Advertisers wrote off children’s audiences, but age checks could restore their value

Every parent knows this scene from the supermarket. A child at the shelf decides what ends up in the basket, and someone else pays the bill. Yet advertisers have spent years walking away from exactly this group.

Jo Redfern, SVP digital at UK firm Coolabi and a former strategist at the BBC, Disney and WWE, says on LinkedIn that low value is not behind the exodus. “Advertisers stopped buying kids media inventory long before talk of bans because measurement is thin and the word ‘compliance’ gives folks the jitters,” she wrote. For years, children’s inventory sold below its price, until the market began to confuse weak supply with an audience that has no value of its own.

Thin measurement and fear of regulation

Redfern separates what the market long tied together. Measurement of ad exposure among children is weak, and the word compliance puts brands off, because working with minors’ data means parental consent, deleting records and legal risk. That does not mean the screen hides a worthless viewer. “That they are a low value audience is simply not true,” Redfern writes. In her view, the children’s ad market took a hit for reasons that have nothing to do with the real buying power of the audience.

The audience that decides the family basket

The numbers back Redfern. According to a Salsify survey from January 2026, which covered around 3,000 shoppers in the US, UK and Canada, more than 40% of parents say their Generation Alpha children influence household spending in some way. Razorfish research with GWI goes further. Collected in late October and early November 2024 among around 2,300 American children aged 9 to 13, it found that 61% of children have the final say on what car the family buys, and the same share strongly influences what the household eats.

The influence is moving straight into the basket. PwC’s US survey from the start of the 2026 school year found that 61% of parents let children take some form of direct part in online shopping, and 58% of those parents name children as the biggest factor shaping their back-to-school purchases. Redfern cites the same data when she writes that more than half of parents let children add items straight to the cart. A brand building a relationship with a ten-year-old viewer today is buying an affinity that may last into adulthood.

Age checks change the shape of the inventory

Since January 2026 the gaming platform Roblox requires facial age estimation for access to chat, and it splits users into six age bands to separate communication between minors and adults. The company frames this as a safety measure and a response to growing concern about child protection.

Redfern sees a business opportunity. Once a platform can reliably tell age apart, inventory emerges that can be assembled to measure and booked at the planning stage. She names SuperAwesome, Lumee and Wildbrain as firms building solutions around such an environment. The UK company SuperAwesome, which Epic Games bought in 2020 and whose advertising assets were later bought back by its management, builds tools for safe monetisation and parental consent. It says it provides a safe digital environment for more than 500 million children a month.

A substitute intervention for family brands

The second wave of pressure comes from nationwide bans. In December 2025 Australia became the first country to enforce a ban on social media for under-16s, with fines of up to A$49.5 million for repeated breaches. In November 2025 the European Parliament backed, in a non-binding vote, a similar age limit of 16, with an exception for 13 to 15 year olds with parental consent. Family brands that have bought reach on social networks will need somewhere else to put it.

Redfern is aiming at public broadcasters and owners of strong brands. Public broadcasting is becoming a competitive choice for advertisers who count families among their customers. And owners of brands that parents recognise, from Hello Kitty through Harry Potter to Pokémon, can package rare ad placements inside their closed environments and offer partners valuable inventory. For the European market this is a close topic. The planned European rules point in the same direction as the Australian law, so Czech family brands will also run into more expensive and harder to reach ad exposure on open networks sooner than they expect.

Redfern concludes that bans and age restrictions do not necessarily remove an addressable audience. “They’re an opportunity to reallocate inventory and make the audience valuable again to certain advertisers,” she writes. The key remains proving value. “Surely demonstrating value is a way to start mending the economics.” The children’s audience has not disappeared. It is simply moving into environments where it can finally be measured and sold.