Marketing Food to Children and Adolescents - Federal Trade ...

Food Marketing Activities Directed to Children and Adolescents
III. Food Marketing Activities Directed to
Children and Adolescents
A. Introduction
In response to the Special Order, the Commission received thousands of samples and
descriptions of advertising and promotional activities from the 44 target companies. These
samples covered the entire spectrum of advertising and promotional categories covered by
the Special Order: television, radio, and print advertising; company-sponsored websites, ads
on third-party Internet sites, and other digital advertising, such as email and text messaging;
packaging, labeling, point-of-purchase displays and other in-store marketing tools; advertising
and product placement in movies, videos, and video games; premium distribution, contests, and
sweepstakes; cross-promotions and celebrity endorsements; marketing activities in schools;
viral and word-of-mouth marketing; sponsorship of events, sports teams, and athletes; and
philanthropic activity tied to branding opportunities.
The companies provided samples for those activities for which they had reportable
expenditures, as discussed in Section II, as well as for activities that met the Commission’s
criteria for marketing directed to children and adolescents but for which there were no reportable
expenditures. In some cases, particularly for new media such as the Internet, promotional
activities may have required little or no financial investment in order to reach the intended
audience.
Broadly speaking, nearly every food product category engaged the full spectrum of
advertising and promotional activity formats. One exception was the fruits and vegetables
product category, which tended not to use the traditional media of television, radio, and print.
Fruit and vegetable companies did, however, use licensed characters and marketed them in
much the same way as other food and beverage companies: via company websites, in-store
displays, and product packaging. Third-party licensed characters and company proprietary
“spokescharacters” – animated versions of animals, people, or even the food itself – were used
heavily in marketing to children, but also were used to reach teens. Celebrity endorsers, on the
other hand, were almost exclusively employed in advertising directed to teens and “tweens”
(those between the ages of 8 or 9 and 13 or 14). For the most part, other promotional activities
reported were used to reach both children and teens. 55
The responses to the Special Order show that product marketing campaigns directed to
youth typically are fully integrated: a child might first see an ad on television for a food product;
27