After months of analyzing confidential information from 44 major food and beverage marketers, the Federal Trade Commission has released their total spending and a set of recommendations when marketing to children.
The companies spent $1.6 billion to market their products to children under 12 and adolescents ages 12 to 17 in the U.S. in 2006. The review looked at both traditional advertising, and, for the first time at promotional marketing including, packaging, in-store advertising, sweepstakes and the Internet.
“This is the first time that we all have had an opportunity to see what the extent is both in dollar value and the nature of the advertising,” Mary Engle, the director of the division of advertising practices for the FTC, said yesterday. “Hopefully this can serve as a baseline to measure future activity.”
Some of the companies required to participate in the report include Burger King, Campbell Soup Co., Coca-Cola, General Mills, Interstate Bakeries, Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Mars, McDonald’s, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Wendy’s International, Yum Brands and others.
The commission found that these firm’s campaigns were “fully integrated” and “sweeping” in nature playing out across a wide range of media including those tied to 80 TV shows or movies popular with children. In total, the companies spent more than $208 million, representing 13% of all youth-directed marketing, on cross-promotional campaigns. For some food categories, such as restaurant food and fruits and vegetables, cross-promotions accounted for nearly 50% of reported child-directed expenditures, the FTC said.
In addressing whether the FTC believes there is a direct link between advertising and the high rate of obesity among children, Engle said, “We don’t think it’s necessary to make that connection. Obesity is certainly not only about advertising. There are fewer physical education programs in school. Our children are more sedentary. It’s a bigger issue, it’s not just about advertising.”
In breaking down the $1.6 billion, the FTC found that approximately $870 million was spent on child-directed marketing, and a little more than $1 billion on marketing to adolescents, with about $300 million overlapping between the two age groups.
Marketers spent more money on television advertising than on any other technique ($745 million or 46% of the total.)
Engle said that the percentage of foods advertised not considered nutritional was protected by a confidentiality agreement with the 44 companies, but that it did have that information and would chart it over time.
The FTC made the following recommendations for all companies to strengthen their self-regulatory guidelines when marketing food or beverage products to children under 12:
· to adopt meaningful, nutrition-based standards for marketing their products that extend to all forms of advertising and promotion.
· to improve nutritional profiles of products marketed to children and adolescents
· to cease the in-school promotion of products that do not meet nutritional standards
· to improve the quality and consistency of the nutritional criteria adopted for “better for you” products
· to enhance the Council of Better Business Bureau’s Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, a joint self-regulatory effort between 13 food companies and the Council of Better Business Bureaus.
· that media and entertainment companies restrict the licensing of their characters to healthier foods and beverages that are marketed to children and adopt their own self-regulatory guidelines
The total spending reported by the companies “surprised” the FTC, since it, like other organizations, had been looking at the $10 billion number citied by the Institute of Medicine.
Engle said there were two possibilities for the wide disparity: the institute did not have access to the confidential information that the FTC did and the FTC looked specifically at the dollar amount of marketing directed to children, not the total advertising spent on the brands.
The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood has long been a critic of these companies and others marketing practices and said yesterday that the $1.6 billion cited in the report “does not begin to reflect children’s experience of that marketing.”
“Given the concerning picture of food marketing’s infiltration of children’s lives painted by the FTC report, it is disappointing that they continue to perpetuate the myth that self-regulation can effectively rein in an industry whose profits rely on commercializing childhood,” Susan Linn, the director of CCFC, said in a statement.
Will government be stepping in any time soon to force companies to market differently to children?
“For the time being we’d like to see how the self-regulatory process is working,” Engle said. “It is not yet fully implemented. We’d like to see how the companies respond to the recommendation in this report.”
Copies of the report, which had been requested by Congress, are available at the FTC’s Web site at www.ftc.gov.
