"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)

An overall goal should
be to create a digital
media system that
promotes the healthy
development of
children and youth.
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Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing | Creating a Healthy Media Environment for the 21st Century
The dramatic changes in media distribution and advertising technologies require
a comprehensive and systematic approach. We have a relatively brief period to establish
policies and marketing standards that could help prevent today’s parents, young people—
and future generations—from suffering the serious health consequences of poor nutrition.
An overall goal should be to create a digital media system that promotes the healthy
development of children and youth. However, regardless of their recent public commitments,
the food and advertising industries cannot be expected to develop adequate consumer
protections on their own. Self-regulation is always reactive. Adjustments are made
to certain controversial practices in order to placate critics, deflect pressure, and preempt
government regulation. But when pressures have subsided, and the public spotlight has
been diverted elsewhere, industry policing may be relaxed. When there is a great deal of
money to be made, as there is in the children and teen market, practices are likely to
return to business as usual, or new ones created to circumvent public scrutiny. Industry
self-regulation will only work if it is developed and implemented in the context of strong
governmental and public oversight. The responsibility will therefore fall on government
and the health community to monitor closely the emerging practices in contemporary
marketing, and to develop interventions that can effectively minimize the harm that any of
these practices may have on the health of America’s children. The following are recommended
steps in that direction:
• As part of its current proceeding on food marketing to children, the Federal
Trade Commission should require all food and beverage companies to report the
full extent of their digital marketing and market-research practices targeted at
both children and adolescents, including the targeting of Hispanic/Latino,
African American, and other multicultural groups.
• The appropriate Congressional committees should hold hearings on contemporary
food marketing practices targeted at children and adolescents.