Key points
- In two weeks, 204 young people saw more than 5000 ‘dark marketing’ ads for harmful products including alcohol and gambling.
- In the same period, 194 advertisers uploaded data about them.
- VicHealth wants collection of people’s data for marketing of harmful products regulated and only allowed with informed consent.
At 23, Requia Mohamed can recognise how “dark marketing” ads on social media that are individually targeted at young people, including her, weave their spells.
As a younger person, all she could see was “how enticing and how colourful they are; the little slogans are really catchy and stick in your head”. “I didn’t want to be missing out on any of these trends,” she said.
Requia Mohamed, a youth worker and master’s student, thinks advertisers using highly specific dark marketing to get young people hooked on harmful products should be better regulated.Credit:Darrian Traynor
Dark marketing is transient content that does not appear on any of the advertiser’s mainstream branding or marketing platforms, making it almost impossible to monitor.
The profiling of young people for targeting by fleeting ads for harmful industries is so pervasive that when 204 volunteered to have their digital data studied by Queensland University researchers, the average young person had 194 advertisers upload information about them in two weeks.
Their online activity, as observed by platform algorithms, generated an average 787 “interests” about each of them. “Interests” is a term used by the platform Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, to describe a person’s habits that can be used to create a consumer profile of them.
During the study, the volunteers, aged between 16 and 25, screenshot ads from their feeds. Researchers identified 5169 instances of “dark marketing” for harmful products including alcohol, gambling, and junk food and drinks.
Young men were swamped with gambling ads; young women with pink alcohol ads showing fun drinking situations. Young people were targeted according to gender and the socioeconomic status the algorithm deemed to be theirs.
“It’s dark in the sense the only people who can see the ads are the people the ad is targeting,” said Nic Carah, director of digital culture and societies at Queensland University.
“It [advertising] loses its public character, and that matters because our regulatory frameworks are based on the public being able to see what they’re doing.”
One 18-year-old from Melbourne received an ad for a bar in Traralgon straight after visiting a friend in the regional town, saying “it surprised me how quickly the localised ad appeared”.
It’s strange that an energy-saving device is being promoted as something you can use to get free alcohol.
Another snapped an ad offering them slabs of beer in exchange for excess solar power. “It’s strange that an energy-saving device is being promoted as something you can use to get free alcohol,” she said.
Carah, who is the lead researcher of the project commissioned by VicHealth, noted an “explosion” in ads for hard seltzer drinks – alcoholic soda drinks with fruit flavours.
The hard seltzer trend has transformed the US drinking market and taken off in Australia, and messaging for the drinks can stray into “healthier for you” territory.
“Particularly for young women, they’re marketed as low-calorie and preservative-free,” said Carah.
The young people “were horrified when they became more mindful of the sheer volume of targeted marketing of products that were harmful”, said VicHealth’s Emma Saleeba. “They said the ads were creepy and manipulative.”
It was worrying that almost all the screenshot ads could not be seen anywhere else, Saleeba said, as it meant regulation was nigh on impossible.
“It’s very important the types of marketing tactics by these companies can be scrutinised and monitored, and at the moment, it’s very, very challenging for regulators, or parents, or anyone else who is concerned.”
The body wants far more comprehensive regulations developed to govern advertising for harmful industries to young people, rather than industry-led voluntary codes.
“We need a legislated framework with meaningful sanctions that ensures greater transparency,” Saleeba said.
She said the collection of personal data for the marketing of harmful products should not be permitted without express opted-in consent, and the collection of children’s data should not be permitted.
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