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