The online environment Jessica visits is fairly typical of the virtual playgrounds designed for kids. The following are common online strategies used on sites for young children:

• Cross-marketing: Companies team up to create huge merchandising bonanzas.  In this case, we saw an entertainment company (Fantasy Land) and a restaurant chain (Big Burger) join forces.

• Bells and whistles: Site designers attract kids with bold graphics and animation; interactive games; contests; and branded merchandise, such as online colouring books, promotional screen savers, tee-shirts, and e-mail postcards.  Jessica encountered many of these marketing strategies.
  

Brand characters: The promotion of brand characters, animated spokescharacters or animals is an effective marketing tool that helps build strong brand awareness and attachment to a product. Remember, Jessica recognized the characters on the Big Burger Web site from TV.

Jessica's mother did the right thing to read the privacy statement beforehand. But let's take another look at some key points in this statement:

We adhere to the FTC guidelines for compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and Rule.

Read: According to this legislation, Web sites must disclose their information gathering practices from children under the age of thirteen. But this legislation doesn't regulate marketing practices, so we can market our products to your child as aggressively as we wish.

Personal information posted to the Big Burger site becomes our property. It is used for internal purposes only, such as marketing and research and will not be sold to third parties.

Read: It's our property and we'll use this information to sell Big Burger products. Don't be surprised if your child receives promotional email from us.

Big Burger offers an "opt-out" feature that allows you to remove your and/or your kids' email address from our files at any time.

Read: It's up to you to withdraw your child's name from the Big Burger mailing list.

Big Burger also uses "cookie" technology to obtain non-personal information. This technology helps us track visitors to our site and analyze it in aggregate form ...'Cookies' allow us to update and improve our site for our visitors.

Read: Thank you for visiting our site and providing us with information we obtained from a file on your hard drive -- specifically the places on our site you visited and how long you stayed.  This information enables us to target our market much more effectively.

In the end, Jessica is one of hundreds of children to receive an e-mail message promoting Big Burger's new meal deal, new shops, and their exciting new game.