"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)

Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing | Setting the Stage
Under the Public Radar
espite the rapid expansion in the children’s digital marketplace, surprisingly little
research has been done to track, analyze, and evaluate these trends. Most of
the studies available for review for the 2005 Institute of Medicine report were focused on
assessing the impact of television advertising. For the most part, academic research has
not been able to keep up with the pace and scope of change in the media and marketing
environment. Much of the public policy debate over new media and children has focused
on concerns over pornographic and indecent content, with relatively little attention paid to
commercial practices. Marketing is one of the least understood aspects of the new digital
media culture. As a consequence, its role in the health and wellbeing of young people has
remained largely under the radar of most policymakers, educators, health professionals,
and parents.
There have been some efforts to fill this gap. In 1996, when the commercialization
of the World Wide Web was just beginning, the nonprofit Center for Media Education
published a report that documented many of the emerging online market practices that
advertisers—including major food brands—were using to target children. 36 The widely publicized
study helped trigger a national public policy debate over online data collection
from children, resulting in the passage of the first federal law to regulate children’s privacy
on the Internet, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). That law, which
took effect in 2000, restricts the collection of personal information from children under
the age of 13 by commercial website operators. 37
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