(no subject)
Seriously, any critique at all is welcome and appreciated. And if the weird lj formatting makes it difficult to read, I'd be happy to email you a word copy. I don't know why I'm so freaked out about this paper, but it's been a tough class with a tough professor and I've really put hard work into the research.
Child-Directed Food Advertising: I’m Lovin’ It…?
For today’s American children, watching the Saturday morning cartoons is not nearly as simple as it used to be. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the dangers of exposing young, suggestible minds to imitatable violence in the media ran in the forefront of our nation’s attention. More recently, however, another previously ignored potential danger to American children has come under debate: their exposure to imitatable consumerism. Combine this with a dangerous global craving (and a highly profitable marketing arena) for foods high in fat, sodium, and/or sugar, and we have created for ourselves a climate in which obesity and its comorbidities run rampant.
Recently, I intentionally left my television tuned to Nickelodeon for an hour to see if I could observe this phenomenon for myself. In the course of one commercial break, I had already added a breakfast cereal and a new brand of chewing gum to my grocery list, and had a hankering for some McDonald’s chicken nuggets for dinner. In the span of one five-minute commercial break, my buying habits as an adult had already been influenced; for children, who by nature are overly trusting and impressionable, I can only imagine the influence to be far greater. As a future educator, I fully subscribe to the belief that a nation is only as good as the lessons it is teaching the next generation. What lessons are we teaching our kids by exposing them to advertising bent on changing their buying (and eating) habits before they are psychologically capable of making informed decisions? What lessons are we teaching our kids by immersing them in an environment in which the advertising of unhealthy foods is so completely commonplace that the overconsumption of those foods is considered normal and familiar?
This highly controversial issue has been bandied about ever since concerns about the influences of directly advertising to children were first voiced in the late 1960s. However, one could argue that our nation’s obsession with unhealthy foods (and our rates of obesity) has steadily yet dramatically increased since then. Both the food and marketing industries in the US and most industrialized countries have put into place self-regulating bodies in hopes of escaping government regulation, but these voluntary, toothless organizations have very little effectiveness in creating any real change in the landscape of this issue. Countries like Great Britain, Quebec, Sweden, and Norway, however, have made great strides towards protecting their children from the exploitative nature of child-directed advertising through government control. Government regulation of foods advertised to children should be implemented in the US due to the dangerous nature of exploiting children’s vulnerabilities to promote unhealthy lifestyle choices and the extreme ineffectiveness of industry self-regulation.
Advertising specifically designed to target children was unheard of before the last half of the 20th century in America. Take, for example, a print ad for Kraft instant cocoa mix (a product that would now be directly marketed toward children) ran in the November 1941 issue of Good Housekeeping. The ad does indeed include a picture of a happy, pink-cheeked Shirley Temple look-alike mixing herself a teacup of the product. However, the text at the bottom touts the “no pans to wash, no fussing at the stove” ease of use and the nutritional value of the mix. Obviously, this ad was geared toward Mom (who, in those days, would have done all of the grocery shopping, often without kids in tote) and not toward children directly at all.
Advertisements like these seem completely foreign to a modern eye, largely in part due to the major growth in popularity of the television set in the 1960s. According to a recent estimate by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the average child in America has viewed between ten and fifteen thousand hours of television and as many as two hundred thousand television commercials by age eighteen. Even worse, since a study by California State University Northridge places the average number of television sets per American household at 2.24, it stands to reason that the majority of these commercials are viewed without an adult present. Since advertisers are no longer advertising to parents alone, they rely on the power of the “nag factor”, or the ability of children to influence parental purchases via persistent pestering; spend some time in the cereal aisle at a local supermarket and it will not be long before this “pester power” will rear its ugly head. So far, this tactic is working wonderfully. Marketing consultant Martin Lindstrom estimates the purchase influence of children globally to be around $1.88 trillion in 2010 (Cooper 24). The food and advertising industries tap this extremely lucrative market by reaching out to children when they are a captive audience: while they are sitting in front of the television. Children in the US see approximately five thousand five hundred food commercials in a year, ninety-eight percent of which would be banned under Great Britain’s stringent advertising regulations on foods high in fat, sodium, or sugar (Schwartz 60). The overconsumption of foods high in fat, sodium, or sugar (HFSS) play a major influence on growing waistlines, yet in spite of the fact that the prevalence rates of childhood obesity are alarmingly high (25-30% in 2010), these unhealthy foods continue to be marketed to an extremely vulnerable and impressionable demographic (Mehta 49). Considering the dangerous nature of childhood obesity and its associated comorbidities like hypertension and cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and diabetes, sleep apnea, orthopedic problems, and issues with psychosocial development and self esteem, this exploitation cannot be allowed to continue.
For most of these advertisers, hooking a lifelong consumer by instilling a sense of brand loyalty and recognition as early as possible is crucial. The average kindergartener can identify an astounding three hundred logos. Advertisers achieve this by exploiting the vulnerability of children to certain tried-and-true persuasive techniques and gimmicks, such as the use of cartoon mascots (like Cap’n Crunch), third-party licensed characters (like Shrek or Spiderman), and sweepstakes style giveaways of tempting prizes. Marketers do extensive research into who is demanding their product, and they custom tailor their advertisements to fit very specific demographics. Differences in the effectiveness of certain techniques exist between age ranges and gender; for example, the use of celebrity endorsement has been shown more effective in girls than boys, and the use of third-party licensed cartoon characters is much more powerful for ages 6-8 than ages 9-11 (Costa 14).
Nutritionist Kaye Mehta argues that the ability of children to perceive the truth behind advertising ploys is quite underestimated. In her study published in the journal Appetite, Mehta created several focus groups of thirty-seven Australian schoolchildren aged eight to twelve and led a structured interview with questions centered around discovering the children’s perceptions of the aims behind advertising, what they did and did not like about specific advertisements, and their opinions on the overall effectiveness of advertising ploys. In general, the children exhibited a surprisingly acute understanding of the advertisements they viewed. In discussing what appealed to them most about certain advertisements, children chose creative or technical elements like the storyline of a commercial or the visual effects, while repetition and jingles bored and annoyed them (Mehta 52). The children expressed a clear understanding of the intent behind advertising, with one child stating, “they want you to like, want you to eat their food, so they can get lots of money, and have more businesses, so then more people buy it” (Mehta 52). The children also expressed suspicion and skepticism concerning truth in advertising, either through omission or misrepresentation of nutrition facts (Mehta 52). While these findings do seem to refute earlier claims that, cognitively speaking, children are unable to interpret the messages advertising offers, what it does show is an unacceptable level of tolerance and indifference toward these misleading practices behind advertising in these kids. This expressed desensitization is even more upsetting and dangerous than concerns about children’s supposed naiveté. This culture of being totally immersed in misleading advertisements for unhealthy products is all that these kids know, so it has become acceptable and even normal to them. Mehta concludes that lack of cognitive ability is not to blame; however, “current high levels of advertising of unhealthy foods gives children the message that these foods are normative and desirable” (Mehta 49).
Concerns about the effects of advertising products directly to children came into public debate in the late 1960s in the US, but the issue did not begin to pick up speed until the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) compiled a list of guidelines to “encourage advertising practices sensitive to the special nature of children” in 1972 (Fried 95). At this point, the debate over who should have the responsibility of implementing and enforcing these guidelines was fairly evenly split between industry self-regulation or government bodies like the FCC and/or the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). However, the anti-“big government” pro-capitalist sentiments of the post-Cold War era led to an enormous backlash from Congress that almost resulted in the FTC being completely disbanded. Since then, there have been no further attempts at government regulation of the advertising industry in the US; instead, self-regulating bodies like the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) and the Better Business Bureau exert complete control over the marketing landscape, and their success has been limited at best. It cannot be denied that progress has happened within this self-regulatory system, and these efforts are laudable. For example, the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), a “consortium” of sixteen industry giants like Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, Burger King, Campbell Soup, McDonalds, and General Mills, requires all of its members to only advertise “better-for-you products and/or messages that encourage good nutrition or healthy lifestyles” and “reduce the use of third-party licensed characters in ads,” and all members have shown 100% compliance with these guidelines (Goodman 16). In fact, four members-Coca-Cola, Hershey, Mars, and Cadbury-no longer advertise to children under the age of twelve at all (Goodman 16). If industry giants like Coca-Cola and General Mills can positively change the way they market to children, so can other companies. However, these companies are still free to define for themselves what constitutes “healthy” or “better-for-you”, which means that there is no single standardized definition of nutrition. Also, participation in these self-regulatory bodies (and thus compliance with the guidelines put forth by that body) is largely voluntary. A case study by lawyer Ellen Fried offers several examples in which advertisements by large companies like Hostess, Arby’s, and Post Cereals were issued citations by CARU for violating that agency’s guidelines; the companies pledged their cooperation, and then did little or nothing to follow through with changing the advertisements in question (109-12). The failure of industry self-regulation to protect children from these advertisements has come under scrutiny in other nations, as well. An editorial by nutritionist Kaye Mehta published in the journal Public Health Nutrition references the fact that “almost 50% of companies that signed up for Spain’s self-regulatory code were non-compliant” (1001). Louise Thornley, a policy analyst for the National Health Committee of New Zealand, goes a step further and accuses New Zealand’s advertising industry’s self-regulating agency of being in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child for failing to protect children from the harmful effects of advertising unhealthy food (27). While on an extreme side of the spectrum of this argument, Thornley’s argument provides an excellent example of how seriously this issue needs to be taken. The attempts at industry self-regulation, however well meant, are excruciatingly slow, and efforts are coming too little too late.
It is impossible to discuss child-directed food advertising without exploring the cereal industry. Arguably the largest advertiser to children, the cereal industry spent $229 million in advertising to kids between the ages of two and eleven in 2006 (Schwartz 60). After the checkout lane, the cereal aisle is every parent’s worst enemy during the weekly trip to the grocery store for the simple reason that cereal companies are extremely successful at crafting their advertisements to incite the maximum “nag factor” in kids. A study of cereal brands by Marlene Schwartz, the Deputy Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University examines the correlation between the child-to-adult ratio of advertisements and the healthiness of eighty-three nationally-advertised cereal brands. For the sake of this experiment, Schwartz uses the United Kingdom Nutritional Profiling model, a standardized scale used to evaluate foods for their nutritional value in the UK (and the standard on which Great Britain’s advertising regulations are based) to eliminate discrepancies between individual companies and their standards of nutrition. On this scale, any food scoring below a four is considered healthy. The five cereals scoring highest in child-to-adult ratios of advertising (all five brands scored 7.8 or above, meaning children were exposed to almost eight times as many advertisements for these brands as adults) were Cookie Crisp, Trix, Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Reese’s Puffs, all made by General Mills, one of the members of the CFBAI who supposedly had 100% compliance in advertising only healthier-for-you brands to children (Schwartz 66). These five cereals had health scores that ranged between fifteen and eighteen; considering a score of four is considered healthy, this brings the standards by which General Mills evaluates nutrition under suspicion. The healthiest cereals on the list of brands with child-to-adult advertising ratios indicating a degree of child-directed advertising were Kellogg’s Family of Cereals (which includes cereals like Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes), but they still scored a ten (Schwartz 66). Quaker’s Cap’n Crunch scored a twenty-one, the unhealthiest score on the list (Schwartz 66). Eighty-six percent of the eighty-three cereals evaluated failed to meet the health standards of this study, and yet these unhealthy cereals make up ninety-eight percent of the advertisements of cereals directly aimed at children (Schwartz 65). This misrepresentation of the healthiness of the cereals marketed to children is suspect at best and downright criminal at worst. How can we expect children to choose healthy options if these only make up two percent of the brands that are advertised to them, and the rest use false or exaggerated claims of their nutritional value?
Quebec, Sweden, and Norway deem child-directed advertising so dangerous and exploitative that the direct advertising of any type of product to children under the age of twelve is illegal. The European Union has released a set of minimum guidelines regarding child-directed advertising for their 27 member states, and the UK, Denmark, Belgium, and Greece all have government regulated standards regarding advertising aimed toward children. Of all of these, the UK’s restrictions and policies are by far the most strict; the restrictions “impose a total ban on the advertising of food and drink products that are high in fat, salt, and sugar (HFSS) in and around programmes with particular appeal to children under the age of 16; along with additional rules on the content of advertisements aimed specifically at children of primary school age” (Buckingham 201). These measures, put into place in 2007 and regulated by OFCOM, the UK’s equivalent to the US’s FCC, continue to be one of the most controversial pieces of British legislature passed in the 21st century, mainly because the regulations represent a complete volte-face from the same agency’s views on the issue as recently as 2004; the research in this arena was shaky enough in 2004 for OFCOM to be against such regulations, suggesting that “the evidence regarding the influence of food advertising on obesity was limited” (Buckingham 205). However, the agency did a complete 180 from their original statement in 2006, after “further consultation and public debate” and supporting their new stance with evidence drawn from a new, privately commissioned study (Buckingham 206). Critics point to this measure as another piece of political misdirection, “a substitute for the more far-reaching measures that may be required” (Buckingham 206). The regulations as they stand are far from being a perfect solution to such a complicated issue. The stringent regulations prohibit some nutritious foods, like milk, nuts, and cheese from being advertised to children because of their high fat content, and television producers argue that the loss of revenue from advertisers will result in a reduction in the quality and/or quantity of children’s programming (Buckingham 206). In addition, the debate still continues about who should ultimately be responsible for the advertising that children see and the lifestyle that they lead: the government, the industries, or the parents (Henderson 1405). Obviously, changing the messages filtering down to kids through television commercials only constitutes part of the battle; the next step is to encourage healthy choices and active lifestyles, and there has to be a degree of personal (or, in this case, parental) responsibility in making kids stop shoveling Oreos in their mouths while sitting on the couch watching television for six straight hours a day. However, many parents are doing all that they can to encourage this lifestyle in their children; there is only so much a parent can do when, “marketers are undermining parental authority over food issues as much as they can get away with” (Goodman 16). OFCOM’s efforts in the UK are only part of a widespread government campaign to reduce childhood obesity. No one can realistically expect OFCOM’s regulations to be the panacea to make such a complicated issue disappear. According to recent estimates, though, these regulations have lead to a forty-one percent decrease in the number of advertisements promoting HFSS foods to which children under sixteen are exposed, and a fifty-one percent decrease for children under the age of nine. These numbers are nothing if not promising, and they show that progress is possible. If such overwhelming progress in reducing the number of unhealthy foods being advertised to children can happen in the UK, why is it not possible in the US?
Kenneth Hein, a writer for the weekly American marketing journal Brandweek, proposes that amid the battle between several groups lobbying for governmental restrictions on advertising food to children and members of the food industry attempting to rally for self-regulation, the average consumer is actually ambivalent about the debate. One ordinarily thinks of a debate having two sides, but in this case, it seems that there are actually three. On one side are lobbyist groups who view the direct advertising of unhealthy foods to children as being in the same league as advertising of cigarettes to children. One of these, Corporate Accountability International, is “calling for the head of fast food’s most celebrated mascot, Ronald McDonald” in the same way they were successful in banning the use of Joe Camel in cigarette ads in the 1990s (Goodman 17) These groups are pushing for government regulation of these advertisements, if not completely banning them altogether. On another are members of the food industry who argue that they have made great strides towards altering the way food is advertised to children without government interference. Hein’s article cites McDonalds as an example of how the food industry is being judged unfairly by a public who must “…break through the preconceived notions and look at what they’ve actually been doing…” (4). According to McDonald’s representative Walt Riker, all advertising for McDonald’s Happy Meals promotes healthy items like all-white-meat Chicken McNuggets, Apple Dippers, and low fat milk, and yet McDonald’s is most often pointed to as the flagship for unhealthy product advertising. In reality, however, the average consumer has not yet been fully swayed to one side or the other…which is perhaps the most crucial step towards making a decision to end this debate once and for all. Although the wheels have been set in motion at the policy-making level towards addressing this global health issue, the fact of the matter remains that we will not move past this frustrating deadlock unless there is clear consumer support one way or the other.
In the interest of maintaining some industry autonomy, a solution can be found that involves the self-regulating bodies already in place. However, some form of government regulation is necessary to both protect the right and health of children and to establish and maintain fairness and balance within the self-regulatory system. The first step is for the nutritionists within the USDA and FDA to establish a universal, fair scale by which to measure the nutritional value of foods similar to the Nutritional Profiling model used in the UK. Only by holding everyone to the same standards can claims to the healthiness of foods within advertising be evaluated (and those misrepresenting claims of nutrition be held responsible by the FTC). Next, a ban of the advertising of foods deemed above a certain level of unhealthiness should be implemented on children’s networks and during programming hours during which children under the age of 12 would make up a substantial portion of the viewers. However, simply banning the advertisements would translate to a short-term “band-aid” effect; the establishment of government incentives, perhaps in the form of tax breaks, for food and beverage companies showing progress in making their products healthier would be much more effective long-term.
As Americans, we stand behind our capitalist “free market” system almost religiously, and cite the First Amendment as protection for almost any statement we make. However, where do the rights of advertisers end and the rights of our children, the future of this nation, begin? What legacy are we handing down to these kids-a future in which more than one in four of us is clinically obese, and are ambivalent about that fact to boot? This is not a future that we have to accept. Change can be made if we’re willing to put down the Doritos, use our computer to email our congressman instead of playing FarmVille on Facebook, and then go outside and play with our kids. Only then will we create a future for our kids in which eating a Happy Meal is truly something to be happy about.
Child-Directed Food Advertising: I’m Lovin’ It…?
For today’s American children, watching the Saturday morning cartoons is not nearly as simple as it used to be. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the dangers of exposing young, suggestible minds to imitatable violence in the media ran in the forefront of our nation’s attention. More recently, however, another previously ignored potential danger to American children has come under debate: their exposure to imitatable consumerism. Combine this with a dangerous global craving (and a highly profitable marketing arena) for foods high in fat, sodium, and/or sugar, and we have created for ourselves a climate in which obesity and its comorbidities run rampant.
Recently, I intentionally left my television tuned to Nickelodeon for an hour to see if I could observe this phenomenon for myself. In the course of one commercial break, I had already added a breakfast cereal and a new brand of chewing gum to my grocery list, and had a hankering for some McDonald’s chicken nuggets for dinner. In the span of one five-minute commercial break, my buying habits as an adult had already been influenced; for children, who by nature are overly trusting and impressionable, I can only imagine the influence to be far greater. As a future educator, I fully subscribe to the belief that a nation is only as good as the lessons it is teaching the next generation. What lessons are we teaching our kids by exposing them to advertising bent on changing their buying (and eating) habits before they are psychologically capable of making informed decisions? What lessons are we teaching our kids by immersing them in an environment in which the advertising of unhealthy foods is so completely commonplace that the overconsumption of those foods is considered normal and familiar?
This highly controversial issue has been bandied about ever since concerns about the influences of directly advertising to children were first voiced in the late 1960s. However, one could argue that our nation’s obsession with unhealthy foods (and our rates of obesity) has steadily yet dramatically increased since then. Both the food and marketing industries in the US and most industrialized countries have put into place self-regulating bodies in hopes of escaping government regulation, but these voluntary, toothless organizations have very little effectiveness in creating any real change in the landscape of this issue. Countries like Great Britain, Quebec, Sweden, and Norway, however, have made great strides towards protecting their children from the exploitative nature of child-directed advertising through government control. Government regulation of foods advertised to children should be implemented in the US due to the dangerous nature of exploiting children’s vulnerabilities to promote unhealthy lifestyle choices and the extreme ineffectiveness of industry self-regulation.
Advertising specifically designed to target children was unheard of before the last half of the 20th century in America. Take, for example, a print ad for Kraft instant cocoa mix (a product that would now be directly marketed toward children) ran in the November 1941 issue of Good Housekeeping. The ad does indeed include a picture of a happy, pink-cheeked Shirley Temple look-alike mixing herself a teacup of the product. However, the text at the bottom touts the “no pans to wash, no fussing at the stove” ease of use and the nutritional value of the mix. Obviously, this ad was geared toward Mom (who, in those days, would have done all of the grocery shopping, often without kids in tote) and not toward children directly at all.
Advertisements like these seem completely foreign to a modern eye, largely in part due to the major growth in popularity of the television set in the 1960s. According to a recent estimate by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the average child in America has viewed between ten and fifteen thousand hours of television and as many as two hundred thousand television commercials by age eighteen. Even worse, since a study by California State University Northridge places the average number of television sets per American household at 2.24, it stands to reason that the majority of these commercials are viewed without an adult present. Since advertisers are no longer advertising to parents alone, they rely on the power of the “nag factor”, or the ability of children to influence parental purchases via persistent pestering; spend some time in the cereal aisle at a local supermarket and it will not be long before this “pester power” will rear its ugly head. So far, this tactic is working wonderfully. Marketing consultant Martin Lindstrom estimates the purchase influence of children globally to be around $1.88 trillion in 2010 (Cooper 24). The food and advertising industries tap this extremely lucrative market by reaching out to children when they are a captive audience: while they are sitting in front of the television. Children in the US see approximately five thousand five hundred food commercials in a year, ninety-eight percent of which would be banned under Great Britain’s stringent advertising regulations on foods high in fat, sodium, or sugar (Schwartz 60). The overconsumption of foods high in fat, sodium, or sugar (HFSS) play a major influence on growing waistlines, yet in spite of the fact that the prevalence rates of childhood obesity are alarmingly high (25-30% in 2010), these unhealthy foods continue to be marketed to an extremely vulnerable and impressionable demographic (Mehta 49). Considering the dangerous nature of childhood obesity and its associated comorbidities like hypertension and cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and diabetes, sleep apnea, orthopedic problems, and issues with psychosocial development and self esteem, this exploitation cannot be allowed to continue.
For most of these advertisers, hooking a lifelong consumer by instilling a sense of brand loyalty and recognition as early as possible is crucial. The average kindergartener can identify an astounding three hundred logos. Advertisers achieve this by exploiting the vulnerability of children to certain tried-and-true persuasive techniques and gimmicks, such as the use of cartoon mascots (like Cap’n Crunch), third-party licensed characters (like Shrek or Spiderman), and sweepstakes style giveaways of tempting prizes. Marketers do extensive research into who is demanding their product, and they custom tailor their advertisements to fit very specific demographics. Differences in the effectiveness of certain techniques exist between age ranges and gender; for example, the use of celebrity endorsement has been shown more effective in girls than boys, and the use of third-party licensed cartoon characters is much more powerful for ages 6-8 than ages 9-11 (Costa 14).
Nutritionist Kaye Mehta argues that the ability of children to perceive the truth behind advertising ploys is quite underestimated. In her study published in the journal Appetite, Mehta created several focus groups of thirty-seven Australian schoolchildren aged eight to twelve and led a structured interview with questions centered around discovering the children’s perceptions of the aims behind advertising, what they did and did not like about specific advertisements, and their opinions on the overall effectiveness of advertising ploys. In general, the children exhibited a surprisingly acute understanding of the advertisements they viewed. In discussing what appealed to them most about certain advertisements, children chose creative or technical elements like the storyline of a commercial or the visual effects, while repetition and jingles bored and annoyed them (Mehta 52). The children expressed a clear understanding of the intent behind advertising, with one child stating, “they want you to like, want you to eat their food, so they can get lots of money, and have more businesses, so then more people buy it” (Mehta 52). The children also expressed suspicion and skepticism concerning truth in advertising, either through omission or misrepresentation of nutrition facts (Mehta 52). While these findings do seem to refute earlier claims that, cognitively speaking, children are unable to interpret the messages advertising offers, what it does show is an unacceptable level of tolerance and indifference toward these misleading practices behind advertising in these kids. This expressed desensitization is even more upsetting and dangerous than concerns about children’s supposed naiveté. This culture of being totally immersed in misleading advertisements for unhealthy products is all that these kids know, so it has become acceptable and even normal to them. Mehta concludes that lack of cognitive ability is not to blame; however, “current high levels of advertising of unhealthy foods gives children the message that these foods are normative and desirable” (Mehta 49).
Concerns about the effects of advertising products directly to children came into public debate in the late 1960s in the US, but the issue did not begin to pick up speed until the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) compiled a list of guidelines to “encourage advertising practices sensitive to the special nature of children” in 1972 (Fried 95). At this point, the debate over who should have the responsibility of implementing and enforcing these guidelines was fairly evenly split between industry self-regulation or government bodies like the FCC and/or the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). However, the anti-“big government” pro-capitalist sentiments of the post-Cold War era led to an enormous backlash from Congress that almost resulted in the FTC being completely disbanded. Since then, there have been no further attempts at government regulation of the advertising industry in the US; instead, self-regulating bodies like the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) and the Better Business Bureau exert complete control over the marketing landscape, and their success has been limited at best. It cannot be denied that progress has happened within this self-regulatory system, and these efforts are laudable. For example, the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), a “consortium” of sixteen industry giants like Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, Burger King, Campbell Soup, McDonalds, and General Mills, requires all of its members to only advertise “better-for-you products and/or messages that encourage good nutrition or healthy lifestyles” and “reduce the use of third-party licensed characters in ads,” and all members have shown 100% compliance with these guidelines (Goodman 16). In fact, four members-Coca-Cola, Hershey, Mars, and Cadbury-no longer advertise to children under the age of twelve at all (Goodman 16). If industry giants like Coca-Cola and General Mills can positively change the way they market to children, so can other companies. However, these companies are still free to define for themselves what constitutes “healthy” or “better-for-you”, which means that there is no single standardized definition of nutrition. Also, participation in these self-regulatory bodies (and thus compliance with the guidelines put forth by that body) is largely voluntary. A case study by lawyer Ellen Fried offers several examples in which advertisements by large companies like Hostess, Arby’s, and Post Cereals were issued citations by CARU for violating that agency’s guidelines; the companies pledged their cooperation, and then did little or nothing to follow through with changing the advertisements in question (109-12). The failure of industry self-regulation to protect children from these advertisements has come under scrutiny in other nations, as well. An editorial by nutritionist Kaye Mehta published in the journal Public Health Nutrition references the fact that “almost 50% of companies that signed up for Spain’s self-regulatory code were non-compliant” (1001). Louise Thornley, a policy analyst for the National Health Committee of New Zealand, goes a step further and accuses New Zealand’s advertising industry’s self-regulating agency of being in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child for failing to protect children from the harmful effects of advertising unhealthy food (27). While on an extreme side of the spectrum of this argument, Thornley’s argument provides an excellent example of how seriously this issue needs to be taken. The attempts at industry self-regulation, however well meant, are excruciatingly slow, and efforts are coming too little too late.
It is impossible to discuss child-directed food advertising without exploring the cereal industry. Arguably the largest advertiser to children, the cereal industry spent $229 million in advertising to kids between the ages of two and eleven in 2006 (Schwartz 60). After the checkout lane, the cereal aisle is every parent’s worst enemy during the weekly trip to the grocery store for the simple reason that cereal companies are extremely successful at crafting their advertisements to incite the maximum “nag factor” in kids. A study of cereal brands by Marlene Schwartz, the Deputy Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University examines the correlation between the child-to-adult ratio of advertisements and the healthiness of eighty-three nationally-advertised cereal brands. For the sake of this experiment, Schwartz uses the United Kingdom Nutritional Profiling model, a standardized scale used to evaluate foods for their nutritional value in the UK (and the standard on which Great Britain’s advertising regulations are based) to eliminate discrepancies between individual companies and their standards of nutrition. On this scale, any food scoring below a four is considered healthy. The five cereals scoring highest in child-to-adult ratios of advertising (all five brands scored 7.8 or above, meaning children were exposed to almost eight times as many advertisements for these brands as adults) were Cookie Crisp, Trix, Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Reese’s Puffs, all made by General Mills, one of the members of the CFBAI who supposedly had 100% compliance in advertising only healthier-for-you brands to children (Schwartz 66). These five cereals had health scores that ranged between fifteen and eighteen; considering a score of four is considered healthy, this brings the standards by which General Mills evaluates nutrition under suspicion. The healthiest cereals on the list of brands with child-to-adult advertising ratios indicating a degree of child-directed advertising were Kellogg’s Family of Cereals (which includes cereals like Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes), but they still scored a ten (Schwartz 66). Quaker’s Cap’n Crunch scored a twenty-one, the unhealthiest score on the list (Schwartz 66). Eighty-six percent of the eighty-three cereals evaluated failed to meet the health standards of this study, and yet these unhealthy cereals make up ninety-eight percent of the advertisements of cereals directly aimed at children (Schwartz 65). This misrepresentation of the healthiness of the cereals marketed to children is suspect at best and downright criminal at worst. How can we expect children to choose healthy options if these only make up two percent of the brands that are advertised to them, and the rest use false or exaggerated claims of their nutritional value?
Quebec, Sweden, and Norway deem child-directed advertising so dangerous and exploitative that the direct advertising of any type of product to children under the age of twelve is illegal. The European Union has released a set of minimum guidelines regarding child-directed advertising for their 27 member states, and the UK, Denmark, Belgium, and Greece all have government regulated standards regarding advertising aimed toward children. Of all of these, the UK’s restrictions and policies are by far the most strict; the restrictions “impose a total ban on the advertising of food and drink products that are high in fat, salt, and sugar (HFSS) in and around programmes with particular appeal to children under the age of 16; along with additional rules on the content of advertisements aimed specifically at children of primary school age” (Buckingham 201). These measures, put into place in 2007 and regulated by OFCOM, the UK’s equivalent to the US’s FCC, continue to be one of the most controversial pieces of British legislature passed in the 21st century, mainly because the regulations represent a complete volte-face from the same agency’s views on the issue as recently as 2004; the research in this arena was shaky enough in 2004 for OFCOM to be against such regulations, suggesting that “the evidence regarding the influence of food advertising on obesity was limited” (Buckingham 205). However, the agency did a complete 180 from their original statement in 2006, after “further consultation and public debate” and supporting their new stance with evidence drawn from a new, privately commissioned study (Buckingham 206). Critics point to this measure as another piece of political misdirection, “a substitute for the more far-reaching measures that may be required” (Buckingham 206). The regulations as they stand are far from being a perfect solution to such a complicated issue. The stringent regulations prohibit some nutritious foods, like milk, nuts, and cheese from being advertised to children because of their high fat content, and television producers argue that the loss of revenue from advertisers will result in a reduction in the quality and/or quantity of children’s programming (Buckingham 206). In addition, the debate still continues about who should ultimately be responsible for the advertising that children see and the lifestyle that they lead: the government, the industries, or the parents (Henderson 1405). Obviously, changing the messages filtering down to kids through television commercials only constitutes part of the battle; the next step is to encourage healthy choices and active lifestyles, and there has to be a degree of personal (or, in this case, parental) responsibility in making kids stop shoveling Oreos in their mouths while sitting on the couch watching television for six straight hours a day. However, many parents are doing all that they can to encourage this lifestyle in their children; there is only so much a parent can do when, “marketers are undermining parental authority over food issues as much as they can get away with” (Goodman 16). OFCOM’s efforts in the UK are only part of a widespread government campaign to reduce childhood obesity. No one can realistically expect OFCOM’s regulations to be the panacea to make such a complicated issue disappear. According to recent estimates, though, these regulations have lead to a forty-one percent decrease in the number of advertisements promoting HFSS foods to which children under sixteen are exposed, and a fifty-one percent decrease for children under the age of nine. These numbers are nothing if not promising, and they show that progress is possible. If such overwhelming progress in reducing the number of unhealthy foods being advertised to children can happen in the UK, why is it not possible in the US?
Kenneth Hein, a writer for the weekly American marketing journal Brandweek, proposes that amid the battle between several groups lobbying for governmental restrictions on advertising food to children and members of the food industry attempting to rally for self-regulation, the average consumer is actually ambivalent about the debate. One ordinarily thinks of a debate having two sides, but in this case, it seems that there are actually three. On one side are lobbyist groups who view the direct advertising of unhealthy foods to children as being in the same league as advertising of cigarettes to children. One of these, Corporate Accountability International, is “calling for the head of fast food’s most celebrated mascot, Ronald McDonald” in the same way they were successful in banning the use of Joe Camel in cigarette ads in the 1990s (Goodman 17) These groups are pushing for government regulation of these advertisements, if not completely banning them altogether. On another are members of the food industry who argue that they have made great strides towards altering the way food is advertised to children without government interference. Hein’s article cites McDonalds as an example of how the food industry is being judged unfairly by a public who must “…break through the preconceived notions and look at what they’ve actually been doing…” (4). According to McDonald’s representative Walt Riker, all advertising for McDonald’s Happy Meals promotes healthy items like all-white-meat Chicken McNuggets, Apple Dippers, and low fat milk, and yet McDonald’s is most often pointed to as the flagship for unhealthy product advertising. In reality, however, the average consumer has not yet been fully swayed to one side or the other…which is perhaps the most crucial step towards making a decision to end this debate once and for all. Although the wheels have been set in motion at the policy-making level towards addressing this global health issue, the fact of the matter remains that we will not move past this frustrating deadlock unless there is clear consumer support one way or the other.
In the interest of maintaining some industry autonomy, a solution can be found that involves the self-regulating bodies already in place. However, some form of government regulation is necessary to both protect the right and health of children and to establish and maintain fairness and balance within the self-regulatory system. The first step is for the nutritionists within the USDA and FDA to establish a universal, fair scale by which to measure the nutritional value of foods similar to the Nutritional Profiling model used in the UK. Only by holding everyone to the same standards can claims to the healthiness of foods within advertising be evaluated (and those misrepresenting claims of nutrition be held responsible by the FTC). Next, a ban of the advertising of foods deemed above a certain level of unhealthiness should be implemented on children’s networks and during programming hours during which children under the age of 12 would make up a substantial portion of the viewers. However, simply banning the advertisements would translate to a short-term “band-aid” effect; the establishment of government incentives, perhaps in the form of tax breaks, for food and beverage companies showing progress in making their products healthier would be much more effective long-term.
As Americans, we stand behind our capitalist “free market” system almost religiously, and cite the First Amendment as protection for almost any statement we make. However, where do the rights of advertisers end and the rights of our children, the future of this nation, begin? What legacy are we handing down to these kids-a future in which more than one in four of us is clinically obese, and are ambivalent about that fact to boot? This is not a future that we have to accept. Change can be made if we’re willing to put down the Doritos, use our computer to email our congressman instead of playing FarmVille on Facebook, and then go outside and play with our kids. Only then will we create a future for our kids in which eating a Happy Meal is truly something to be happy about.