Creating a Healthy Media Environment for the 21st Century

Choices about what to eat are always made within a larger context. These choices are shaped, to a large extent, by the relentless onslaught of food and beverage marketing, first on TV and now on a multitude of ever-present digital platforms. The practices documented in this report reveal that food and beverage marketers now target children and adolescents with unprecedented reach and sophistication. These practices deserve close scrutiny and immediate action by policy makers and the public. The following are recommended steps in that direction:

• As part of its current proceeding on food marketing to children, the Federal Trade Commission should require all food and beverage companies to report the full extent of their digital marketing and market-research practices targeted at both children and adolescents, including the targeting of Hispanic/Latino, African American, and other multicultural groups.
• The appropriate Congressional committees should hold hearings on contemporary food marketing practices targeted at children and adolescents.
• The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and Congress should work together, along with the industry and the public health and child advocacy communities, to develop a new set of rules governing the marketing of food and beverage products to children. New regulations must take into account the full spectrum of advertising and marketing practices across all media, and apply to all children, including adolescents. Direct attention needs to be focused on each of the 10 practices described in this report.
• Government agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Trade Commission, should regularly monitor the digital media marketing industries, with a particular focus on the impact of new advertising practices on children’s nutrition and health.
• Private and public funds should be established to support broad, multi-disciplinary research on the interactive media and their relationship to the health of children and adolescents.
• Venture capitalists and other financial investors in the digital media should develop policies for ensuring that the companies they fund do not engage in deceptive or unfair marketing of food products to children and adolescents.
• Avenues should be created so young people can become leaders in the effort to monitor and understand new marketing practices targeting them and to educate their peers—and adults—about digital marketing and its relationship to health.

While the growth and expansion of the interactive marketing system will continue unabated, there is still time to create interventions that can help the twenty-first century media culture serve the health of our children rather than undermine it.