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

Abstract

BackgroundSocial 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. ObjectiveWe 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, 10,000), medium (1000-10,000), or low (3 hours/day) were 6.366 times more willing to comment on ads compared to light users (P<.001). ConclusionsAdolescents 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.