Children are seeing fewer ads on TV than they did 30 years ago, according to a report released last week by the Federal Trade Commission.
But that’s only part of the picture. The FTC will conduct a separate study to analyze food and beverage marketing beyond advertising. The study will track kids’ exposure to food messages in promotions, online, in-store, in schools, through licensing deals and athlete/celebrity endorsements, through premiums, and in video games.
That second study will use data from food companies to detail the types of food, the marketing techniques used and budgets, as well as food companies’ marketing policies regarding kids.
The FTC is negotiating now with companies on what information it will collect.
“We don’t know yet whether companies will fight the request, or how good the data will be,” said Pauline Ippolito, associate director of the FTC’s Bureau of Economics. “It will be a year or more before the report itself is ready.”
Together, the two pieces of research set a benchmark that could affect the government’s decision to have the FTC regulate food marketing to kids. For two years, the FTC has pressed food companies to clean up their kids’ marketing, or risk federal regulation of their advertising.
“The FTC’s current chair [Deborah Platt Majoras] is trying to work with the industry to see how much can be accomplished through voluntary means, but we’re also preparing whatever evidence is out there to take a hard look [at kids’ marketing] in case we have to go to court,” Ippolito told Promo.
Food ads account for 22% of all TV spots seen by kids, topped only by ads for TV shows themselves, at 28%, according to the report released last week. About half the food ads that kids see on TV run during programs geared to kids.
Kids ages 2 to 11 saw 25,600 TV spots, and 5,500 of them were for food or beverage brands. Another 7,300 were PSAs and programming promos, and the remaining 12,700 were for non-food products and services.
That compares with 21,700 TV spots that kids saw in 1977, including 6,000 ads for food and just over 2,000 programming promos.
“We certainly don’t have evidence to say that the volume and mix of ads that kids see has grown at the same time that obesity has grown,” Ippolito said.
Kids watched an average of 2.25 hours of ad-supported TV each day (16 hours per week) and another hour of TV without ads, such as PBS. They saw more than half the ads in the evenings (4 p.m. to midnight) and less than 5% of the ads on Saturday mornings (8 a.m. to noon).
The FTC released the research in preparation for a July 18 workshop on marketplace responses to childhood obesity, co-hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services. Food companies and industry associations are expected to speak at that workshop, although the agenda has not yet been set, Ippolito said.
The session will review industry-wide initiatives and specific product, packaging, and marketing changes that food marketers have made since July 2005, when the FTC and Health and Human Services held their first workshop to determine whether food and beverage marketers’ self-regulation measures were strong enough to keep brands from over-marketing to kids (PROMO, September 2005).
That workshop had presentations from PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Kraft Foods, Kellogg Co., General Mills, Nickelodeon Networks, Sesame Workshop, as well as the Four As and the American Advertising Federation and nutrition experts.
The TV ad report released last week is based on Nielsen Ratings Monitor data for 2004 that was presented at the 2005 workshop, and provides a baseline for studying future changes in kids’ exposure to TV ads.
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