Currently browsing posts about: Marketing to kids

The FTC has released its new report on food marketing to kids.  The big news?  The food industry only spends $1.6 billion for this purpose, a figure nobody I know believes.  The FTC had to subpoena this information and I’m sure that companies gave the lowest number they could.  Kellogg may spend $32 million just for media advertising for Cheez-Its, but I’m sure it’s hard for the company to figure out how much of that goes for packages with cartoons on them.  The FTC press release compliments food companies for all the great things they are doing to protect kids from what they used to do.  It makes recommendations that begin with words like “work toward,” “encourage,” “continue,” and “consider,” but nothing much that says “stop!”  I think $1.6 billion is likely to be an underestimate but it doesn’t really matter.  The number should be zero, no?

Thanks to Michele Simon for the heads up on the Federal Trade Commission’s new report on how much the food industry spends on marketing to kids.  The FTC is releasing the report Tuesday at 11:00 a.m.  I can’t wait to see what it says.  View the webcast!

My Canadian correspondent, Yoni Freedhoff, tells me (and his blog readers) that Coca-Cola has an ad in the Canadian Medical Journal assuring doctors that the company has not marketed its products to children for the last 50 years.  This is news to me.  Aren’t you happy to know this?

The giant food company, Nestlé (no relation), says it will not join the food industry’s voluntary efforts to stop marketing junk foods to kids.   Why not?  Here’s one guess: maybe the company doesn’t want to make promises it knows it can’t keep.

I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area giving a bunch of talks. An agricultural engineer who works for USDA – and must have sneaked off work to come to one of them yesterday – tells me that if you look up the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) schedule, you get a message from Nestlé’s Nesquik “inviting all BART riders to take the Chocolate Line to their own Happy Place on Sunday, May 4, 2008.” Cartoon characters! Free rides for kids! Yummy marketing!

So the British food industry has this brilliant idea: let’s ask kids what they like to eat. And, presumably, give it to them. The plan is to host a one-day conference for this purpose. I’m truly astonished. I thought food companies already invested fortunes in finding out what kids like.  Junk food, mostly.  So let’s give them credit for at least raising the possibility of healthier options.  I, of course, have this old-fashioned idea that kids don’t innately know what’s good for them and should only be offered healthy foods, which won’t help food companies much.

Mary Story, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has done terrific work on revealing the extent of food marketing to children, gave the first annual Michael & Susan Dell Distinguished Lecture in child health at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Austin, just a year ago on April 13, 2007. But now her slides – full of interesting tidbits and data – are online for viewing and well worth a look.

Canadian food companies argue that there is no point in banning food marketing to kids because the bans don’t keep kids from becoming obese. Maybe, but I’m just back from the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue in Washington, DC, a conference in which officials from Canada and Europe discussed what they were doing to address childhood obesity on the policy level. In a word–European countries are taking the challenge seriously and are doing a lot more than we are. I was most impressed by a report about Quebec, which banned marketing to kids in 1982. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but rates of childhood obesity are lower in Quebec than in any other Canadian province. But so are fast food sales so it’s no wonder food companies are upset.