Call for Papers

Advertising is a ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives. We are confronted with persuasive messages via different channels, in different situations and – due to the increasing use of hybrid and embedded advertising formats like native advertising, advergames, influencer marketing and product placements – with varying degrees of transparency. The blurring of different media genres and reference frameworks in a complex media environment poses challenges to the recipients. These challenges are particularly hard to master for children and adolescents since they are less experienced in handling commercial messages.

To be able to identify persuasive messages and to process them in a competent way, child, teen, and adult recipients alike need skills such as the ability to recognize, understand, and evaluate advertisements and other commercial messages. These skills can be summarized under the term “advertising literacy”. The extent of how recipients are properly equipped with these skills influences how they further process and reflect persuasive messages.

Recipients’ effort to identify persuasive messages in today’s blurred advertising/media environments can be supported by external factors. For instance, advertising disclosures can help recipients to identify persuasive messages and support their right to decide whether they wish to engage with the persuasive content or not. Furthermore, especially when dealing with children and adolescents, mediation strategies are important to empower young recipients in their process of identifying and recognizing as well as understanding and evaluating persuasive messages. The effectiveness of such factors and how advertising literacy can even be adequately assessed is an ongoing debate in the field.

Deadline for submissions was expanded until the 1st of July.

Call for Papers (PDF)