Thank you very much for this opportunity. This is fantastic.
It's great to hear all of this information about advertising live. We have it all on our site summarized wonderfully and it's nice to know that we got it right.
This is what I'd like to talk about today. I'm going to give you a description of the organization I work for and I'm going to cover a bit of a hole in our discussions today, namely, what children are exposed to online.
First of all, I am with the Media Awareness Network. The Media Awareness Network is a national not-for-profit media education organization. Our vision is to ensure that children and youth have and possess the necessary critical thinking skills and tools to actively engage with the media. Our organization has been around for ten years and we've produced education resources that are distributed across Canada and around the world, and they are being used in classrooms to help facilitate media education and media literacy.
As I mentioned, I'm going to give you a sense of what kids are exposed to and how they're being enticed by food advertising, in particular, food advertising on the Internet. That's an area where we have considerable expertise, and I'll be able to give you a little research that we have conducted very recently. To avoid repetition, I'll go over a snapshot of the regulations and how they affect what kids are seeing on the Internet and what we can do about it. Then I want to give you a little piece abut the essential role of media education and this need for supporting media education as a component of facilitating a healthy society.
When you look at how kids are being marketed to, kids today are in a multimedia environment. In 2003 the Canadian Teachers' Federation conducted a national survey on kids' media use. We found that 75% of children watch television daily and 48% of kids have their own TV set. They are watching in their rooms. Some 60% of boys in grades 3 to 6 are playing video games or computer games almost every day. If we look at young children in regard to advertising, with the ABCs and brands, children are familiar with brands from an early age. Babies as young as six months can form mental images of corporate logos and mascots. Brand loyalties can be established as early as age two, and by the time children head off to school, most can recognize hundreds of brand logos.
The surfing habits of young people make them ideal candidates and targets for both online advertisers and market research. Forrester Research notes that, compared to adults, young Internet users stay online for longer periods of time. They're more likely to access the Internet from different locations and participate in a wider range of online activities, many under the watchful eye of commercial sites that collect their personal information. Kids also multi-task with various media effortlessly. Online and offline, marketers are interested in kids because of their spending power.
Online marketers are also interested in the kids because essentially these are kids who are going to influence the family purchases. Youth culture research has shown that 12- to 24-year-olds in Canada account for approximately $62 billion in personal income. Even those at the younger end of this demographic have a surprising amount of disposable cash. They have $114 a week, on average, for kids who are 12 to 17 years old.
I have five kids, and none of them has that much to spend in a week, I have to say, but that's a side note.
“Young Canadians in a Wired World” is a research study that we recently did through the Media Awareness Network. This was phase two, as a follow-up to our 2001 survey. We took a look at what kids are doing online and how they're interacting with what they see. The research included findings on the commercial nature of kids' favourite online spaces, particularly food advertising. In fact, almost 94% of the top 50 sites included marketing materials.
When we look at online marketing, we are looking at kids' sites that are designed to build brand recognition and relationships with children and youth. They build these relationships through online ads, but also through immersive environments, virtual communities, and virtual marketing. They also use data mining techniques to collect personal information, so we have online advertisers that are tending to steer away from your traditional sales pitches. They're not going through Advertising Standards Canada for approval of their ads. What we see are these creative virtual playgrounds where content and advertising are seamlessly integrated into graphics and games.
Neopets actually trademarked the term “immersive advertising”, referring to it very proudly as its interactive advertising technique and claiming that it's an evolutionary step forward in traditional marketing practices of product placement using television and motion pictures. According to an MNet survey, in fact, Neopets is in the top five favourite sites for kids from grade 4 all the way to grade 9. It has staying power.
Advergames are a particular type of immersive environment. These are interactive online games centred on brands, products, or brand-related characters. In particular, these are a popular tool for food advertisers such as Candystand, Nabisco, and Lucky Charms. These are just a few examples of the advertising-based sites that have these advergames--flashy, interactive, engaging games for kids who are very young.
As one marketer states, “Could you imagine anyone staring at a magazine advertisement or a banner ad for three to eight minutes?” But kids will happily play brand-focused games for long periods of time. Marketers call this youthful demographic “sticky traffic”. When we're talking about food advertising and Life Savers, it's “sticky traffic”.
For young children, the web appears to be the new playground, the seamless integration of junk food advertising and interactivity. However, it is misleading for these young people. Our research showed that three-quarters of the kids think advergames are just games. Kids aren't aware that sites such as Neopets make money by integrating advertising products, services, and brands into the games they are playing. Neopets, for example, derives 60% of its revenue from advertising and 40% from product placement, mostly in games available on these sites.
We want to take a look at what I've just told you in relation to what we have for advertising regulations legislation and voluntary codes in Canada.
We have the Canadian code of advertising standards, which encompasses the broadcast code for advertising to children. We have the new interpretive guidelines for food advertising developed in 2004. We know that legislation in Quebec prohibits television advertising, but we also know that foreign services carried by cable companies don't have to follow this country's codes and regulations.
When it comes to advergames and other online marketing, there is no specific Canadian legislation or regulation. Canada does not have legislation in place to deal with the Internet as a unique medium presenting its own distinct problems and requiring its own solutions.
Considering these regulations and codes, looking at the new ways in which children are being exposed to the media, I think what we find is a hole. We find that kids are interacting with junk food advertising with very little supervision and very little intervention, and they're just unaware of exactly what they're seeing and the implications of what they're seeing.
I think--and of course I come to you with this bias--that education is an important tool in the overall process. It isn't the only solution, but it is absolutely a critical one. It is the responsibility of the ministries of education and health to ensure that teachers, parents, physicians, and children have the tools and skills they need to make healthy lifestyle choices and to guide our young people into making these healthy lifestyle choices.
Media literacy must be an essential part of the Canadian strategy for encouraging these healthy lifestyle choices. Media literacy is commonly defined as the ability to assess, analyze, evaluate, and--even for young people today--to produce media that.... It's the process of becoming active rather than passive consumers of media. It's being able to read between the lines of junk food advertising and to understand the difference between entertainment and food marketing. It's the ability to question the connections between the food industry and one's own personal health, self-esteem, and self-image.
Media education is the essential tool in helping kids acquire media literacy skills. It is the process of teaching and learning about media so that learners acquire media literacy knowledge and skills. Canada is in fact a pioneer in the development of media education. In the late 1980s Ontario became the first educational jurisdiction in the world to mandate media literacy as part of their English curriculum. Currently, media education is part of the core curricula in every provincial and territorial jurisdiction in Canada.
If we look at a little part of media education, we see how lifestyle choices and healthy relationships are central to the health and professional development courses. We see how media and popular culture can provide a framework for discussing junk food advertising, alcohol and tobacco use, sexuality, body image, obesity, media violence, diversity, and gender representation.
Unfortunately, despite the efforts to date, media education has been slow to be implemented in the classroom. Over the last--