My now five-year-old son was never very good at supermarkets when he was a toddler.
Or, to put it another way, he was exceptionally good at having massive, aisle-shaking tantrums in supermarkets when he was a toddler, usually after being told we were there to buy groceries, not to buy 18 toy cars.
This is why I quickly developed a well-planned route around my local store to avoid the toys aisle, while developing a range of distraction techniques to stop him remembering it.
This is also why the angriest I’ve ever been with any company ever, pretty much, was the day I turned into the tinned-veg aisle to find a craftily-hung display of Hot Wheels toys.
Cue toddler meltdown, and parental fury. At least only one of us threw ourselves on the floor kicking and screaming at a volume audible in three counties. But look, I couldn’t help myself, etc etc.
But yes, unexpected advertising aimed at your children can be annoying, which is why I can see how some parents may have been cross at finding ads in the recently-released YouTube Kids app, if they didn’t expect them.
That disgruntlement has turned into a formal complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission from a group of children’s and consumer advocacy groups, accusing Google of “unfair and deceptive practices” in the app. The FTC says it is now going to “review the concerns raised by these groups”.
Knee-jerk response: Google is evil! YouTube Kids is a pernicious threat to our children’s online innocence, designed to groom them into unquestioning consumers bowing down to the Googleplex! Pfft...
Or, knee-jerk response: who are these idiots? Clueless souls who hadn’t realised there were ads on YouTube? Or opportunistic scaremongers looking for another reason to pile on to Google? Pfft...
Either would make for a cracking opinion column, at least on the K. Hopkins provocation scale. Boringly, though, the truth is somewhere in between the two, with more thought and less jerk involved.
‘Hordes of children are already watching videos on YouTube’
The FTC complaint raises some important issues about the blurring boundaries between children’s entertainment and advertising that we need to talk about. But I think YouTube is grappling with these issues, rather than just cynically exploiting them.
The company certainly never hid the fact that ads would be part of YouTube Kids, which was released as an Android and iOS app in February in the US.
“It was really important for us to make the app free and available to everyone, therefore it’s ad-supported,” product manager Shimrit Ben-Yair told the Guardian when the app launched in the US in February. “We are taking a similar approach with the ads as with the content: narrowing it to what is family-friendly.”
An important point: YouTube Kids is in part a response to the fact that hordes of children are already watching videos on YouTube, most while logged in to their parents’ accounts, with no restrictions on what ads (or, indeed, what videos) they might see.
YouTube Kids is a walled garden on both counts, with YouTube’s team screening videos and ads alike for their appropriateness. If as a parent you don’t want your children watching ads, you have the choice not to use the app, just as you have the choice to not let them watch ad-funded TV channels.
Personally, I’m still more cross about toy cars in the tomatoes aisle than I am about ads in a children’s app that I can choose not to install.
For me, ads are an opportunity for a chat with my kids – admittedly, sometimes a stern chat about why they can’t have an expensive new toy just because they saw it on a screen – but I understand that other parents would prefer to avoid them for as long as possible.
The FTC complaint about YouTube Kids raises some more important points, though, about what happens when the lines are blurred between entertainment and advertising. That’s an important discussion to have out in the open in 2015, as it relates to the digital world.
‘Fun Toyz Collector is the biggest channel of all on YouTube’
One example: unboxing channels, where toys (and a surprising number of Kinder Eggs) are unboxed and shown off for massive audiences of online kids. Fun Toyz Collector is the biggest channel of all on YouTube with 427m views in February alone, with peers It’s Baby Big Mouth and Blu Toys notching up 228m and 205m views respectively that month.
“Many of the video segments endorsing toys, candy and other products that appear to be ‘user-generated’ have undisclosed relationships with product manufacturers in violation of the FTC’s guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising,” claims the FTC complaint.
Until recently, nobody even knew who the creator of Fun Toyz Collector was, let alone whether she was taking money from toy firms for any of her videos.
Pushing for more transparency in this area is a sensible move, and is part of a wider debate about whether YouTubers should be subject to similar rules to TV channels on disclosing sponsorships and product placement.
The advocacy groups are also concerned about branded channels on YouTube, from My Little Pony and Barbie to Fisher Price, Lego and McDonald’s. Their letter to the FTC asks for an investigation into how these channels mix entertainment with ads, suggesting that often, they’re more of the latter.
Welcome to the world of “branded entertainment”, which is hardly a new thing in the children’s world – I grew up with He-Man and Transformers, longform toy ads in cartoon form – but which is growing rapidly on YouTube.
Pretty much every major toy brand, as well as apps like Angry Birds and Talking Friends, are spawning “webisodes” on YouTube as well as traditional ads, which often sit side-by-side within the same channel. Lego, in 2015, makes films and TV shows as well as toys, remember.
Again, the argument is over whether YouTube should be regulated in the same way that TV channels are on these issues. Should the team at YouTube Kids be including branded channels in the first place, and if they do, should they be labelling the ads more clearly as ads? It’s a discussion worth having.
‘Should we be exploring ways to pay for content?’
The FTC will decide whether further action is needed, and that will influence what YouTube does next for its youngest viewers and their parents. But just like most controversies around kids and digital, this all raises some questions for parents, and the choices they are making around their children’s digital entertainment.
Should we be making sure we’re aware of what our kids are watching online and whether ads are part of that? Definitely. Should we be exploring ways to pay for content rather than rely on free, ad-supported sources? Maybe, if we can afford it.
There are burgeoning children’s sections on Netflix and Amazon, and an emerging crop of child-focused, ad-free subscription services like Hopster and PlayKids to consider too.
(In the UK, of course, parents are lucky in having the BBC and its free and ad-free iPlayer app, which has plenty of CBeebies and CBBC shows to stream.)
As things stand, YouTube Kids doesn’t have an option to pay a monthly subscription to remove the ads. Perhaps the FTC investigation will nudge YouTube into trying the idea, which is when we’ll find out how many parents are concerned enough to spend money on it.
The basic idea of advertising funding children’s entertainment isn’t new or shocking, but the importance of that advertising being appropriate, clearly highlighted as ads, and carefully regulated – which includes looking at whether the old regulations for TV are fit for the online, on-demand world – is clear.
If an FTC investigation into YouTube Kids helps Google and other tech firms continue to develop responsible policies for the children using their services, that’s a good thing. Likewise if it helps more parents make informed choices about their children’s digital entertainment.
If it can expand into addressing the issue of dangling diecast vehicles in front of hair-trigger-temper toddlers when their parents are just looking for pasta-sauce ingredients... well, Bishop’s Stortford supermarkets are well out of the FTC’s remit. But I might just send them a letter...