Check Out: AdAge's Kids Upfront 2008

The current edition of Advertising Age Online includes a nice assortment of US kids' media and marketing related articles, compiled together in a special feature called Kids Up Front 2008. I highly recommend reading these before they pass into archive, at which point a subcription is required (though affordable on a pay-per basis). Not only does AdAge have access to information the public does not (they commission and conduct a lot of proprietary research that sometimes then becomes available for purchase at exorbitant industry prices, and other times remains within AdAge's privilege to report), and hence is an excellent resource for free and cutting edge insider information that is not always available elsewhere. And I must say that for an industry publication, they include a (pleasantly) surprising number of critical articles, lots of analysis, and generally try to achieve a level of reflexivity that is otherwise sorely lacking within ad/marketing industry discourses. Of particular interest are a series of articles penned by Andrew Hampp, including this one on the kids' $1 Billion television industry, one co-authored with Emily York describing a surprising increase in food advertising spending despite the ongoing child obesity controversy (and self-regulatory commitments of the US food and beverage industries), an overview of Nickelodeon and all the money it's making through online (adver)games, and an exploration of PBS Sprout's decision to target parents instead of kids. It also includes some handy stats supplied by ComScore Media Matrix:

McDonald's on the Hot Seat

The FTC issued a flurry of subpoenas to food, beverage and fast-food advertisers today demanding details about how they market their products to children. Included among the 44 major companies served are Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kraft Foods, and McDonald's. This development comes right on the heels of a report and press coverage earlier this week about the effectiveness of McDonald's branding strategies on kids' food preferences. In a study conducted at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, led by Thomas Robinson, researchers studied the food taste preferences of 63 kids between 3 and 5 years, who were enrolled in Head Start programs across San Mateo County. The kids sampled three types of McDonald's fast food -- including chicken nuggets, french fries and hamburgers -- as well as two types of food purchased at a grocery store (carrots and milk). Kids were given two equal portions of each of the five food items, but with a small difference--one (of each) was wrapped in a McDonald's wrapper, or placed in a McDonald's bag, while the other (of each) was wrapped in similar wrapping, but without the McDonald's logo. The kids were then randomly asked to taste first one and then the other of the five "identical, differently packaged, pairs of food samples" and pick which one they thought tasted better (with the option of answering that they thought they tasted the same). According to the study press release:

With four out of the five foods - chicken nuggets, fries, carrots and milk - significantly more children pegged the McDonald's product as tastier, despite the fact that the foods were exactly the same.

"The branding effect is very strong, even by only 3 to 5 years of age," said Thomas Robinson, MD, director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Packard Children's and associate professor of pediatrics and of medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine.

The researchers also revealed that they selected McDonald's because it was a brand that kids were most likely to be familiar with. And they certainly found indications of a link between preference and exposure:

"We found that kids with more TVs in their homes and those who eat at McDonald's more frequently were even more likely to prefer the food in the McDonald's wrapper," said Robinson. "This is a company that knows what they're doing. Nobody else spends as much to advertise their fast-food products to children." McDonald's is estimated to spend more than $1 billion dollars per year on U.S. advertising.

You can read more coverage of the report here via Yahoo News, and here via AdAge. You can also watch a clip of Sussan Linn talking about the study on The Today Show. If you click on all three of these links, you'll see something pretty interesting...a slight, but important deviation in how the study's research design is represented. While the Stanford press release and Yahoo News both describe that the second, non-McDonald's sample was wrapped in "unbranded packages in the same color and style", the AdAge and Today Show coverage states that the second sample was "wrapped in plain paper." The Today Show includes a clip of some kids with food choices in front of them chowing down on McD's --not the study itself-- with fast food alongside tupperware containers and other variously packaged foods. The report I watched on Tuesday (Monday?) night, which aired on Global News, also reproduced the study but had the kids picking between McDonald's foods and foods wrapped in plain brown paper wrapping. I think that this inaccuracy is pretty significant, given that it implies that the study asked kids to pick between colorfully-packaged "restaurant food", which carries all the associations of "treats" "special occasions" and "price" (which can be confused with quality even by adults), and paper-bag food, with all of its associations with "generic", "school lunch" and "knock off". I think it's important that parents see that kids were choosing between two equally appealing, similarly-coded samples and that McDonald's still won out because the kids had specific feelings about that specific brand.

Another issue is whether this study is all that groundbreaking, considering the vast amounts of research that already establish fairly solid links between brand exposure (through media and advertising and culture) and kids' product preferences. What's so different about this study? The news media seems to think it has to do with the research methodology. According to Yahoo News, "While prior studies have looked at the impact of individual ads on kids, Robinson and colleagues set out to study the overall influence of a company's brand -- based on everything from advertising to toy premiums and word of mouth." Well, obviously this isn't exactly the case (there have definitely been studies of branding and branding campaigns, as well as studies of children's whole media environments), but applying such a comprehensive approach does represent something of a departure from the research to date. It's strange how much (on certain topics/methods) and how little (on other topics/methods) research exists on kids and advertising, considering how big an issue it appears to be within public consciousness. Anyway, I feel that there are links here to longer trends among the media in terms of how they represent the media effects debate, which you can read more about in this article by Steve Kline if you're interested.

The Global Kids Food Ads Revolution

Philip M. Stone, of FollowTheMedia.com, reports on a recent announcement by Canadian food and beverage companies "that 15 of its biggest companies will devote at least 50% of their ads directed to children under 12 to promote healthy food choices and how to live an active life." A series of PSAs will also be produced under the umbrella brand "Long Live Kids"...think "Participaction" for a new generation. Stone's article goes on to discuss regulatory developments worldwide (stating "Junk food has replaced tobacco as the young’s Public Enemy #1"), focusing in on the UK (obviously) and US in particular, but also mentions Chile, which I haven't really heard much about until now. The article also links to a number of background documents, which may be useful if you're interested in following the kids' food ads "revolution".

Meanwhile, the FTC is preparing to serve food and beverages companies in the US with "compulsory requests for information" on their children's marketing and advertising practices. Said
FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, in a speech to the Food and Drug Law Institute given last week (cited in the AdAge article):

"We hope to get a more complete picture of marketing techniques for which publicly available data have so far been lacking. This effort is exploring not only traditional TV, print and radio advertising, but will provide an analysis of all of the many other ways that the industry reaches children -- through in-store promotions, events, packaging, the internet and product placement in video games, movies and television programs."

The Fight Against TV Food Advertising to Children Continues: with New KFF Report

The Kaiser Family Foundation released a new report on child-targeted TV food advertising yesterday, lending even more support to the various organizations and US politicians currently pushing for increased regulation of children's television and marketing (within the context of the fight against childhood obesity). Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States represents the largest study ever conducted on kids' TV food advertising. It also includes a bunch of useful new statistics on kids' viewing habits, such as top ten network by age category, and amount of television consumed by the different age groups. Some of the study's key findings include:

- Children's exposure to food ads is substantial and varies by age. Children aged 8-12, for example, watch more television than any other group, and therefore see more food ads than other age groups. The authors and literature show that this group is also the most likely to be affected because this is an age where personal food habits start to develop, as kids in this age group begin to spend more time (and meals) away from home, increasingly buy food/snacks with their own money, etc.

- Ads for food and beverages (continue to) dominate US children's television advertising. According to the report, "Food is the most widely advertised product on the networks in the study, and among children’s shows, fully half (50%) of all ad time is for food. Furthermore, most of these food ads promote foods that are unhealthy--fast food, junk food, candy and sugar cereal. None of the ads reviewed were for fruits and vegetables.

- Only 15% of child-directed food ads depict a physically active lifestyle.

- 19% of child-directed food ads try to entice young viewers with incentives, such as free gifts or prizes (a practice that was recently prohibited in the UK).

- Only 10% of child-directed food ads feature a known children's media-character (from TV, film, etc.).

- Low priority ad space for public-service announcements means that children under 8 years see about one PSA promoting fitness or nutrition for every 26 commercial food ads. For tweens, it's one PSA per 48 food ads. For teens, it's one PSA for every 130 food ads.