"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)

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