Frozen in the Past

The Kaiser Family Foundation held a public forum today to release an important report entitled, Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States. According to Kaiser, “The purpose of this study is to paint a picture of the current landscape of food advertising to children on TV, to help inform the efforts of policymakers and the food and media industries and to provide a benchmark for measuring change in the years ahead.”

The Kaiser report may be a useful snapshot of food advertising on TV in 2005, but it is certainly not a “current” representation of the present landscape. The vast bulk of the food commercials analyzed in the report were collected from May through July 2005. As anyone who has been following these issues knows, there have been enormous changes in the marketplace over the last 18 months. In addition, important segments of the advertising community have pledged unprecedented further changes in the coming year.

Let’s take a quick look at how the marketplace is rapidly changing:

• According to a Grocery Manufacturers/Food Products Association survey of their members, in just the last several years, food and beverage companies have responded to marketplace demand by introducing 10,000 products that provide new low-calorie servings and/or improved health profiles.

• Restaurants, also responding to this demand, have provided numerous healthier menu options, and increasingly, reduced portion size items. In addition, many quick-service restaurants have made salads a major selling focus and promoted juices, yogurt, and low- fat milk as new serving offerings. One quick-service restaurant sells about 50 million pounds of apples annually, much of this as part of their children’s menu.

• As part of the advertising community’s self-regulatory initiatives, 11 companies, representing approximately 2/3 of all food advertising to kids, pledged through the Children’s Food and Beverage Initiative, overseen by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, to devote at least half of their advertising directed to children to promote healthier lifestyles or good nutrition. Participants in the Initiative are Cadbury Schweppes USA; Campbell Soup Company; The Coca-Cola Company; General Mills, Inc.; The Hershey Company; Kellogg Company; Kraft Foods, Inc.; Masterfoods; McDonald’s; Pepsi-Co, Inc.; and Unilever.

• The advertising community, through its public service arm, The Advertising Council, also has greatly ramped up its public service efforts in regard to anti-obesity initiatives. The Ad Council has partnered with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) since 2004 on obesity prevention Public Service Announcements (PSAs). The “Small Steps” campaign was launched in 2004 and was expanded to target children in 2005. Since the campaign launch, the PSAs have received more than $270 million in donated media support and the “Small Steps” website attracted an average of 190,000 visits per month during 2006. Just last month, The Ad Council launched a new round of PSAs featuring Shrek characters, urging children to get more exercise.

In just the last couple of years, these programs have comprised a multi-billion dollar coordinated effort by the advertising community to come to grips with and combat the obesity crisis in the United States. Unfortunately, much of this substantial and sustained effort was missed by today’s report.

Also, while the Kaiser snapshot may provide some valuable data, it made no attempt to examine trend-lines in TV food advertising. The report appears to give short shrift to two studies which demonstrated that food and beverage advertising on TV has actually declined substantially in recent years, while obesity rates have increased.

The ANA and the Grocery Manufacturers of America used Nielsen Media Research data to analyze food, beverage and restaurant advertising on TV during the decade from 1993 to 2003. We found that TV ads for these products had actually declined by 13% over that time period.

An FTC Bureau of Economics’ staff report released at the FTC/HHS workshop on food marketing in the summer of 2005 confirmed our findings. The FTC report found that TV advertising for food, beverages and restaurants directed towards children has actually decreased by 34% since 1977.

Given this trend-line data and substantial marketplace changes spearheaded by the Children’s Food and Beverage Initiative, it is now clear that the future landscape of food advertising on TV will be dramatically different from the Kaiser snapshot from 2005.

Perhaps the best news from the Kaiser report may be a more accurate assessment of how many TV commercials are actually seen by children. In its 2004 report, The Role of Media in Childhood Obesity, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, “The number of ads children see on TV has doubled from 20,000 to 40,000 since the 1970’s…” Today’s report makes clear that these assessments were seriously inflated and misleading. We can only hope that this latest Kaiser Family Foundation report will lay this urban and misguided legend to rest once and for all.

Finally, today’s Kaiser Report lumps commercials into broad product categories (i.e., candy and snacks, restaurants, cereals) with no apparent distinction between the nutritional characteristics of different products within the category. This approach increasingly will lead to flawed policy analysis as companies continue to bring to the market and advertise a broader array of low fat, low calorie options. In other words, if you merely compare year to year how many ads there are in each broad and undifferentiated category, you will completely miss all of the efforts to provide children and their parents an ever wider array of nutritious and healthy options.

We appreciate the Kaiser Family Foundation’s efforts to combat obesity and we intend to continue to work cooperatively with the foundation to help solve this important national issue.

One of the stated goals of the Kaiser report was to “help inform the efforts of policymakers,” and the report has some important information. Unfortunately, the report is frozen in place. We cannot move forward if we are so fixated on the past that we fail to see the dramatic progress already made in the present and the rapid steps and firm commitments that the advertising community has made to take even greater strides to combat obesity in the immediate future.