowing advertisers to target their ads to
users who are less than 18 years old. However, this paper shows that other
targeting features can be exploited to reach children. For example, on YouTube,
advertisers can target their ads to users watching a particular video through
placement-based targeting, a form of contextual targeting. Hence, advertisers
can target children by placing their ads in children-focused videos. Through a
series of ad experiments, we show that placement-based targeting is possible on
children-focused videos and enables marketing to children. In addition, our ad
experiments show that advertisers can use targeting based on profiling (e.g.,
interest, location, behavior) in combination with placement-based advertising
on children-focused videos. We discuss the lawfulness of these two practices
concerning DSA and COPPA. Finally, we investigate to which extent real-world
advertisers are employing placement-based targeting to reach children with ads
on YouTube. We propose a measurement methodology consisting of building a
Chrome extension to capture ads and instrument six browser profiles to watch
children-focused videos. Our results show that 7% of ads that appear in the
children-focused videos we test use placement-based targeting. Hence, targeting
children with ads on YouTube is not only hypothetically possible but also
occurs in practice...
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