Children's Perspectives of Advertising with Social Robots: A Policy Investigation

Children are beginning to interact and develop rapport with social robots in their homes. These devices pose new concerns around marketing to children. These include questions of how advertisements can and should be embedded in a robot and the robot's persona and which methods of conveying advertisements to the user are deceptive. In this paper, we engage with 62 children ages 9–12 in an activity to design future robot advertising policies. Results demonstrate that children prefer robots to advertise to them through casual conversations, citing a more positive user experience and the benefit of personalized and conversationally relevant advertising. These findings illuminate a tension between child preferences and more deceptive advertising policies. Overall, the work presented in this paper prompts new design and legal policy questions for how and if robots should advertise to children.