On September 1st, history will be written without warning anyone. The platforms will have to verify the age of their new registrants, and minors under 15 will no longer be able to open an account. Accounts that are already active benefit from a reprieve until January 1, 2027, when they must be closed. The text, carried by MP Laure Miller and validated by a large majority by the Assembly and the Senate, makes France the first country in the European Union to establish such a rule, subject to the green light from the Constitutional Council. For sports brands, which have made TikTok and Instagram their main hunting grounds with the 2010 generation, an entire part of the strategy is losing its playing field.
The paradox is cruel. This age group, 11-14 year olds, is precisely where what specialists call brand imprinting takes place: the age where a teenager decides that Nike, Adidas or a rising gem like On or Hoka is now part of their identity, well before having the purchasing power to buy it themselves. Studies on adolescent preferences confirm this year after year: the trio Nike, Adidas and Puma remains firmly established at the top of the brands cited by middle and high school students, driven by a virality that plays out in a few hours on a social network. A sweatshirt spotted in a story, a pair of sneakers that explode live, and the preference crystallizes even before the first visit to the store. Removing this age group from the channel where everything is at stake amounts to cutting formatting at the source, at the precise moment when it produces its most lasting effects.
Influencer marketing loses its most malleable target
The figures of Launchmetrics (software and data platform that helps fashion, luxury and beauty brands manage their campaigns, organize their events and measure their media impact, Editor’s note.) on the media impact of sports brands in France are clear and precise. Adidas builds more than a third of its visibility on content creators, Fila and Converse derive more than half of their media value from influencers alone, and Nike generates twenty times more impact through creators than through its own accounts. This model is based on a young, captive audience who follows their digital idols with an assiduity that traditional advertising campaigns no longer achieve. Depriving brands of direct access to under-15s does not kill marketing influence, but it cuts off the most receptive segment, the one who has not yet developed the advertising skepticism specific to older people.
Still, the law leaves doors open that strategists are already beginning to explore. Educational sharing platforms, scientific directories and certain digital projects with an educational vocation escape the text, just like YouTube and WhatsApp, the regime of which will still have to be clarified by MP Laure Miller herself. Gaming and worlds like Fortnite or Roblox, where sports brands are already increasing virtual collaborations, are also not qualified as social networks within the meaning of the law. For equipment manufacturers, the challenge in the coming months therefore consists less of mourning a closed channel than of reinjecting budget towards what remains accessible: the local club, the adult prescriber, the physical event, and video game worlds where attachment to a brand is built just as effectively, without even going through a personal account.
There is also, in this law, an opportunity that few marketing departments dare to express out loud. Brand loyalty among teens has proven to be worryingly volatile in recent seasons… with more than half of young people surveyed saying they had changed their preferences in less than a year. A system that slows down early and repetitive exposure could, paradoxically, strengthen the value of brands that will be able to capture this generation later, in high school, with messages that are more constructed and less dependent on the algorithm of the moment.
Alain Jouve
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
