Latino and African-American youth are in the forefront of adopting new media devices, and their substantial online activity and digital trend-setting behaviors have opened up new channels for marketers to bypass parents and reach them directly.
In 2006, Coca-Cola created its MyCokeRewards Campaign in response to flagging soda industry sales. The campaign, still active today, is a loyalty and direct-response marketing system that has offered Coke customers millions of dollars worth of prizes since its inception.
Everywhere children and youth go, marketing follows them, touting foods and drinks they would be much better off avoiding. This report illuminates the latest developments in the digital media marketplace and what it means for the health of young people.
Digital techniques are quickly evolving and unprecedentedly immersive. To assess the best ways to understand these new media effects, we convened a group of scholars to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the impact of the digital practices on food and beverage consumption among children and youth and a research agenda to guide future studies of that impact.
One of the main goals of fast food and soda marketing is to make you to feel special, like the product is just for you. We reveal the tactics they use to do so in this marketing brief, part of a series on target marketing that BMSG developed for the national capacity-building initiative Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE). Also available in Spanish.
New technologies are fundamentally altering the alcohol marketing landscape. Even as the “information superhighway” has given way to a web devoted largely to commerce, marketing is one of the least understood aspects of the new media culture. This report summarizes findings from a study BMSG conducted with the Center for Digital Democracy to identify and analyze the emerging alcohol digital marketing practices and to assess the policy implications for both.
BMSG Director Lori Dorfman talks to Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, about marketing to children and youth in the digital age. Dorfman describes how marketers use online technology to target ads more precisely and for less money than traditional marketing.
Until recently, much of the research on the relationship between food marketing and the youth obesity crisis has been focused on television. To provide insight into how food marketing has changed, we teamed up with the National Policy & Legal Analysis Network to Prevent Childhood Obesity (NPLAN) to produce a series of memos that explore the new digital marketing landscape and its implications. This paper is the introduction to the series
Advertisers today have opportunities to target adolescents like never before. Increasingly, this is happening through under-regulated digital platforms that often take advantage of the way teenagers think and process information. Kathryn C. Montgomery and Jeff Chester expose some of the ways companies have been targeting adolescents in their digital marketing efforts and call for stronger policy solutions to adapt to marketers’ changing playing field and tactics.
Much of the debate on the roles that media and advertising have in the youth obesity crisis has focused on television. In this article, the authors argue that increasingly sophisticated digital marketing has escaped the same level of scrutiny, with the result that young people on both sides of the Atlantic are at risk from a marketing industry that is able to target them with an ever increasing level of personalisation. They conclude that, while self-regulation is undoubtedly of value, the time has come for governments to take decisive action of their own.