Kids today are watching more video content than ever before. Shrouded by legitimate concerns about online child safety, online video still provides a huge opportunity for advertisers but only if safety comes first.
For those brands looking to safely reach an under 13s audience, YouTube is prime real estate - and by understanding the possible pitfalls and steps to overcome them, there’s no reason why brands can’t advertise safely to kids. Here are some tips to get you started.
1. Understand COPPA Compliance
Complying with COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) is critical for brands targeting an under 13s audience. Among other things, COPPA prohibits advertisers from collecting cookie data and using retargeting to reach young audiences.
For brands and agencies, working with a trusted third-party that understands the complexities of COPPA Compliance will ensure the privacy and compliance necessary to reach this regulated target audience.
2. Prioritise brand safety
The key to ensuring your videos don’t end up appearing next to the wrong content or being served to the wrong audiences - to the detriment of your brand - is to understand what you’re buying in the pre-bid phase. Doing so will deliver the control necessary to ensure brand safety.
Kid-safe contextual targeting with the highest possible brand safety, which works through a combination of AI, natural language processing and human verification to place ads alongside videos, gives brands the ability to advertise on a video-by-video (rather than channel) basis.
3. Know who is behind the screen
When it comes to reaching kids through YouTube, it’s worth noting the high volume of device sharing within families as well as the variety of ways in which YouTube is consumed by the ‘under 13s’ audience, such as co-viewing between parents and toddlers.
This drives home the power of video-level contextual targeting, which can reach the right audience in each moment, regardless of how they are consuming.
4. Overcome the pitfalls of channel targeting
Most third-party video advertising solutions in the market for YouTube use channel-level targeting, aligning branded advertising material to content channels across YouTube. The trouble with this approach is that it lacks the nuance necessary to understand and evaluate individual videos for relevance and safety, especially where the toy category is concerned.
For instance, advertising a toy aimed at boys aged 8 to 12 years old on an influential ‘unboxer’s channel’ only to find that same channel promoting videos of Nerf guns alongside Barbie Dolls, makes audience alignment difficult and drives up wastage.
Opting for contextually-driven video-level targeting will help avoid the wastage that comes from channel-level targeting.
5. Learn from insights
Predictive analytics helps to identify which content is most likely to move the needle on brand awareness and purchase intent.
By using analytics to inform and optimise ongoing and future campaigns, brands can improve the outcomes for their ads. For example, children’s brand Zuru used Precise TV to drive a 24.2% lift in product awareness and a 19.1% lift in purchase intent for one of their toy products.
Despite the potential risks, it’s never been safer for kids’ brands to advertise online. By partnering with a third-party expert that understands the possible pitfalls and steps to overcome them, brands and advertisers can ensure the safety and compliance of their video advertising.
To learn more about advertising safely to kids on YouTube, download PreciseTV’s free guide: precise.tv/kids
Topics: coppa, kids marketing, kids advertising, youtube, kidsafe, Kids