Persuasive Messages and the Development of Advertising Literacy in Children and Adolescents

Over the past years, children and adolescents’ commercial media environment has changed dramatically. Driven by technological innovation, advertisers have rapidly adopted new advertising techniques, including brand placement in video games and influencer marketing on social media. Typically, new advertising practices rely on affect-based mechanisms and are often embedded within the program or editorial content, which may have important consequences for young people’s processing of advertising. In this chapter, we review the state of the art of international research literature on young people and persuasion, focusing specifically on today’s commercial media environment. We focus on four important themes: (1) persuasion processes, (2) persuasion and resistance, (3) advertising literacy, and (4) advertising disclosures. Based on the extended four-dimensional definition of advertising literacy (conceptual advertising literacy, advertising literacy performance, attitudinal advertising literacy, moral advertising literacy), we propose four focal points for the research agenda.