Food and Advertising Industries Revise Voluntary Guidelines on Advertising to Children
In November, 2006, the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU), an organization created by advertising industry trade groups, issued revised guidelines for advertising to children.
The new guidelines were issued in part in response to critics who charged the existing rules, developed 32 year earlier, were too narrow and lacked enforcement mechanisms.
In addition, 10 companies promised CARU that they would spend at least half their advertising budgets aimed at children under the age of 12 on promoting products defined as healthy by the government and that they would not advertise in elementary schools.
The 10 companies, which account for two-thirds of the television food and drink advertising directed at children, are: Cadbury Schweppes USA, Campbell Soup Company, Kraft Foods, Unilever, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Hershey, General Mills and Kellogg.
According to an article in the Washington Post, Dr. J. Michael McGinnis, who served as Chair of the Institute of Medicine panel that wrote a recent report on food marketing to children, the proposed changes in marketing practices were, “a move in the right direction… It would be a pretty substantial change.”
Critics, on the other hand, were not satisfied. In a recent statement Center for Science in the Public Interest director Michael F. Jacobson argued: “A serious approach to childhood obesity would not allow corporations to appeal directly to children and convince them to eat foods that harm their health—period. The voluntary measures announced recently in the U.S. are promulgated by advertising (and food) industry groups whose main goals are to forestall serious government action and to generally make life easier for advertisers. Unfortunately the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission are also more oriented to protecting business than helping parents and protecting children.”
And Susan Linn, a Harvard psychologist and author of Consuming Kids told the Washington Post that these companies “will continue to be able to market junk food to children—and their marketing is going to be even more confusing for children because it will be linked to “healthy lifestyle” messages. (See her full statement here.)
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