Understanding the Extent of Adolescents’ Willingness to Engage With Food and Beverage Companies’ Instagram Accounts: Experimental Survey Study

Abstract

Background Social media platforms have created a new advertising frontier, yet little is known about the extent to which this interactive form of advertising shapes adolescents’ online relationships with unhealthy food brands. Objective We aimed to understand the extent to which adolescents’ preferences for Instagram food ads are shaped by the presence of comments and varying numbers of “likes.” We hypothesized that adolescents would show the highest preferences for ads with more “likes” and comments. We predicted that these differences would be greater among adolescents who were “heavy social media users” (ie, >3 hours daily) vs “light social media users” (ie, <3 hours daily). Methods We recruited Black and non-Latinx White adolescents (aged 13-17 years; N=832) from Dynata, a firm that maintains online participant panels. Participants completed an online survey in which they were randomized to view and rate Instagram food ads that either did or did not show comments. Within each condition, adolescents were randomized to view 4 images that had high (>10,000), medium (1000-10,000), or low (<100) numbers of “likes.” Adolescents reported ad preferences and willingness to engage with the brand. Results Adolescents rated ads with medium or high numbers of “likes” higher than ads with few “likes” (P=.001 and P=.002, respectively). Heavy social media users (>3 hours/day) were 6.366 times more willing to comment on ads compared to light users (P<.001). Conclusions Adolescents interact with brands in ways that mimic interactions with friends on social media, which is concerning when brands promote unhealthy products. Adolescents also preferred ads with many “likes,” demonstrating the power of social norms in shaping behavior. As proposed in 2019, the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act should expand online advertising restrictions to include adolescents aged 12 to 16 years.

The Use of Social Media in Children and Adolescents: Scoping Review on the Potential Risks

“…Out of the reports, 15 dealt with the association of social media use and diet [ 21 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 ]. The problems were related to junk food marketing (9 reports) [ 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ] obesity (4 reports) [ 21 , 41 , 42 , 43 ], unhealthy eating behaviors (3 reports) [ 44 , 45 , 46 ], and alcohol marketing (2 reports) [ 21 , 47 ]. In Table 3 the retrieved articles dealing with social media and diet, and their major findings are presented ( Table 3 ).…”

Food Marketing and Power: Teen-Identified Indicators of Targeted Food Marketing

“…Such calls for effective policy and monitoring related to unhealthy food marketing to children have, in recent years, acknowledged the need to consider the teen audience as well. This stems from growing evidence that teenagers are aggressively targeted by food marketers across the full spectrum of communicative platforms [9]-from television [10], websites [11], and online video platforms [12] to social media [13][14][15][16] and within the built environment. Cultural spaces for teenagers are riddled with persuasive food marketing messages [9,12], which-given their powerful emotional and social appeals-teenagers are generally unable or unwilling to resist ([17] p.29).…”

Associations between State-Level Obesity Rates, Engagement with Food Brands on Social Media, and Hashtag Usage

“…Other studies have found that corporations are utilizing social media platforms such as Instagram, to convert individual social media users into positive advertisers for their unhealthy products [ 19 ]. Adolescents have become primary drivers for said products, and their tendency to interact with brands in ways that mimic interactions between friends makes youth-targeted fast-food and sugary beverage brand social media ads much more harmful [ 18 ]. These results contribute to the literature because we identified a positive correlation between state-level obesity rates and the number of followers of food and beverage brands.…”

“…Our research also differs from previous work in important ways. Previous research on how adolescents engage with food and drink brands examined social media posts themselves [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 31 ] and used self-reported engagement data. In this study, however, we correlated engagement with obesity rates using purchased, more objective engagement data instead of self-reported data [ 16 , 17 , 18 ].…”

“…When rating the images in the survey, though, adolescent respondents reported preferring images from Instagram over traditional mediums [ 17 ]. In separate analyses using the same sample of participants, adolescents viewed and rated food brand images from Instagram that either did or did not show user comments, as well as images that showed either high, medium, or low numbers of “likes.” The researchers found that adolescent respondents rated ads with medium or high numbers of “likes” higher than ads with few “likes.” In addition, the participants who reported heavy social media use were more than six times more willing to comment on brands’ Instagram posts compared to the participants who reported light social media use [ 18 ]. Finally, in a case study, researchers examined a week’s worth of user-generated Instagram content responding to one of KFC’s hashtag campaigns.…”