November 15, 2006
Kids’ Food Ads to Change
Leading food and beverage manufacturers and providers have decided it’s time to change the way they advertise to kids. And after yesterday’s announcement that the group had created new guidelines for child-oriented advertising, that’s exactly what they intend to do.
The companies taking part in this self-regulation exercise include McDonald’s, The Coca-Cola Co., Campbell Soup Co., Cadbury Schweppes USA, General Mills, The Hershey Co., Kellogg Co., Kraft Foods Inc., PepsiCo Inc. and Unilever.
Advertising targeted to kids has become a hot button issue as more children have been classified as overweight, and as chronic diseases once almost exclusively confined to adults, such as Type 2 diabetes, have become more common.
The rules the companies agreed to abide by include limiting the use of popular children’s characters, such as Shrek, SpongeBob Squarepants and Little Mermaid, in ads promoting foods that do not have a healthy profile.
The companies have also agreed to not advertise in elementary schools and to make sure online “advergames” are used to promote healthy food products and/or ways to become more fit.
“Today’s announcements are another significant step in combating obesity, as companies use advertising to promote healthier products and healthy lifestyle messages to children and adults,” said C. Manly Molpus, president and CEO of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, in a press release. “We congratulate the CBBB (Council of Better Business Bureaus), NARC (The National Advertising Review Council) and the many food and beverage companies that participated for their efforts to provide consumers with the tools they need to achieve and maintain a healthy lifestyle.”
Not everyone saw the announcement as reason to cheer. Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told The Associated Press, “The only changes from the status quo in these guidelines occur at the fringes. If a ‘healthy lifestyle message’ means that Ronald McDonald is pedaling a bike while peddling junk food, that message still does more harm than good.”
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, an outspoken critic of food company advertising directed towards kids was encouraged by the announcement and said he would monitor the companies’ progress.
“If employed successfully, this could be a good first step,” he said. “But the program leaves companies significant leeway to continue marketing unhealthy foods to kids.”
Discussion Question: What is your reaction to the announcement yesterday regarding voluntary rules for advertising food products to children?
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It seems to me that getting out a “healthy food message” to kids faces the same challenges as natural medicines. Just as drug companies don’t promote homeopathic cures, who is the manufacturer who is going to promote fruits and vegetables? Where is the margin necessary to support an aggressive advertising campaign? If the manufacturer can’t create a unique product and brand that carries enough margin for the advertising expenses, then the message will never be heard.
I guess the one possibility is that some creative manufacturers will be able to disguise the healthy products that kids normally despise (e.g. salads or raw vegetables) in some kind of processed food that hides their true content. These “stealth vegetables” would reduce the number of calories and improve the kid’s diet without them even realizing it.
From Wikipedia: “Sweden and Norway prohibit domestic advertising that targets children. Some European countries don’t allow sponsorship of children’s programs, no advertisement can be aimed at children under the age of twelve, and there can be no advertisements five minutes before or after a children’s program is aired.”
Major food manufacturers are concerned that the USA might adopt the stricter European rules. These rules save marketers a lot of money. If they were enforced in America, children’s food brands would be more profitable. When tobacco ads were banned from American TV, the savings were huge. Tobacco is still an extremely profitable industry. Bring on the regulation!
I think this is a very interesting development, but still there is a fork in the road. Yogi Berra said, “When you see a fork in the road, take it!”
OK, here goes. One way is to start marketing kids products like sin products (cigarettes, booze), where the product isn’t any different but you’re much more careful about how you advertise it. The other path, is to actually make the foods healthy. I think that the big opportunity is to go down this latter path, as our society becomes more sensitized to this issue; as baby boomers attempt to outlive old age.
Where do parents come into the equation here? Where is their responsibility to just say no!
How many decades have regulators been screeching about the need for responsible advertising for kids? Probably as long as I’ve been eating Frosted Flakes. The current guidelines will probably turn out to be as toothless as a sugar junkie in a candy factory.
You want a positive image? How about Ronald McDonald peddling his bike, munching on a Big Mac and keeling over clutching his heart.
The announcement was beneficial as an inching toward a solution. The health of our children needs to be protected, but first by parents, then by the government. But there’s a paradox in play.
Processed food manufacturers don’t get graded on Wall Street by the measure of our children’s health but by the large bucks they can extract from any marketing practices – good or bad.(That’s just one of many reason why bonuses on Wall St. project to total $36 billion this year, averaging $170,000 per person.)
Thus one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior taste and challenge of those who put him down. Thus, I believe that kids will continue to be the target of zealous marketers, perhaps in a more subtle manner, which brings me back to the only basic solution for the problem: Continual Parental Guidance.
Voluntary guidelines are only that-voluntary. It is up to the leaders in the food industry to initiate more than these guidelines to address obesity, our nation’s growing health priority. It may be viewed as a first step, although the food industry still has a long way to go in initiating changes over the long term, and then evaluating what has made a difference and what has not.
If these guidelines are aimed only at elementary schools, what about middle schools and high schools? Now there is an opportunity to promote health and activity for sure.
The Institute of Medicine Report clearly called for leadership from the food industry. Perhaps it should be “required” reading for today’s CEOs.
When will these groups realize that the issue is not the advertising or the food, it is the choices WE, as parents make for our kids? Why is this always someone else’s fault? Yes, I agree, “Joe Camel” was not appropriate, but you choose to go see Ronald McDonald, he doesn’t force you to go to McDonald’s.
I’m with Joel. This is PR nonsense, at least to me. Didn’t Disney already announce tougher guidelines for licensing food products? My contacts in licensing tell me that the other majors have intended to follow suit with Disney for PR reasons. So the character image thing is fluff. Ads in schools were going to go away anyway…public opposition and a Democratic Congress.
The sad fact is that the junk food tastes better, has enormously more availability, is priced better, and is firmly rooted in the social psyche. If you really care, make better food.
This announcement, I believe, will be a great step forward in terms of focusing on lifestyle issues in advertising food products to children.
Over the last several years there has been an almost exclusive focus on food, and the lifestyle issues have been omitted.
Food, diet, and even caloric intake can only be judged in relationship to lifestyle, and conversely, lifestyle represents a major controllable relative to the impact of food and caloric consumption on people and, specifically, children.
It seems to me that this is a really important breakthrough in terms of framing the issue in a broader and more constructive context.
My only comment about the kids and food is to make the checkout aisle at the grocery or retail stores less attractive to the junk food consumer. Put some healthy food there. If we leave junk food in the aisles, we are advertising the unhealthy eating experience. Has anyone ever encountered the screaming kid wanting a candy bar on the way out of the store? And the impulse buying of junk food by adults while they are standing and waiting in the checkout line. If we make changes at the checkout, we are making progress for healthy eating, in my opinion.
Picking up on a few points above, the solution is with the consumer: Nothing creates change faster than a declining profit margin, so if parents adopted more responsibility for their children’s eating habits, they wouldn’t buy the [unhealthy] food. That would force manufacturers to change their products to be healthier.
Notice how this solution bypasses the entire issue of advertising to kids? Because that isn’t the problem, the problem is parents who are shirking their responsibilities and pointing their fingers at other people when their kids become overweight.
Never mind Yogi’s fork. If you see an obstacle in the road, find a way around it. Even if people within the food industry are creating their own obstacles, they’re finding even more ways to get around them. One example – website content is considered to be editorial and therefore not regulated in the same way as advertising. Most of the big food companies have already started using websites to promote to kids (and, for all those pointing fingers at parents, to enlist kids in conspiracies of secrecy from mom and dad) so reducing their more overt advertising isn’t going to be a major loss. It’s already been largely replaced. I would love to believe in Tinker Belle and Santa Claus but sadly find them no more realistic than these new assurances and promises. There are just too many cliched responses to throw into the mix – prove it and show me summarise them neatly. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Can’t finish without responding to the parental responsibility argument though. Absolutely. Yes. Make time to shop and prepare food and cook and then sit down with the kids to eat it. Supervise where they go and what they do. Teach them and spend time with them, show them that ads are there only to persuade them of things that may or may not be absolutely entirely completely true. But then find a way to explain that if parents resist advertisers’ exhortations they (the advertisers) will only try harder because they have to earn those bonuses already mentioned. And figure out how to teach your kids to be good parents when they grow up because saying no to them now is good for them. I remind myself each and every day how lucky I am that my kids have grown up to be responsible adults who make (mostly) sensible decisions but in spite of teasing them about how much I’d love to be a Granny, I can’t say I’m altogether sorry that they haven’t yet had to face the dilemmas and pitfalls of parenthood.
I’ve yet to hear the argument – in this forum – that it is the PARENTS’ responsibility to buckle in their offspring before setting their automobiles in motion, so we wouldn’t really need to have seatbelt laws, then, would we?
C’mon! There will always be parents who won’t – or can’t – make the best choices for their children, whether it be in fast food, consistent bedtimes, or safe homes. And with the dissolution of much of the middle class in recent years, fast food is the ONLY way for the increasing load of lower-income households to provide “dining out” experiences for their children. Today’s health choices of the poor/uneducated will be reflected in increased spending on social programs of the future – it is in our best interest to not only encourage the recent volunteer actions of these companies, but to advocate for more governmental controls as well.
When McDonald’s adds a veggie burger and starts carrying those little bags of baby carrots that I can easily pick up at the grocery store, I’ll start bringing my own children there again. Other single parents who work more than 40 hours a week? Hmmmm . . . not so patient.
Food companies are going to start paying for advertising to reduce sales for their most promising customers? Oil companies are now environmental? What’s to become of this world?
The only thing food companies can do to help young people with weight loss (or the oil companies for the environment) is to make less of their product.
Instead, they hire PR professionals to spin the story. One even could say, unhealthy food IS PR.
McDonald’s tried to offer a VEGGIE Burger. It failed though; no one bought it. The customers just couldn’t say no to all the taste of a REAL burger and fries. Oh, I forgot the soda…Up size that please!
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It seems to me that getting out a “healthy food message” to kids faces the same challenges as natural medicines. Just as drug companies don’t promote homeopathic cures, who is the manufacturer who is going to promote fruits and vegetables? Where is the margin necessary to support an aggressive advertising campaign? If the manufacturer can’t create a unique product and brand that carries enough margin for the advertising expenses, then the message will never be heard.
I guess the one possibility is that some creative manufacturers will be able to disguise the healthy products that kids normally despise (e.g. salads or raw vegetables) in some kind of processed food that hides their true content. These “stealth vegetables” would reduce the number of calories and improve the kid’s diet without them even realizing it.
From Wikipedia: “Sweden and Norway prohibit domestic advertising that targets children. Some European countries don’t allow sponsorship of children’s programs, no advertisement can be aimed at children under the age of twelve, and there can be no advertisements five minutes before or after a children’s program is aired.”
Major food manufacturers are concerned that the USA might adopt the stricter European rules. These rules save marketers a lot of money. If they were enforced in America, children’s food brands would be more profitable. When tobacco ads were banned from American TV, the savings were huge. Tobacco is still an extremely profitable industry. Bring on the regulation!
I think this is a very interesting development, but still there is a fork in the road. Yogi Berra said, “When you see a fork in the road, take it!”
OK, here goes. One way is to start marketing kids products like sin products (cigarettes, booze), where the product isn’t any different but you’re much more careful about how you advertise it. The other path, is to actually make the foods healthy. I think that the big opportunity is to go down this latter path, as our society becomes more sensitized to this issue; as baby boomers attempt to outlive old age.
Where do parents come into the equation here? Where is their responsibility to just say no!
How many decades have regulators been screeching about the need for responsible advertising for kids? Probably as long as I’ve been eating Frosted Flakes. The current guidelines will probably turn out to be as toothless as a sugar junkie in a candy factory.
You want a positive image? How about Ronald McDonald peddling his bike, munching on a Big Mac and keeling over clutching his heart.
The announcement was beneficial as an inching toward a solution. The health of our children needs to be protected, but first by parents, then by the government. But there’s a paradox in play.
Processed food manufacturers don’t get graded on Wall Street by the measure of our children’s health but by the large bucks they can extract from any marketing practices – good or bad.(That’s just one of many reason why bonuses on Wall St. project to total $36 billion this year, averaging $170,000 per person.)
Thus one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior taste and challenge of those who put him down. Thus, I believe that kids will continue to be the target of zealous marketers, perhaps in a more subtle manner, which brings me back to the only basic solution for the problem: Continual Parental Guidance.
Voluntary guidelines are only that-voluntary. It is up to the leaders in the food industry to initiate more than these guidelines to address obesity, our nation’s growing health priority. It may be viewed as a first step, although the food industry still has a long way to go in initiating changes over the long term, and then evaluating what has made a difference and what has not.
If these guidelines are aimed only at elementary schools, what about middle schools and high schools? Now there is an opportunity to promote health and activity for sure.
The Institute of Medicine Report clearly called for leadership from the food industry. Perhaps it should be “required” reading for today’s CEOs.
When will these groups realize that the issue is not the advertising or the food, it is the choices WE, as parents make for our kids? Why is this always someone else’s fault? Yes, I agree, “Joe Camel” was not appropriate, but you choose to go see Ronald McDonald, he doesn’t force you to go to McDonald’s.
I’m with Joel. This is PR nonsense, at least to me. Didn’t Disney already announce tougher guidelines for licensing food products? My contacts in licensing tell me that the other majors have intended to follow suit with Disney for PR reasons. So the character image thing is fluff. Ads in schools were going to go away anyway…public opposition and a Democratic Congress.
The sad fact is that the junk food tastes better, has enormously more availability, is priced better, and is firmly rooted in the social psyche. If you really care, make better food.
This announcement, I believe, will be a great step forward in terms of focusing on lifestyle issues in advertising food products to children.
Over the last several years there has been an almost exclusive focus on food, and the lifestyle issues have been omitted.
Food, diet, and even caloric intake can only be judged in relationship to lifestyle, and conversely, lifestyle represents a major controllable relative to the impact of food and caloric consumption on people and, specifically, children.
It seems to me that this is a really important breakthrough in terms of framing the issue in a broader and more constructive context.
My only comment about the kids and food is to make the checkout aisle at the grocery or retail stores less attractive to the junk food consumer. Put some healthy food there. If we leave junk food in the aisles, we are advertising the unhealthy eating experience. Has anyone ever encountered the screaming kid wanting a candy bar on the way out of the store? And the impulse buying of junk food by adults while they are standing and waiting in the checkout line. If we make changes at the checkout, we are making progress for healthy eating, in my opinion.
Picking up on a few points above, the solution is with the consumer: Nothing creates change faster than a declining profit margin, so if parents adopted more responsibility for their children’s eating habits, they wouldn’t buy the [unhealthy] food. That would force manufacturers to change their products to be healthier.
Notice how this solution bypasses the entire issue of advertising to kids? Because that isn’t the problem, the problem is parents who are shirking their responsibilities and pointing their fingers at other people when their kids become overweight.
Never mind Yogi’s fork. If you see an obstacle in the road, find a way around it. Even if people within the food industry are creating their own obstacles, they’re finding even more ways to get around them. One example – website content is considered to be editorial and therefore not regulated in the same way as advertising. Most of the big food companies have already started using websites to promote to kids (and, for all those pointing fingers at parents, to enlist kids in conspiracies of secrecy from mom and dad) so reducing their more overt advertising isn’t going to be a major loss. It’s already been largely replaced. I would love to believe in Tinker Belle and Santa Claus but sadly find them no more realistic than these new assurances and promises. There are just too many cliched responses to throw into the mix – prove it and show me summarise them neatly. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Can’t finish without responding to the parental responsibility argument though. Absolutely. Yes. Make time to shop and prepare food and cook and then sit down with the kids to eat it. Supervise where they go and what they do. Teach them and spend time with them, show them that ads are there only to persuade them of things that may or may not be absolutely entirely completely true. But then find a way to explain that if parents resist advertisers’ exhortations they (the advertisers) will only try harder because they have to earn those bonuses already mentioned. And figure out how to teach your kids to be good parents when they grow up because saying no to them now is good for them. I remind myself each and every day how lucky I am that my kids have grown up to be responsible adults who make (mostly) sensible decisions but in spite of teasing them about how much I’d love to be a Granny, I can’t say I’m altogether sorry that they haven’t yet had to face the dilemmas and pitfalls of parenthood.
I’ve yet to hear the argument – in this forum – that it is the PARENTS’ responsibility to buckle in their offspring before setting their automobiles in motion, so we wouldn’t really need to have seatbelt laws, then, would we?
C’mon! There will always be parents who won’t – or can’t – make the best choices for their children, whether it be in fast food, consistent bedtimes, or safe homes. And with the dissolution of much of the middle class in recent years, fast food is the ONLY way for the increasing load of lower-income households to provide “dining out” experiences for their children. Today’s health choices of the poor/uneducated will be reflected in increased spending on social programs of the future – it is in our best interest to not only encourage the recent volunteer actions of these companies, but to advocate for more governmental controls as well.
When McDonald’s adds a veggie burger and starts carrying those little bags of baby carrots that I can easily pick up at the grocery store, I’ll start bringing my own children there again. Other single parents who work more than 40 hours a week? Hmmmm . . . not so patient.
Food companies are going to start paying for advertising to reduce sales for their most promising customers? Oil companies are now environmental? What’s to become of this world?
The only thing food companies can do to help young people with weight loss (or the oil companies for the environment) is to make less of their product.
Instead, they hire PR professionals to spin the story. One even could say, unhealthy food IS PR.
McDonald’s tried to offer a VEGGIE Burger. It failed though; no one bought it. The customers just couldn’t say no to all the taste of a REAL burger and fries. Oh, I forgot the soda…Up size that please!