"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)
"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)
"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)
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<strong>Interactive</strong> <strong>Food</strong> & <strong>Beverage</strong> Marketing | Creating a Healthy Media Environment for the 21st Century<br />
Marketing<br />
has become a pervasive presence in the lives of children and adolescents,<br />
extending far beyond the confines of television, and the Internet, into an<br />
expanding and ubiquitous digital media culture. <strong>Food</strong> and beverage companies are at the<br />
forefront of a new twenty-first century marketing system. The strategies and techniques<br />
described in this report constitute a dramatic departure from traditional advertising. For<br />
example, in-game advertising is not just a new form of product placement; it is a highly<br />
sophisticated interactive environment designed to closely monitor individual players, and<br />
direct personalized ad messages designed to trigger impulsive purchases. Viral marketing<br />
is not just an online extension of word-of-mouth brand promotion, but also a calculated<br />
database strategy that relies on detailed profiles of key “influentials,” along with surveillance<br />
of their social networks. And so-called “brand-generated marketing” is not a way to<br />
direct advertising messages to children, but instead an increasingly popular method for<br />
recruiting millions of children to create and distribute the ads themselves.<br />
Many of the practices we have documented will need to be investigated further<br />
before we can fully understand their implications for children and youth. But the patterns<br />
and directions we have identified raise a number of troubling issues. For example, the<br />
influx of brands into social networking platforms—where they now have their own “profiles”<br />
and networks of “friends”—is emblematic of the many ways in which contemporary<br />
marketing has all but obliterated the boundaries between advertising and editorial content.<br />
The unprecedented ability of digital technologies to track and profile individuals<br />
across the media landscape, and engage in “micro” or “nano” targeting, raises the twin<br />
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