One sure way to gage the progress in the fight against marketing to children is to see what articles and blog posts come across our RSS feed. Here’s what we’ve seen in just the last couple weeks:

Facebook Wants Children — Yours — to Boost Ad Sales [BNET]

Food Makers Won’t Leave Your Kids Alone [Rodale.com]

Marketing Junk Food To Kids Is Evil [Care2]

Marketing to Tweens – making our kids grow up too fast [NJ.com]

Movies still sell smoking to our kids [WLTribune.com]

Are Advergames Fair Game for Kids? [Brand Channel]

Curbing Junk Food Marketing to Children [Eat Drink Better]

Time to crack down on child-focused ads [SFGate.com]

Is McDonald’s Betraying Our Kids By Barraging Them With Junk Food Ads? [Huffington Post*]

Children’s Internet Games — Health and Obesity [Patch.com]

McDonald’s aggressively markets to kids [Las Vegas Review-Journal]

Maybe Trix aren’t for Kids [insideawake]

Kid-baiting ads have gone too far [Salon]

Food, Advertising Reps Blast Proposed Guidelines for Marketing to Kids [Fox News]

*We have a no link policy for the Huffington Post. This is why. [video]

In the great debate over who’s responsible for kids’ unhealthy diets and related illnesses, here’s one that points to corporate marketing: Products that are labeled healthy for kids really aren’t:

Parents shouldn’t look to the labels on the front of food package for guidance on picking the healthiest products for their kids. Claiming Health: Front-of-Package Labeling of Children’s Food looked at packages with front of package labeling–symbols that identify healthier products–and found that 84% of products studied didn’t meet basic nutritional standards.

Consider parents who are in a rush at the grocery store — can we really blame them for choosing a product that their kids clamor for and is good for them to boot?

It’s not the first time front-of-packaging labels and health claims have come under fire. Meant to inform consumers, most nutritional marketing does just the opposite. There’s a slew of competing symbols, labels and check marks that have been developed by food manufacturers to sell their goods, without little to no oversight.

Babysitter Approved: A Minneapolis firm, Haberman, is asking consumers to identify marketing campaigns “that truly ADD value to our world.” ADD or DELETE also asks companies and agencies to take a look at what they’re producing:

We think the advertising and communications industry needs to redirect some of its creative firepower towards creating positive change instead of more distasteful or wasteful advertisements. Take the 5% challenge – devote some of your business time, marketing expertise and resources to ADDing.

The campaign’s focus on Super Bowl advertising reminds me of this slide — now slightly outdated — I’ve used in parent education presentations showing the yearly increases in public education spending, Super Bowl ad revenue, and the amount spent marketing to children:

World governments are being asked to monitor advertising directed at children in an effort to curb non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart and lung disease — a growing cause of premature death in poor countries.

From the World Health Organization:

21 January, 2011 | Geneva — Children throughout the world are exposed to marketing of foods high in fat, sugar or salt, which increases the potential of younger generations developing noncommunicable diseases during their lives. The World Health Organization is urging countries to take action to reduce the exposure of such marketing to children by implementing a set of internationally-endorsed measures.

Television advertising is responsible for a large share of the marketing of unhealthy foods and, according to systematic reviews of evidence, advertisements influence children’s food preferences, purchase requests and consumption patterns.

In May 2010, WHO Member States endorsed a new set of recommendations on the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children. The recommendations call for national and international action to reduce the exposure of children to marketing messages that promote foods high in saturated fats, trans-fatty acids, free sugars, or salt, and to reduce the use of powerful techniques to market these foods to children. . . .

WHO data shows that 43 million pre-school children worldwide are obese or overweight. Scientific reviews have also shown that a significant portion of television advertising that children are exposed to promotes “noncore” food products which are low in nutritional value. . . .

Preparations are ongoing for the first United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on the Prevention and Control of NCDs, which will be held on 19-20 September 2011 in New York. Heads of state and government are being invited to the High-level Meeting, which will focus on the health, development and socioeconomic impacts of NCDs, particularly in the developing world.

Image courtesy {N}Duran

Advertising in public schools is back in the news as School Media’s (sic), a new Coon Rapids, Minnesota-based company, begins to pitch their in-school advertising and locker-wrapping services to area schools, including Centennial School District:

Centennial schools may soon tout everything from Crayola crayons to Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer” on their lockers.

Centennial School District was scheduled to vote on using School Media’s services a week ago, but didn’t [pdf]:

Advertising in Schools: Superintendent Stremick shared the feedback received on advertising in the schools. Discussion followed. Board would like gather more feedback from community and district staff before proceeding further. No School Board action was required.

The story hit the AP wire and got the attention of FOX & Friends, a morning talk show on the FOX News Network. The producer contacted me while considering doing a segment on the topic. It’s since postponed, but she asked to contact me again “as the story develops.”

Advertising in schools, called a “sacred cow” by the National School Public Relations Association, has long been debated as schools struggle to find solutions to their funding problems. (See also: Will new Minnesota legislation invite corporate interests into the classroom?) These are especially tough times for schools, which have been put in the position of coming up with their own creative solutions to the problems created by state and federal governments and/or mismanaged school districts (depending on who you ask).

Enter corporate marketers like PepsiCo or ad brokers like the now-defunct Bus Radio or School Media’s, who bring funding solutions to schools in a seemingly win-win situation: The schools get to hire the teachers they need, and the companies make a profit. So what’s the harm?

The harm has been documented in reports by the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University since 1998:

It is easy to understand why marketers would target children. They influence their parents’ spending, they spend a lot of money themselves, and when they develop preferences for brands in childhood, their loyalty often lasts a lifetime. Because children spend so much time in schools, corporations pursue access to them . . . . For their part, school districts, especially those facing higher costs and shrinking budgets, often see advertising as a potential source of additional funds. Some are also attracted to advertising and marketing activities because they believe that participating in such activities demonstrates goodwill toward the business community.

. . . Overall, marketing activities in schools actively threaten high-quality education by causing psychological, health-related, and academic harm to students. Commercial activities offer children experiences primarily intended to serve the sponsors and not the children themselves; they are therefore inherently “mis-educative,” because they promote unreflective consumption rather than critical thinking and rational decision making.

Emphasis mine. Corporate advertising messages in schools are in a direct conflict with the purpose and goals of education. Watch Nickelodeon! while researchers and educators are trying to encourage kids to move away from screens and into books. Eat Doritos! and Drink Pepsi! while nutritionists and district food services are working desperately to teach good eating habits and stem obesity.

Why don’t companies pursue placing ads in front of parents, instead? District websites, for example, are probably more frequented by adults than children. Could it be that it’s more cost-effective to influence a child — with years of spending power ahead — than it is to try to persuade adults to change their buying habits?

Children are easier targets, indeed.

As a parent who advocates for ethical marketing, I often hear the counterarguments: If you don’t like the ads, just turn off your television/don’t allow that website/don’t read those magazines. And that’s just what I do.

But I can’t keep my kids out of school.

Here’s a comment from a Facebook posting I read (status is private so you’ll have to trust me) about School Media’s wrapped lockers:

Locker ads are especially offensive to me. That locker is the closest thing a student has to a personal space while at school. It’s an anchor to personal sanity in an otherwise hectic, depersonalizing environment.

CCFC’s Josh Golin offers some advice to districts considering working with in-school advertising companies in Thinking About Allowing Advertising in Your School? Do Your Homework.

More from the Commercialism in Education Research Unit:

Policy and Statutory Responses to Advertising and Marketing in Schools (2010)
Click: The Twelfth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2008-2009
At Sea in a Marketing-Saturated World: The Eleventh Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2007-2008
Adrift: Schools in a Total Marketing Environment. The Tenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2006-2007
The Ninth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2005-2006
Empty Calories: Commercializing Activities in America’s Schools (2005)
Virtually Everywhere: Marketing to Children in America’s Schools (2004)
No Student Left Unsold (2003)
What’s in a Name? The Corporate Branding of America’s Schools (2002)
Buy Me! Buy Me! (2001)
Commercialism@School.com (2000)
Cashing in on Kids (1999)
Sponsored Schools and Commercialized Classrooms (1998)

Kucinich Pushes To End Tax Subsidies For Junk Food Advertising [Huffington Post]
Pulling the Plug on Marketing Junk Food to Kids [Care2]
Tell the USDA to Restrict Junk Food Ads Aimed at Children [Change.org]
Open Thread: Should the FDA Control Junk Food Marketing? [Fast Company]
The first Cannes Lion for not advertising at all [alexbogusky’s posterous]

It took a national public health crisis. But it looks like marketing to children has finally found a home in the nation’s spotlight.

The May issue of Scientific American tackles it head-on with Underage, Overweight: The Federal Government Needs to Halt the Marketing of Unhealthy Foods to Kids. Citing the recent study that linked television commercials – not simply sitting in front of a TV but the commercials themselves – with obesity, the editors at Scientific American call on the FDA to create and enforce mandatory standards for food and beverage marketing to children.

The estimated cost of treating obesity-related ailments in adults was $147 billion for 2009. With the health care system already faltering, allowing companies to decide for themselves whether to peddle junk food to kids is a fox-and-henhouse policy this country simply cannot afford any longer.

Scientists and parents and health professionals and teachers are waking up to the idea that maybe, just maybe, corporations shouldn’t be spending billions of dollars to convince kids to want things that are bad for them.

And maybe, just maybe, since corporations are not going to stop on their own, it’s time for someone to step in.

Agencies who should be doing something now are instead putting their time and effort into advertising literacy campaigns. The FTC recently unveiled Admongo, an online game to teach kids how to decipher the very ads that shouldn’t be directed at them in the first place.  Why not just go after the advertisers? Seems the FTC was careful not to alienate any corporate campaign donors when creating Admongo, in fact, they’ve partnered with Scholastic, the single largest offender of bringing corporate advertising directly into the classroom via licensed-character-laden books. [Read also: Government Program Teaches Kids to Gaze at Ads Better]

Thanks for the help, FTC.

Yet we know the climate is changing. Our friends at Cynopsis Media recently talked to some cable network types to get their sense of what they expected to happen this year in advertising. Jackie Kulesza from Starcom:

There are a lot of factors that play into kids marketplace. There are discussions outside of our advertising world in Washington about this space and it continues to be a concern from a regulatory perspective. This administration might be bringing a different tone.

But don’t tell this to the corporations and their taxpayer subsidized marketing and advertising departments. They want to buy what Adweek is selling:

Kids want what they want when they want it. The little centers-of-our-universe can beg and plead for their essentials — toys, snacks and TV shows — with unfettered determination. Turns out that parents, television networks and marketers are working double time to oblige.

Nice. This is from Adweek’s What Kids Want: A Special Issue. It continues:

Marketers too are seeking to box out competitors by altering food products to reduce the dreaded salt, sugar and fat content in kids snacks. Are they doing too little too late to make an impact on kids health? Are their efforts just a smoke and mirrors move aimed at duping parents and kids to buy more bad food? Depends who you ask.

Asked and answered.

Image courtesy ford.

I would so love to attend this FTC forum in D.C. that I am almost willing to snack on [fill in name of food industry sponsor]’s delicious products all day long. While standing in the front of the room. And passing out coupons.  

FTC Announces Agenda for December 15 Forum to Explore Food Marketing to Children
Will Address Developments in Self-Regulation; Report on Recommended Nutritional Standards

The Federal Trade Commission announced the agenda and speakers for its December 15, 2009 public forum titled “Sizing Up Food Marketing and Childhood Obesity.”

The forum participants will present new research on the impact of various food advertising techniques on children and discuss the statutory and constitutional issues surrounding governmental regulation of food marketing. Panelists also will address the food and entertainment industries’ self-regulatory efforts and implementation of the recommendations in the FTC’s 2008 report, Marketing Food to Children and Adolescents: A Review of Industry Expenditures, Activities, and Self-Regulation. In addition, the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children – comprised of representatives from the FTC, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and U.S. Department of Agriculture – will report on the status of recommended nutritional standards for foods marketed to children, followed by a Town Hall discussion.

An agenda for the forum is available. Updated information will be posted as it becomes available.

Read the rest of the press release.