Misperceptions and Misprescriptions

The Committee on Communications of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) today released a sweeping Policy Statement on “Children, Adolescents, and Advertising.” The report unfortunately is extremely disappointing. Its recommendations misdiagnose the advertising marketplace, and the majority of its proposals are counterproductive. It fails to meet the high standards that should be expected from an important and well regarded organization like the AAP.

The Committee is either unaware or completely ignores numerous important self-regulatory initiatives by the ad industry. It lauds highly restrictive advertising policies in other countries and calls on the U.S. to emulate them, but completely fails to examine if these restrictions have been beneficial or effective. It proposes bans or severe restrictions on several categories of advertising without apparently realizing that similar types of proposals have been found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Reflexively and relentlessly negative, the report attacks a wide range of advertising categories and only expresses support for one segment: advertising of contraceptives. The following are just a few examples of the numerous methodological, logical and factual flaws in the report:

- The Committee once again uncritically rehashes the discredited claim that “young people view more than 40,000 ads per year on television alone.” This claim ignores the testimony of FTC Associate Director of Economics Pauline Ippolito, who noted at an FTC/HHS workshop on obesity in 2005, that the actual figure was less than one-half (17,507) and that since 1977 the amount of ads seen by children on TV had, in fact, declined by “12 percent.” Professor Todd Zywicki, a professor of law at George Mason University and the former Director of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission, examining the 40,000 ads claim noted dryly, utilizing Kaiser Family Foundation figures, that, “If the 2 to 18 year olds were watching 40,000 ads per year, they must have watched 40 ads per hour. If the 4 to 6 year olds saw 40,000 ads per year, they were viewing approximately 94 ads per hour. This seems unlikely.”

- The Committee also states unequivocally that prescription drug companies “now spend more than twice as much on marketing as they do on research and development.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO), however, in a report to the Senate in 2002, found that, in fact, R&D spending by prescription drug companies was “10 times greater than their spending on DTC advertising.”

- The Committee also appears to believe that their proposals for bans and significant restrictions on advertising will be upheld because “Unlike free speech, commercial speech does not enjoy the same protections under the First Amendment of the Constitution.” The Committee, however, seems to be completely unaware that in the last thirty years commercial speech has been increasingly protected. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, recently held in the Western States case regarding advertising that, “If the First Amendment means anything, it means that regulating speech must be a last-not first resort.”

- In regard to children’s and food advertising, the Committee makes broad, interlocking, ill-defined and short-sighted recommendations. The Committee calls on advertising in children’s programming to be cut by “50 %” down “5 to 6 minutes/hour.” In addition, the Policy Statement calls for “Congress to implement a ban on junk food advertising during programming that is viewed predominantly by young children.” Unfortunately, the Committee fails even to attempt to define what it means by “junk food” or “young children.” More fundamentally, the Committee completely fails to consider the devastating impact that a 50% cut in children’s advertising would have on the economic foundations of children’s programming on the broadcast media. It also ignores the recent pledge by companies that comprise over two-thirds of all children’s food advertising to focus at least one-half of their advertising on healthy life-style or low fat, low calorie food offerings.

- In their recommendation section, The Committee calls for “Congress to implement a ban on cigarette and tobacco advertising in all media.” This proposal conveniently ignores the fact that far less inclusive proposals to ban or restrict these products’ ads based on a child protection rationale have consistently been knocked down in the state courts and by the Supreme Court. These courts have refused to impose these types of limitations pointing out that in furtherance of protecting children discourse in society cannot be lowered to “the level of the sand-box.” See Lorillard v. Thomas Reilly 533U.S.525 (2001)

Regrettably, this list of errors could be substantially expanded. We are hopeful that in the future the American Academy of Pediatrics will be far more careful when it decides to release policy positions on important issues such as the regulation of advertising. The ad community stands ready to discuss advertising issues with all interested groups. For this discussion to be constructive and productive, however, policy prescriptions must be based on fact and sound analysis rather than misguided supposition and finger pointing.