After The Under 16’s Social Media Ban: Where to build awareness with under-16s

From spring 2027, education providers will still be able to reach under-16s, through what they listen to, what the household watches, what they read online and where they physically go. The feed is closing. Their attention is not.

In the first piece in this series we showed why that matters. Across the college application campaigns SHC manages, students drive only around 10% of conversions but around 78% of awareness. This piece covers the practical question that follows: where should that awareness budget go, and what should change in the parent campaigns that still run across paid media?

Stop targeting the person. Target the moment

Paid media lets marketers buy a named audience: 15 year olds, within ten miles, interested in sport. That model was already weakening before the ban. Google does not allow personalised advertising to signed-in users under 18, and the ban now removes under-16s from the main social platforms altogether.

What replaces it is older and simpler. You choose the context, the place or the household, and you accept that the audience is defined by where the ad appears. That gives three questions to plan around:

• What are they listening to or watching? Audio, podcasts and television.

• What are they reading or playing? Contextual display and programmatic.

• Where are they, physically? Outdoor.

  
  

Every channel below answers one of those. None of them will fill in an application form, and none of them is supposed to.

Audio: Spotify and podcast sponsorship

Audio is the closest replacement for the daily habit social used to own. Music streaming sits outside the ban, and Ofcom's Media Nations research found that podcasts and streamed music make up 58% of listening time for 15 to 34 year olds, up from 40% in 2019.

Spotify and streaming audio. Buy by location, time of day and genre or playlist context. A 30 second spot on the journey to school, heard through headphones, gets attention a skippable video rarely did. Write for the ear: say the college name early and more than once, and give one clear thing to remember, such as the open event date.

Podcast sponsorship. This is the underused option. A host-read sponsorship on a show teenagers already follow, covering football, gaming, music or study, borrows the trust that influencer content used to supply. Local and regional shows are affordable and far less crowded than national ones.

Audio's limit is that almost nobody clicks. Judge it on reach, frequency and recall. 

Connected TV: one screen, both decision makers

Connected TV is the only channel that reaches the student and the parent at the same moment. Advertising on streaming services such as ITVX, Channel 4 and Sky is bought by household and postcode, so age data is not needed.

That suits college recruitment well. The decision about where to study at 16 is made at home, between a young person and their parents. A television ad starts that conversation with everyone in the room, which a feed on one person's phone never could.

The trade-offs are cost and craft. Cost per impression is higher than self-services digital channels and a vertical clip filmed on a phone will not hold up on a 50 inch screen. Budget for proper creative, keep the catchment tight, and concentrate spend around open events and application deadlines.

One caution: YouTube is named in the ban. How it applies to signed-out viewing on a shared television is not yet confirmed, so do not build a plan that depends on it.

Contextual display and programmatic

Contextual targeting places the ad beside relevant content and uses no personal data, which makes it the most future-proof way to reach under-16s online. It targets the page, so the viewer's age never enters the buy.

There are two routes, and they do different jobs.

Google contextual targeting. Choose topics, keywords and placements across GDN. It is quick to set up, low cost and easy to keep local. Start with the content Year 11s use during the application window: GCSE revision, careers and apprenticeships, sport, music and gaming.

Programmatic contextual. Bought through a demand-side platform, this adds what Google alone cannot. You can build curated lists of youth publishers, reach in-game and in-app inventory, and buy across display, video and audio in one place with a shared frequency cap. It needs more budget and more management, and it returns more control over where the college appears.

In both cases, brand safety matters more than usual when the audience is under 16. Use inclusion lists of approved sites instead of relying on exclusions, and review placements weekly.

Outdoor advertising 

Outdoor advertising reaches Year 11s with no age check, no account and no algorithm, because it sits on the routes they already take. For a college with a defined catchment, it is also one of the most efficient uses of a local budget.

Plan it around the school day:

• Bus shelters and bus sides on routes serving feeder schools

• Digital screens in town centres, shopping centres and retail parks

• Leisure centres, cinemas and sports grounds

• Rail and tram stations for colleges that recruit across a wider area

Digital outdoor can now be bought programmatically by screen, day and hour. That means a college can run only from 7.30am to 9am and 3pm to 5pm, switch creative for open event week, and stop when applications close.

Outdoor also reaches parents, teachers and grandparents on the same streets. After the ban, those are the people who will carry more of your message to the student.

Building the mix

No single channel replaces paid digital, so the plan has to be a combination. Each one earns its place for a different reason.

Channel	Best for	How you target	Judge it on
Spotify and streaming audio	Daily frequency with students	Location, time of day, genre	Reach, frequency, completed listens
Podcast sponsorship	Trust and credibility	Show and audience fit	Downloads, recall
Connected TV	Student and parent together	Household and postcode	Household reach, completed views
Google contextual	Low-cost local coverage	Topics, keywords, placements	Viewable impressions
Programmatic contextual	Scale and control across formats	Curated publisher lists, in-game, in-app	Viewable reach, frequency
Outdoor	Local presence all day	Routes, screens, time of day	Catchment coverage

A sensible starting point for a college is two or three of these, not all six. Pair one channel students meet daily, such as audio or contextual, with one that reaches the household, such as connected TV or outdoor.

Then match the weight to the calendar. Build awareness from September, peak around autumn open events, and hold a lighter presence through to the application deadline.

For parents, creative is the new targeting

Parents remain fully reachable to paid digital channels, and they already account for around 90% of conversions. The way to reach them has changed, though: broad targeting with specific creative now outperforms narrow targeting with generic creative.

The instinct after the ban will be to slice parent activity ever finer. One campaign per course area, per feeder school, per postcode, per interest group. It feels precise. In practice it spreads the budget so thinly that no single campaign gathers enough data for the platform to optimise, and cost per lead rises across all of them.

The better approach is the opposite. Set the catchment area and a sensible age range, leave the rest broad, and let the platform's algorithm find the people most likely to respond. Then let the creative do the job the audience settings used to do.

An ad that opens with "Is your Year 11 choosing between A levels and a T Level?" selects its own audience. Parents of Year 11s stop and watch. Everyone else scrolls past, and the algorithm learns from both. The message finds the audience more accurately than an interest list ever did.

That changes where the effort goes:

• Fewer campaigns, more creative. Consolidate budget into a small number of broad campaigns and put the variety into the ads.

• Build creative around parent questions. Results and progression, travel and cost, support and safety, careers and university. Each one speaks to a different parent without a separate audience.

• Name the audience in the first three seconds. Year group, subject or decision. That is the targeting.

• Read results by creative. Which messages win tells you what your catchment cares about, and what to make next.

There is a second benefit. With students harder to reach, parent creative has to carry some of the awareness job too. A broad campaign with a range of messages does that. A dozen narrow ones, each repeating the same apply-now ad, does not.

Measuring awareness when nobody clicks

Awareness activity should be judged by what happens to everything else in the plan, not by its own lead count. If it is working, four numbers move.

1. Branded search. More people in your catchment search for the college by name.

2. Direct and organic traffic. Visits to course and open event pages rise without a paid click behind them.

3. Parent cost per lead. Parent campaigns convert more cheaply in the areas where awareness is running.

4. Open event bookings. The clearest sign that a household has had the conversation.

The cleanest way to prove it is a simple geographic test. Run awareness in some postcodes and hold it back in others, then compare parent CPL and applications between the two. 

Struggling to make this cut through for 27/28 academic year? Chat to SHC’s team of paid specialists who are proficient at running further education campaigns where students and parents are most active.