Advertising Literacy in an Advergame Context. The Moderating Impact of an Advertising Literacy Training Session on Children’s Advertising Vulnerability

This study examines the impact of advergames and the role of an advertising literacy training session for children on their purchase request and behavioral intention in two experiments. The results show that both cognitive and affective advertising literacy are lower for an advergame than for a TV ad. However, only affective advertising literacy mediates the effect of advertising format on purchase request and behavioral intention. when it comes to increasing children’s advertising literacy, a training session accelerates the cognitive (but not the affective) advertising literacy of children, and this especially for the advergame (vs. the TV ad). Finally, the results show that while the training session is effective in decreasing the vulnerability to advertising effects of nine-year-olds, this is not the case for seven-year-old children.