In 2025, marketing to kids is no longer about jingles on Saturday morning cartoons or sugar-laced cereal boxes placed at eye level. Today’s children are digital natives raised in a world of AI-powered influencers, personalized content algorithms, and immersive digital ecosystems that track their behaviors in real time. As the line between content and advertising blurs beyond recognition, so too does the boundary between influence and manipulation.
Marketing to children has always been controversial, but in this era—where screens outnumber swings and brands talk to toddlers in their own language—it’s reached an inflection point. The question isn’t whether kids are being targeted by marketers; it’s whether society is ready to reckon with the long-term consequences.
The New Landscape of Childhood Consumption
Children under 13 are now active consumers in digital spaces where ads are indistinguishable from content. According to recent studies, over 70% of children between ages 6 and 12 regularly watch YouTube or similar platforms, often encountering content laced with influencer partnerships, product placements, and embedded sponsorships. Many of these children can identify logos before they can read fluently.
What’s changed in 2025 is not just the volume of marketing aimed at kids, but its precision and personalization. With the advent of AI-powered recommendation engines, marketers can analyze a child’s engagement patterns to deliver hyper-targeted content. Whether it’s recommending a new toy based on TikTok trends or nudging an in-app purchase after analyzing gameplay behavior, brands can now market to kids in ways that are subtle, seamless—and sometimes insidious.
The Rise of Kidfluencers and Branded Childhoods
Perhaps the most telling shift in recent years is the explosion of “kidfluencers”—children as young as four or five with millions of followers, lucrative brand deals, and full-time content schedules. These pint-sized celebrities don’t just advertise toys; they are the toy, the show, and the brand, all rolled into one.
For young audiences, the persuasive power of a peer recommending a product is exponentially more effective than traditional ads. A toy doesn’t need to be demonstrated in a glossy commercial when it’s being unboxed by a cheerful 8-year-old with relatable energy and parental approval. But this approach raises critical ethical questions: Who’s really in control? The child? The parents? The marketers?
And what does it mean for a generation of children to grow up seeing their peers not just as friends or classmates, but as marketing tools?
Surveillance as a Service
Behind every “recommended for you” video or personalized ad lies a trail of data. Cookies, behavioral trackers, and AI-driven analytics are quietly building detailed profiles on children’s habits, preferences, and psychological triggers. Though laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and its international equivalents attempt to place guardrails around data collection, enforcement is limited and often reactive.
In 2025, most apps aimed at children include some form of telemetry, collecting behavioral insights under the guise of “user experience improvement.” And while companies claim anonymization and compliance, breaches, loopholes, and workarounds remain common.
This surveillance doesn’t just threaten privacy—it amplifies the effectiveness of manipulative advertising. When brands know exactly how a 10-year-old interacts with a game, what makes them laugh, or when they tend to spend money, they can craft experiences that nudge behavior with near-clinical precision.
Is There Such a Thing as Ethical Marketing to Children?
There’s a growing debate among marketers, educators, and ethicists about whether ethical marketing to kids is even possible. Children, especially those under 12, lack the critical thinking skills to distinguish between content and advertising, persuasion and information. Their brains are literally still forming, which makes them uniquely vulnerable to influence.
Some argue that educational or “positive” marketing—say, promoting healthy food, science kits, or sustainability messages—is justified. But even well-meaning campaigns can be problematic when they rely on the same manipulative techniques used to sell sugar or screen time.
At the core of the issue is consent. Kids cannot meaningfully consent to being marketed to, let alone surveilled or nudged. This creates a power imbalance that is hard to justify, no matter how noble the product or message.
Parental Pressure and Digital Parenting Gaps
While marketers are getting more sophisticated, most parents are stuck playing catch-up. Many don’t fully understand how algorithmic feeds work, how data is collected, or how their child’s digital footprint is expanding with every tap and swipe.
Parental controls are often limited or ineffective. Moreover, many parents—juggling work, exhaustion, and limited tech literacy—end up leaning on screens as babysitters, inadvertently opening the door to corporate influence.
In some cases, parents are even complicit in the commodification of their children, turning family vlogs and child-led product reviews into income streams. On platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, family influencers blur the line between parenthood and production studio, often without clear guidelines, oversight, or protections for the child.
Regulation: Too Little, Too Slow?
In the past few years, regulators have attempted to step in. COPPA, first enacted in 1998 and updated sparingly since, remains the main federal law protecting children’s online privacy in the U.S. But it’s hopelessly outdated in the face of AI-driven marketing, cross-platform data collection, and evolving digital ecosystems.
Internationally, the UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code and the EU’s Digital Services Act offer stronger frameworks, requiring companies to consider the developmental stages of young users and limit data collection. But enforcement remains challenging, especially against multinational tech companies operating across jurisdictions.
What’s needed is not just piecemeal reform, but a complete rethinking of how childhood is protected in the digital marketplace. This includes:
- Stronger data protections for minors
- Clear labeling of all marketing content
- Age-verification systems that are privacy-preserving
- Limits on behavioral advertising to children
- Transparency around algorithms and personalization
Until regulators catch up, the burden falls on parents and civil society to push back.
The Psychology of Influence: When Kids Internalize the Brand
One of the most troubling aspects of modern marketing to children is not the immediate transaction—a toy sold, a game downloaded—but the long-term identity formation it shapes. Kids don’t just buy products; they absorb the values behind them.
When a child identifies with a brand—say, a fashion label they see influencers wearing, or a gaming franchise that dominates their friend group—it becomes part of their social currency. Their preferences, behaviors, and self-worth become entangled with consumption.
In 2025, brand identity is increasingly inseparable from digital identity. Kids learn to present themselves online, curate their profiles, and even think in memes or branded content formats. This creates a feedback loop: the more a brand is engaged with, the more it is rewarded by algorithms, and the more it shapes the culture.
It’s not just that kids are marketed to. They are marketing themselves, shaped by invisible corporate hands.
What Can Be Done?
If marketing to children is to be made safer, it will require a coordinated effort across sectors—tech, education, government, and families. Here are some steps that could help:
Media Literacy Education
Schools should teach children how to recognize advertising, understand persuasive intent, and question the messages they receive online. Critical thinking must be a core component of digital citizenship.
Parental Empowerment
Tech companies should offer clearer, simpler tools for parents to control content and data collection. Governments should support public awareness campaigns that explain how algorithmic content works and how to monitor it.
Corporate Responsibility
Companies that target kids must adopt higher ethical standards. This means going beyond legal compliance and actively avoiding manipulative design patterns like dark UX, endless scroll, or disguised ads.
Whistleblower Protections and Watchdogs
Internal industry whistleblowers can play a critical role in revealing unethical practices. Governments and nonprofits must fund independent watchdogs to hold companies accountable.
Child-Centric Design
Platforms and apps used by children should be designed with their developmental needs in mind—not to maximize engagement, but to promote well-being. This means age-appropriate UX, limits on monetization, and greater transparency.
The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher
The way we market to children today will shape the consumers, citizens, and thinkers of tomorrow. If we continue down the current path—normalizing surveillance, blurring truth and advertising, and monetizing childhood attention—we risk raising a generation that is hyper-commercialized, addicted to digital validation, and skeptical of their own autonomy.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
2025 could be the year we reclaim childhood from the grip of corporate influence. Not by banning all marketing, but by reimagining it. By asking hard questions. By holding the powerful accountable. And by remembering that children are not mini-consumers—they are human beings, still forming, still learning, still vulnerable.
Let’s give them the space to grow up without a price tag on their play.
