"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)

Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing | The New Digital Marketing Landscape
T
he forms of advertising, marketing, and selling that are emerging as part of the
new media depart in significant ways from the more familiar commercial advertising
and promotion in children’s television. Digital technologies are ushering in an entirely
new set of relationships, breaking down the traditional barriers between “content and
commerce,” and creating unprecedented intimacies between children and marketers.
Digital technologies make it possible for marketers to track every move, online and off,
compiling elaborate personal profiles that combine behavioral, psychological, and social
information on individuals, and aggregating that data across different media and over
time. Companies are recruiting young people into market research enterprises, and
encouraging them to promote products to their peers. Marketers are also making it easy
and fun for young people to serve as extensions of ad agencies, incorporating brands into
their “user-generated content” and distributing their work virally (from person-to-person)
on the Internet, cell phones, and iPods.
In the following pages, we discuss how food companies are embracing and
shaping the contours of the new digital marketing landscape, highlighting the most prominent
practices, and providing illustrations from food products marketed to children, teens,
and youth. These are not discrete techniques, but rather a constellation of strategies that
are often combined in digital marketing campaigns. Taken together—and viewed against
the backdrop of the major changes taking place in the worlds of media, advertising, and
market research—these practices constitute a new and fundamentally different direction
for advertising.
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