Over the past few months I have been dedicating a lot of
time to speaking about the advertising policies surrounding childhood
obesity. It is an extremely important
issue for the ANA and the advertising industry overall, and we continue to
reach out and provide insight on the real facts of this problem.
Recently I spoke at the Second National Forum on Obesity
Policy, Regulation and Litigation in Chicago. As I recapped the events of the past few months, I was reminded that we
still have a long way to go in communicating all of the efforts that the
advertising industry is making to combat childhood obesity.
From our industry’s self-regulatory system, the
Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU), which monitors the advertisements
that potentially take advantage of a child’s credulity, to the Ad Council’s
“Small Steps” program, which strives to educate the public with numerous
methods and examples of how to combat obesity, we are actively working to do
our part.
But what concerns me most is that despite all of this
positive and progressive action, the advertising industry continues to be
targeted as a leading contributor of this epidemic.
I wanted to point to some articles from just last week
that demonstrate the challenges we face as an industry:
*Aiming at kids: Pressure builds on foodmakers, Star
Tribune
*Snack foods sweet on adults: Childhood obesity forces marketing twist; firms insisting
products are for grown-ups, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
*Empire of nutritionists strikes back at childhood
obesity, Boston Herald
What is even more frustrating is that there is an
ever-growing body of evidence that demonstrates that advertising is not a major
factor in the obesity challenge that we increasingly face around the
world. In Sweden and Quebec, for
example, they banned all advertising to children, including food advertising, yet their obesity rates are not
lower than many societies that have no such restrictions and substantial rates
of food advertising. Also, in the United
States where food and restaurant advertising is relatively uniform throughout
the nation, there are wide variations in obesity rates from locality to
locality, even in closely contiguous areas. This type of substantial variation would not be expected if advertising
were a major engine generating this problem.
In fact, recent data provided by Nielsen Media Research,
Inc. and Nielsen//NetRatings and analyzed by Georgetown Economic Services, LLC
for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Grocery Manufacturers
of America (GMA) found that during the past 10 years, food, beverage and
restaurant television advertising expenditures, as well as the number of food,
beverage and restaurant ads seen by children under age 12, have declined. This
decline took place during the very period cited as the time during which
obesity rates grew the most and at the fastest rates. The number of food and
restaurant commercials seen annually by children 12 and under, for example,
peaked at nearly 6,000 in 1994 but declined by over 13% over the next 10
years. Adjusting for inflation, in order
to hold the value of dollars constant over the same time period, TV ads for
foods and restaurants reached nearly $6 billion in 1994, but dropped below $5
billion in 2004.
The new data, in addition, examined the exposure of
children to messages from food and restaurant companies in the online
environment and found that they continue to be miniscule in comparison to the
ads on broadcast and cable.
As noted earlier, the advertising community is committed
to helping combat obesity through public service advertising and the rapidly
accelerating development and advertising of new and improved food, beverage and
restaurant items that are lower in fat and calories. Our community, however, needs to strongly
oppose efforts to restrict food and restaurant advertising that will take us
down regulatory and legislative blind alleys under the guise of obesity
prevention.
