"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)

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Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing | Setting the Stage
More recently, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2006 report, It’s Child’s
Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children, examined websites
sponsored by food manufacturers promoting popular brands among children, finding that
“the vast majority (85%) of the leading food brands that target children on TV are also
either directly targeting children on the Internet or providing online content likely to be of
interest to them.” By providing vivid documentation of these “branded entertainment”
sites, the Kaiser study has helped shed light on some of the practices that have become
commonplace in digital marketing, including “advergaming,” viral marketing, media tieins,
and extensions of online experiences into “offline” outlets. 38
But these studies reveal only a tiny part of a complex and extensive global digital
marketing enterprise that has important implications for the health of America’s children.
As the media marketplace continues its rapid transformation, becoming a ubiquitous
presence in young people’s lives, the public remains largely unaware of the nature,
scope, and extent of its influence.
This report is a first step in articulating the nature of this new digital marketing
environment. The report has three main objectives:
1. to provide an overview of the key developments that are shaping the new digital
marketing environment, with particular attention to the targeting of children and
youth;
2. to identify the major contemporary strategies used by food marketers to promote
their brands to children and adolescents, including the targeted efforts to
reach multicultural youth; and
3. to offer recommendations for further research, public education, corporate initiatives,
and policy interventions.
This descriptive report is based on detailed examination and analysis of developments
in the digital marketplace, in order to develop a deeper understanding of its
structure and direction, and to identify the key practices that are emerging to target children
and adolescents. We have relied on a variety of resources, including media and
advertising industry white papers, trade publications, conference transcripts, proprietary
reports, and other documents. To research the ways in which major food and beverage
companies are marketing their products to young people in the digital media, we examined
the companies’ own public documents and press statements, augmenting this information
with analyses of websites and other content available online. 39
Recently, the food industry has told regulators that it has decreased the amount
of money spent on advertising to children. 40 But such claims fail to acknowledge the fundamental
changes that are blurring the lines between advertising, marketing, and brand
promotion. It is no longer possible to isolate ads or commercials as discrete forms of selling
to young people. For that reason, we will use the broader term “marketing” to
describe the wide range of practices that food companies use to promote their brands.
In many ways, the digital strategies used by food companies* are not that different
from those of other corporations targeting young people, and the report will lay out a
broad picture of the nature of this new marketing infrastructure and its dominant practices.
But as the following pages will show, in the case of food marketing, some of these
practices raise serious issues that deserve close scrutiny and prompt, remedial action by
policymakers and the public.
* We use “food companies” in this report to refer to both food and beverage marketers.