The development of children's understanding of advertisements on television and the Internet in the U.K. and Indonesia.

Children's ability to understand the purpose of television advertising
develops in stages; the ability to recognize advertisements from surrounding
programmes and the ability to understand the informative and persuasive intent of
advertisements. Researchers have demonstrated that children are able to
distinguish television advertisements from surrounding programmes as young as 4
years of age. Most research into children's understanding advertisement intent has
been based on verbal methods and this research has concluded that children have
an awareness of persuasive intent of advertisements from the age of 7 or 8 years.
In contrast, researchers who have used non-verbal methods to measure children's
understanding of advertising claim that children as young as 4 or 5 years of age
have some awareness of the informative and persuasive intent of advertisements.
In chapters 3 to 7 we investigated UK and Indonesian children between the
4 and 9 years of age using non-verbal methods. The results failed to show that
young children can demonstrate an awareness of the informative or persuasive
intent of advertisements. Instead our results support the. findings from verbal
methods, that children only develop an understanding of the purpose of
advertising about 7 or 8 years of age.
Although research on children's ability to distinguish between
advertisements and programmes is well established for television advertising,
there has been lack of research in new media. In chapters 8 to 1O we investigated
UK and Indonesian children's ability to identify advertisements on Web pages.
The results showed that children were poor at recognizing advertisements on the
Web pages. Less than a third of 6-year-olds could identify the advertisements,
although this age group can successfully identify television advertisements.
Therefore we concluded that the sequence of children's understanding of
advertising that has been put forward to explain children's awareness of television
advertising may not apply to other media, like the Internet.