Food and beverage marketers now have FTC veteran Elaine Kolish on their side.
Kolish has been named the director of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, a joint effort between 11 food companies and the Council of Better Business Bureaus.
Kolish will join the CBBB on March 19 to take charge of the fledgling initiative that was first announced last November. The participating companies will submit to Kolish specific plans on how their brands will follow the program’s new guidelines, which were designed to tighten food marketers’ self-regulation in order to avoid a crackdown by the Federal Trade Commission on kids’ advertising (PROMO Xtra, July 19, 2005).
Kolish spent 25 years at the FTC, rising to the post as the head of Division of Enforcement in the Bureau of Consumer Protection. She comes to the CBBB this month from law firm Sonnenschein Nath and Rosenthal, where she has been a partner since 2005, counseling national advertisers on advertising and marketing compliance.
At the CBBB, Kolish will be reunited with another FTC veteran, C. Lee Peeler, who joined the CBBB in September 2006 as executive vice president of national advertising self regulation, and as president and CEO of CBBB’s National Advertising Review Council. Peeler had been deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Peeler said he worked with Kolish in a variety of capacities at the FTC from 1984 until she left the agency in 2005.
Kolish will work with the initiative’s participating companies to make sure their commitments meet or exceed initiative principles, and she will monitor marketers’ compliance.
All marketers in the program have agreed to devote at least half their kids’ advertising (TV, radio, print and online) to promote good nutrition and healthy lifestyles; to stop advertising in elementary schools; to stop placing products in editorial and entertainment content; to cut their use of third-party licensed characters in ads that don’t meet the initiative’s criteria; and to place only healthier foods and drinks in interactive games and to incorporate healthy lifestyle messages in those games (PROMO Xtra, Nov. 16, 2006).
The participating companies are Cadbury Schweppes USA; Campbell Soup Co.; The Coca-Cola Co.; General Mills; The Hershey Co.; Kellogg Co.; Kraft Foods; Masterfoods; McDonald’s; PepsiCo; and Unilever. These companies account for an estimated two-thirds of all kid-targeted TV advertising for food and beverages, according to the CBBB.
The advertising initiative is just part of CBBB’s efforts to shape up kids’ marketing. The council also revised its Self-Guidelines for advertising to children, working with 40 top advertisers to give the guidelines more teeth. Among the changes, made in November:
- The Children’s Advertising Review Unit was authorized to take action on unfair and misleading advertising to children.
- “Blurring,” obscuring the line between ads and editorial content, was prohibited in all media.
- Advergaming was required to clearly label all ad messages incorporated into games.
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