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Average child exposed to 27 advertisements for food per day
The National Post (Tue 21 Nov 2006 Byline: Sharon Kirkey) writes the second of a five-part series looks at how youth is targeted by marketers. Selling junk food to children is an area so fraught with strong reactions that even those paid to peddle the products admit to feeling guilty. When Juliet Schor was researching her book, Born to Buy, she encountered a marketer convinced she would "burn in hell" for selling children on junk food, an advertising executive who left meetings for a sugary cereal feeling "icky" and a researcher for Duncan Hines who refused to bring a box of Dunkaroos the company gave her as a gift
Children have become the targets of saturation marketing by food and beverage makers, leading critics to charge that they are suffering from an epidemic of "marketing-related diseases" -- notably, obesity. According to Ms. Schor, an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College, the average child is exposed to 27 advertisements for food per day, the vast majority of them for nutritionally weak foods that are high in fats, oils, sugar and calories.
In the U.S., annual sales of food and beverages to children and youth were more than US$27-billion in 2002 and marketers are targeting kids more aggressively, more brazenly and more directly. The industry says parents are ultimately responsible for the foods they buy their children. But children also influence what ends up in the grocery cart through what marketers term the "nag factor" or "pester power." Quebec, in 1980, became the first jurisdiction in the world to ban nearly all advertising directed at children under 13. Back then the bigger worry was cavities from sugary foods. But Bill Jeffery, national co-coordinator of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says the main justification for the ban "was related to the unique vulnerability of children to deception." Since the ban, Quebec's obesity rates and soft drink consumption have been among the lowest in Canada.
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