Have you ever heard the word “warning”? Don’t feel stupid if you haven’t. The term is only about ten years old and is barely spoken outside of advertising circles.
So what is an advergame? An advergame is a video game used to promote a brand, product or message. And, “advergaming,” as it’s called, is an increasingly popular way to get kids under 12 to fall in love with food brands.
Take Kellogg’s Rice Krispie website. It has more than a dozen games for preschool and kindergarten children. The site is branded and the sets feature Kellogg’s breakfast items. In one game, players must move a bowl under a row of funnels to catch a variety of Kellogg-brand cereals. In another game, players help Rice Krispie characters put cocoa beans into bowls.
And Kellogg’s isn’t alone in using advertising gimmicks to promote children’s cereal in any way. General Mills’ breakfast cereal, Lucky Charms, has its own website complete with games, an adventure club, books, and secret content.
While the ad games themselves are fun, educational, and seemingly harmless, they don’t fit comfortably into government guidelines for healthy eating and physical activity. Most countries have dietary guidelines. Many countries have laws in place that are supposed to 메이저사이트 ensure that companies do not market junk food to children under the age of 12. With the rise of gaming as a recreational activity in recent years, several countries have recently developed healthy screen time guidelines for children.
So, given that societies are very concerned about the health of future generations, it seems that when a food company uses online games to sell sugary foods to children under the age of twelve, something is not quite right. At worst, there is a complete disconnect between promising to keep children healthy and actually doing it. At best, it’s just a weird juxtaposition of means and ends where shareholders benefit the most from this clever marketing approach.
When you combine the rise of advergaming with the fact that many parents use video games and other sedentary activities as babysitters and that many of us are too busy to cook from scratch, the increasing use of games for children, young children, fall in love love for junk food is something that parents should keep in mind. After all, neither governments nor corporations are ultimately responsible for what our children play and eat. We are.