Emily Steel. Wall Street Journal (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jul 2, 2007. p. B.3.

Steel reports the findings of a study conducted by a private company in which a survey about attitudes towards internet advertising was administered to 1,200 children between the ages of 9 and 17.  Predictably, the study found that children and teens dislike banner ads in particular, and advertising which interrupts their internet use in general.  Surprisingly, the study produced one finding which was more encouraging: children and teens did occasionally like widgets which they could use on their social-networking sites.  In fact, 20% of teens surveyed had downloaded marketing content in the month previous to the survey.  However, a number of factors influenced this.  Widgets are more attractive to this population when they can enhance the personalization of their site and when accompanied by incentives like coupons, giveaways, or entertaining tools.  Perhaps the most important and attractive characteristic of widgets is that they give some amount of control to consumers, who get to choose what they download and when.  Like all advertising, though, widgets have their drawbacks in that they do not necessarily convert to purchase behavior.  In view of all the studies which find consumers actively avoiding advertising, discovering one type of advertising which some consumers actively seek out may be encouraging to advertisers.

Of course, this source does not report the methodology behind the study, which brings the validity of its conclusions into question.  However, if the results are accurate, they provide a number of intersting contributions to the literature.  For one, they examine attitudes toward advertising according to age, instead of by gender or, more commonly, by grouping all consumers together.  This distinction is especially important with regards to the internet as a medium because of all internet users, children and teens have been immersed for all their lives in internet use, advertising, and norms, perhaps affecting how they have come to view internet advertising.  Attitudes of younger generations will also continue to be relevant for many decades as they grow older and increase in buying power.  The results of this study also narrowly consider one particular type of internet advertising which utilizes widgets, instead of internet advertising broadly or only banner ads, which can probably be safely reported to be disliked.  This points advertisers to a type of internet advertising which could be useful in the future, as well as to unique attributes behind it which may help them target ads and understand consumers better.

*Because this was not an academic study, I was not able to access the actual study results, only this article.