Calories for Sale: Food Marketing to Children in the Twenty-First Century
| DOI | 10.1177/0002716207308487 |
| Date | 01 January 2008 |
| Published date | 01 January 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
the billions, an escalation that mirrors the rise in child-
hood obesity rates. Children are targets for a maelstrom
of marketing for all sorts of products enabled by sophis-
ticated technology and minimal government regulation.
Despite the fact that recent studies document links
between food advertising and childhood obesity, a sig-
nificant proportion of marketing that targets children is
for energy-dense, low-nutrient food. Moreover,
advances in digital technology allow marketers to find
more direct, personalized gateways to reach young
Calories for
audiences that sidestep parental authority and bank as
much on the unknowing parent as the gullible child.
Sale: Food
Cataloguing the depth and breadth of child-centered
food marketing while discussing grassroots strategies
for instituting change, the authors argue that parents
Marketing to
can no longer keep pace either with innovations in
advertising or increased spending, suggesting the need
Children in the for more stringent government regulations on food
marketing to children.
Twenty-First
Keywords:
food marketing; food advertising; child-
hood obesity; marketing to children; adver-
Century
tising to children; advertising regulation
Obesity Rates Mirror Rise in
By
Marketing; History of Television
SUSAN LINN
and
Deregulation Complicit
COURTNEY L. NOVOSAT
Childhood obesity is a serious and escalating
public health concern, yet children are targeted
as never before by marketing for high-calorie,
nutritionally deficient foods.
Overweight children are at risk for a number
of medical problems, including hypertension,
asthma (American Academy of Pediatrics 2003,
424), and type 2 diabetes, a disease previously
found primarily in adults (Sinha et al. 2002,
802). Since 1980, the proportion of overweight
children ages six to eleven has doubled to 15.3
percent; for adolescents, the rate has tripled to
15.5 percent (Ogden, Carroll, and Johnson 2002,
1728). The most recent studies suggest that
“over 30% of American children are overweight
DOI: 10.1177/0002716207308487
ANNALS, AAPSS, 615, January 2008
133
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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
or obese” while “only 2% eat a diet consistent with United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) guidelines” (Batada and Wootan 2007, 1). This unprece-
dented escalation of childhood obesity mirrors the equally unprecedented esca-
lation of largely unregulated marketing that targets children. In 1983,
corporations were spending $100 million on television advertising to children,
which was essentially the only avenue available (Schor 2004, 21). By 2000, Burger
King spent $80 million on advertising to children (Cebryznski and Zuber 2001)
and Quaker Oats had allocated $15 million just to market Cap’n Crunch cereal
(Thompson 1999). Today, food and beverage advertisers alone spend between
$10 billion to $15 billion a year targeting youth (Eggerton 2007). Given the expo-
nential rise in dollars spent on marketing to children, there is little doubt that the
food industry believes that marketing is a critical factor in children’s food
choices—and research bears that out.
In recent years, the World Health Organization (WHO 2003), the Institute of
Medicine (McGinnis, Goodman, and Kraak 2006), and the British Food
Commission (Dalmeny, Hanna, and Lobstein 2004) conducted reviews of acade-
mic research pointing to a link between child-targeted marketing and childhood
obesity. The 2006 report released by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) found that
“for younger and older children, the evidence clearly supports the finding that
television advertising influences their food and beverage purchase requests”
(McGinnis, Goodman, and Kraak 2006, 21). Moreover, of the $200 billion spent
by children and youth consumers, the four categories leading in sales are candy
and snack foods, soft drinks, fast food, and cereal (McGinnis, Goodman, and
Kraak 2006, 22). The IOM’s findings underscore the important results of the
2003 review conducted by the WHO, which concluded that “the heavy market-
ing of high-calorie and low-nutrient foods and fast food outlets represents a prob-
able increased risk for childhood obesity” (McGinnis, Goodman, and Kraak 2006,
301-2). Confirming the barrage of advertisements, a subsequent study published
by the American Journal of Public Health of food commercials aired during the
most popular shows for children ages six to eleven found that 83 percent were for
snacks, fast foods, or sweets (Harrison and Marske 2005, 1568). Furthermore,
the researchers found that a diet based on foods advertised on these programs
would exceed U.S. Department of Agriculture Recommended Daily Values of
Susan Linn is associate director of the Media Center of Judge Baker Children’s Center and
Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. She has written extensively about the effects
of media and commercial marketing on children. Her book Consuming Kids: The Hostile
Takeover of Childhood was praised in publications as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and
Mother Jones. She is director and cofounder of the national coalition Campaign for a
Commercial-Free Childhood.
Courtney L. Novosat is the program coordinator at the Campaign for Commercial-Free
Childhood in Boston. Approaching the social sciences by way of the humanities, she is partic-
ularly interested in the historical rise of commercialized consumer culture and the effects of
commercialism on self-definition and language use among children and adolescents. She has
also been published in MP: An International Feminist Journal Online.
CALORIES FOR SALE
135
fat, saturated fat, and sodium (Harrison and Marske 2005, 1568). Most recently,
researchers at Stanford University found that when offered identical food includ-
ing chicken nuggets, French fries, milk, and carrots in both McDonald’s-branded
wrapping and unbranded wrapping, 54 to 77 percent of the three- to five-year-
old participants preferred the taste of the food they believed was from
McDonald’s. In fact, all the offerings were from the fast food giant, suggesting
that the influence of market branding is so strong among preschoolers that it
even trumps sensory input (Robinson et al. 2007, 796).
The current food marketing environment has its roots in the history of the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC), which share most of the authority to regulate advertising and
marketing to children. During the 1970s, Action for Children’s Television (ACT),
a public interest organization, criticized broadcasting networks for their failure to
provide enough valuable educational programming to children and for failing to
“protect children who are too young to effectively recognize and defend against
commercial persuasion” (Kunkel 2001, 385). Citing several landmark studies1
confirming that children younger than seven or eight cannot differentiate
between program content and advertisements, ACT petitioned the FCC to
devise protective regulatory policies, a petition that led to the first federal poli-
cies restricting advertisements during children’s television (Kunkel 2001, 385).
The FCC regulations limited commercial time, required a “clear separation”
between program and commercial content, and restricted “host selling,” or sales
by program characters within program content (Kunkel 2001, 385).
The FTC attempted to reify and strengthen the former decision in 1978 by
ruling that “advertising directed to children too young to understand a message’s
persuasive intent was inherently unfair and deceptive” (Kunkel 2001, 387). Amid
a general climate of government deregulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
the FTC’s decision was met with shock from the advertising industry and from
the government. Congress responded in 1980 by rescinding the FTC’s authority
to regulate advertising deemed “unfair” and, subsequently, abated policies for
advertising to children (Kunkel 2001, 387). Although the FTC maintains author-
ity to regulate advertising deemed “deceptive,” the restriction of its authority
crippled the potential for any broad-spectrum regulation in advertising to chil-
dren for nearly three decades. As a result of the restriction placed on the FTC,
today it is easier to regulate advertising targeted to adults than advertising tar-
geted to children. Since the FTC Improvements Act of 1980 removed the FTC’s
power to regulate advertising to children that is deemed unfair, advertising to
children is only regulated on the basis of practices deemed deceptive (Kunkel
2001, 387). In contrast, advertising to adults continues to be regulated on the
basis of unfairness and deception (FTC.gov 2007).
In 1984, a watershed moment for advertisers, the FCC “rescinded all restric-
tions on the amount of commercial content” in favor of a self-regulatory policy
that remains in effect today; it maintained that the advertising industry could bet-
ter establish appropriate commercial levels (Kunkel 2001, 387). The Children’s
Advertising Review Unit (CARU), created in 1974 and funded by the advertising
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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
industry, establishes and encourages the self-regulatory guidelines for the indus-
try. The disempowerment of the FTC and the FCC’s recanting of its previous
policy enabled CARU’s rise to prominence; an era of industry self-regulation was
born and continues today. Although the Children’s Television Act of 1990 rein-
stated commercial time limits, restricting the time to 10.5 minutes per hour on
weekends and 12 minutes per hour on weekdays during children’s...
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