Why are kids getting distracted by ads so easily?

We live in the age of non-stop content consumption. In the past, the information density was nowhere near where it is now — you simply couldn’t watch TV on the go or take a bulky PC with you on a road trip. Today, everyone has 24/7 access to the Internet in their pocket, and it reflects not only in the volume of the information we consume, but also in the ways we do it. When everything is available to us at any moment, we naturally tend to gravitate towards shorter-form content. It’s so much more appealing to gobble up a few dozen fast-paced TikToks on your commute to work than it is to sit through a single 20-minute video on the history of the Roman Empire, or God forbid, to read a book. This is the price we pay for technological advances, and it takes its toll on our attention span and the ability to concentrate.

It’s already become hard to focus on your task and ignore all the distractions when researching something online, and the ever-present ads don’t exactly help. As Anakin Skywalker used to say, “I don’t like ads. They’re flashy and loud and irritating and they get everywhere,” — or something like that, I am not a Lord of the Rings fan. But at least if you’re a grown-up person, you have it infinitely easier than kids do. The studies have shown that there are several objective reasons why children can’t resist the distracting nature of ads.

One research study has demonstrated that kids physically can’t avert their eyes from animated ads (guess what — coincidentally, many ads are!). 25 children in Sweden aged around 9 were tasked with surfing the web while eye-tracking cameras were registering their eye movement. Over the 7 minutes they were surfing, an average of 15 ads showed up, about 20 seconds each — this adds up to 5 minutes of the 7 allocated to the test. The longer the ad stayed on the screen, the higher was the chance that the kid would get distracted, with animated ads catching the children’s attention more often than static ones.

In another similar test the researchers measured how well the children in two age groups could fix and control their gaze. 45 children aged 9 and 12 were instructed to ignore a pop-up when it appeared and to look to the other side of the screen. While twelve-year-olds showed comparatively better results, nine-year-olds only managed to complete the task 2 times out of 10. And don’t assume that ads only distract kids who are working on their homework or researching for a science project. In another test, researchers investigated how well children can concentrate on a game while being bombarded with ads. Spoiler — not very well either. But children’s inability to concentrate on a task and ignore ads is only half of the problem.

In another experiment, the researchers developed a mobile app where participants could play a game, which was occasionally interrupted by pop-up ads. At the same time, they were also asked to watch a 14-minute video of an American football game on a TV. This setup was supposed to imitate how an average user could interact with ads in a real-life setting. When the participants had finished with the game and the video, the researchers asked them questions about their recall of the pop-up ads, and the results were somewhat surprising. The greater the participants’ engagement with the game was, the better they remembered the ads. The rate of ad recall was even higher when all the “attention grabbers” (the game, the video, and the ads) were shown on the same screen.

“Our study suggests that when people are highly focused on a ‘distracting’ task such as playing a game on their phone while watching TV, and that task is interrupted, it automaticity causes the mind to process both task and interruption as a single event,” explain the researchers. Pair this effect with the kids’ natural predisposition to distractions, and you have an explosive mix on your hands. Kids get distracted easily and often, which, in turn, leads to them absorbing the information in the ad like a sponge. And we know how damaging some of the stuff being advertised can be for adults, let alone children: junk food, vaping, gambling websites, alcohol.

So what do we do? It’s not the 90s anymore, you can’t isolate your children from the internet, and you can’t always stand over their shoulder to make sure they don’t get any wrong ideas from the ads they watch. A way better solution is to prevent ads from making their way onto your kids’ phones, tablets, and PCs. Install an ad blocker on all your kids’ devices, or set up a DNS-based ad blocker on your home router to protect everything at once. Consider getting a network-wide software like AdGuard Home so you could manage the permissions for all the devices connected to your home Wi-Fi and monitor their web activity. Remember that kids don’t have the ability to resist the ads like adults do — and let’s be fair, not many adults can boast this skill anyway. It’s best to be one step ahead and make sure your children don’t get exposed to a myriad of online ads in the first place.