Some of this concern arises because of the nature of marketing through websites, email, text messaging and other digital media. For example, the 'Like' or 'Favourite' buttons on social networking sites, although ostensibly market research tools, can clearly be used as marketing tools but are not classed as such. This adds to the impression of stealth-marketing techniques taking advantage of children's credulity and parents' relative inexperience online. Moreover, as these messages are delivered to the individual, parents are unlikely to know what advertising their children are exposed to at any given time. This combination of the unfamiliar and the unknown can make parents uneasy, as shown by the results of our omnibus survey (see Figure 10).
Figure 10: Parents’ views of marketing and advertising tools
Do you think that any of these marketing and advertising tools should NOT be used when promoting products to children?
Source:TNS Omnibus Survey, 2011 Weighted base: 1199 parents in the UK
32.
The key to helping children to distinguish between advertisements and content is clear and consistent labelling, and there are many examples of good practice, such as the clear separation of 'paid for' and 'non—paid for' search listings on most search engines. And while there is quite a lot of consensus over the age at which children understand television advertising (for example, see the work of Deborah Roedder John, 1999), how children use and understand newer marketing techniques is less certain, particularly as the lines between content and advertising can seem unclear to children, and the types of technique
