Web ads raise concerns advertisers’ impact on childhood obesity
BY ANDREA VALDEZ
Medill News Service
Sixteen percent of American children age six to 11 are diagnosed as obese, according to the Center for Disease Control. Experts point to several contributing factors for why 9 million children are overweight, but the effects online food marketing have on children's eating habits and lifestyles has become a hot topic for the Federal Trade Commission, the Institute of Medicine and other concerned groups. Yet there have been no public studies done on the subject.
Until now.
On Wednesday the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit, private foundation based in California that focuses on major health care issues, released the first analysis of online food marketing advertising targeted to children.
The report, titled "It's Child's Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children" produced some significant findings. For example, 85 percent of the brands that use television advertising aimed at children also have Web sites that do the same, or they host content that would be of interest to children.
"We did this (analysis) because over the past year, there has been an increasing focus on food marketing to children," said Vicky Rideout, vice president and director of Kaiser's Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health, the overseer of the research.
"In reports that we have seen from the Federal Trade Commission, Congress and the Institute of Medicine, they all noted the lack of data about online food advertising and we wanted to fill that gap and provide some information," she said.
The author of the report, Elizabeth Moore, PhD. and associate professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame, studied 77 Web sites and more than 4,000 unique Web pages from June to November 2005. Moore and her colleagues determined which sites to study by visiting the corporate or brand Web sites of the most popular foods advertised on television. They targeted foods from several different categories including cereals, cookies, candy, drinks and prepared foods.
Almost a dozen of the brand Web sites studied by Kaiser belonged to Northfield-based Kraft Foods Inc., including Thecheesiest.com and Postopia.com. A representative for the company, Nancy Daigler, vice president of corporate and government affairs for Kraft, said there was not substantial evidence to link child obesity to food marketing.
"All of the experts agree that there are many different factors contributing to childhood obesity," Daigler said Wednesday at a forum on the study. "We have considered this a very important topic for us at Kraft and have gone ahead and implemented some policies because of it."
In order to attract a young audience, the Web sites studied by Kaiser offer games, or as the study referred to them, "advergames." Of the 77 Web sites studied, 73 percent offered advergames, offering one to 67 games per site.
The study tallied a total of 546 games on the 77 sites, with each game featuring at least one, sometimes several, brand icons, characters or items.
Webmasters of these sights know getting users to initially visit the site is important, but the harder task is maintaining user interaction and persuading users to return to the site. Repeated use and visits fosters brand recognition, which builds a relationship between the customer and the product.
Companies employ several tactics to ensure multiple visits or substantial logged hours on a site. Seventy-one percent of the studied Web sites flash "play again" options at the end of a game or round, 45 percent offer multiple levels of play and 22 percent recommend other games for the user to play, the study states.
Something seems to be working because the 77 sites studied by Kaiser received more than 12.2 million visits from children ages two to 11 during the second quarter of 2005, according to the Nielsen//Net Ratings.
The study also found that 64 percent of the sites use viral marketing, or word-of-mouth marketing. Sites, like Chicago-based Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, encourage users to "send a friend this fruitylicious site!" and if they send the site to five friends, users will have access to a code that open additional features on the site.
So is there a direct correlation between online advertising and childhood obesity? This question is still up for debate by the experts with both sides boasting strong arguments.
"There certainly seems to be a link between food advertising on television and children's diets," Rideout said. "Internet reach is a lot narrower, but it goes a lot deeper. We (at Kaiser) are not taking a position on what should be done about (online food advertising). We just think those decisions should be informed."
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