2024

Srivastava, Sonali

Children are a significant consumer group and active users of digital platforms. This dissertation aims to explore concerns related to advertising ethics in relation to children as consumers in digital environments and how children navigate contemporary digital commercial environments. To examine macro-level ethical concerns that advertisements (re)produce societal stereotypes, girls’ portrayals in fifteen contemporary fast fashion advertisements available on the public Facebook pages of Nordic fast fashion companies H&M, Lindex, Kappahl, and Gina Tricot were analysed by using visual discourse analysis. Advertisements addressing buyers of teenage girls’ clothing in Finland, available from January 2019 to June 2020, were examined. Moreover, to examine ethical concerns regarding the privacy invasiveness of contemporary advertising formats, eight (N = 38) focus group discussions (FGD) were conducted to explore children’s perspectives on online profiling and targeted advertisements and their privacy negotiation practices in the digital commercial context. The FGDs were conducted with participants aged 13 to 16 in schools in Finland’s capital region between December 2020 and May 2021. The FGD data was analysed by using thematic analysis. The results suggest that the analysed advertisements portrayed girls in avidly stereotypical ways or used complex images that subtly reproduced stereotypes. While discussing contemporary advertising formats, some participants raised the macro-level ethical concern that targeted advertisements may encourage over-consumption. Some expressed ethical concerns regarding (i) the opacity of online data gathering processes and resultant privacy-invasive advertisements, (ii) experiences of privacy-invasiveness from online profiling, (iii) challenges in opting out of online data collection and (iv) the long-term ramifications of online profiling and targeting in limiting their choices and perspectives. Some children found contemporary online advertising formats unproblematic because they (i) deemed online profiling non-intrusive, (ii) found targeted advertisements helpful, and (iii) considered the monitoring of their previous online activities as “normal”. While navigating contemporary commercial digital environments, children adopted some practices that helped them protect their online commercial privacy, at least to some extent. In contrast, certain practices made them vulnerable to digital commercial surveillance.