Brand Integration, Disclosure, and Ethics in Child-Targeted YouTube Videos: A Content Analysis

ABSTRACT

This content analysis explores how often implicit brand integrations occur in YouTube videos that were created for child viewers. The study also investigates how often advertising disclosures appear along with the videos that include brand integration. Results indicate that brand integration occur the most often as a branded product becomes a prop or in the background (i.e. product placement), and this type of brand integration tends to have the least advertising disclosure. Brand integration with influencers actively using/interacting with the branded products in the video (i.e. product integration) followed the official advertising disclosure policy the most. Moreover, product integration was more likely to show the disclosure of advertising at the beginning and the end of the videos than product placement. The blind spot in advertising disclosure policy for implicit brand integration techniques on child-friendly YouTube channels should be reconsidered.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to acknowledge the following people for their help with this project, Dr. Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, Dr. Dale Kunkel, and Heather Gahler.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23736992.2022.2158829

Notes

¹ Considering the coder’s ability to comprehend the content and context of the videos, channels that are run by English-speaking YouTubers were mainly selected. In order to filter out English-speaking YouTube channels hosted by a family or a child, the name of the channel, the titles of the videos in the channel, and the descriptions about the channel (i.e., About) were checked. In addition, random videos from each channel were selected to see if their descriptions are in English and whether the YouTubers speak English. Using these strategies filtered most of the foreign language speaking channels out, but in the final sample list, some of the videos had the YouTubers speaking foreign languages; they switch between their mother-tongue language and English back and forth within and across videos. The videos were excluded and substituted with other English-speaking videos from the same channel as the foreign language disrupted the coder’s comprehension of the context of the video.