Food manufacturers spend $10 billion each year for “advertising that targets children.” Targets. Our children are targets. Of course, you and I are targets too, but that’s another story.
A lot of that money shows up in TV advertising. Last week the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report on how much children are exposed to food advertising on television. This is an easy punching bag to take a swipe at so I won’t linger. Just a few statistics from the report.
Overall advertising that targets children: for children 2 to 7, 14.000 ads per year totaling 106 hours (that’s almost 4½ days); for children 8 to 12, 30,000 ads per year totaling 230 hours (almost 10 days); and for children 13 to 17, 29,000 ads per year for 217 hours (9 days).
That’s advertising for everything. For just food advertising that targets children: children 2 to 7, 4,400 ads per year for 30 hours; children 8 to 12, 7,600 ads per year for 50 hours; and children 13 to 17, 6,000 ads per year for 40 hours.
The bulk of foods advertised are candy, processed foods, cereal, and sugar-fortified drinks. No ads for fruits or vegetables. None.
The article in the San Francisco Chronicle that covered the release of the Kaiser report opened with the story of a mother who wondered why her 7-year old son, who had been an avid fruit and vegetable guy, started asking for junk food. She spent a half hour with him watching his favorite TV program. Quite a surprise.
She’d have another rude surprise if she followed him to his favorite websites. Last July Kaiser published another report on the new frontier of advertising that targets children: advergaming. As the name suggests, it is a blend of advertising and video games presented on the Internet. Advergaming and the other methods being developed by those clever people in the marketing departments of our leading corporations employ all of the slick methods of the Internet, methods like viral marketing—that’s when a kid is asked to email a friend about her or his favorite advergaming site.
The virtue of this new frontier, expected to quadruple over the next five years, is that it’s cheap compared to TV advertising and it doesn’t have even the fangless FCC to oversee it. The industry, of course, has promised to behave itself and so on. Some people have to pretend that they believe it. I don’t. You shouldn’t.
Last year, the Institute of Medicine issued a report on the topic of advertising that targets children. Their recommendations, adopted by respectable organizations, consist of
1. directing food manufacturers to use their creative talents to promote healthful diets for children,
2. working with industry to develop a better code of conduct, and
3. encouraging research to determine just how much marketing actually affects children.
Good grief. I have two ideas to add. Kids are pretty smart. I think they can learn to be media savvy so they know when they’re being played for a chump. On the industry side, let’s make them contribute to a fund, $2 for every $1 they spend targeting children. The fund would be used specifically to make kids media savvy and to counter industry advertising with alternative content. I’d avoid the “healthy diet” issue since that means the USDA food pyramid, which is heavily influenced by the food industry and, as one critic commented, is quite similar the USDA’s diet for fattening livestock. But I digress.
The impetus for the two Kaiser reports and the Institute of Medicine report is the growing concern that children are too fat: the obesity epidemic among kids caused by junk food. It’s a nice, neat causal chain: advertising leads to bad eating habits leads to obesity. I think that view is wrong. As with adults, the increase in the number of fat kids is a symptom of something more profound. And the eating problem behind it is not that kids are eating too many calories. The problem is that kids are malnourished, which doesn’t mean too few calories, it means they’re not getting the nutrients they need to thrive.
Food advertising that targets children isn’t just making kids fat. It’s ruining their health because the foods are empty calories. Malnutrition. Children are starving.
