When singer, entertainer and former ABC Play School presenter Monica Trapaga appeared in an ad for Coco Pops in 2005, it earned her the wrath of parents around Australia and formal complaints from The Parent's Jury and The Coalition on Food Advertising to Children. Many say it illustrates the power food advertising can hold over young children.

More recently, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ruled that a Coca-Cola campaign featuring actress Kerry Armstrong (in which she declared as myths the facts that Coke makes you fat, rots teeth and is packed with caffeine) had the potential to mislead parents about the potential consequences of their children consuming the soft drink. The ACCC ordered a national corrective ad campaign.

Cases like these generate community outrage but is it just a vocal minority who have concerns? What does the research tell us?

Advertising and obesity
The Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) says that the ‘notion of a children's obesity epidemic is a myth'. It bases this claim on a study released in January by the University of South Australia that looked at research with 60,000 children from 1985 to 2007 and concluded that rates had settled around 23-24 per cent for overweight and five to six per cent for obesity.

However, in 1985, only 12 per cent of children were classified as either overweight or obese, which had almost doubled to 22 per cent by 1995. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)  figures reveal that 25 per cent of children aged 5 to 17 years were classified as overweight or obese (comprised of 17 per cent classified as overweight and 7.8 per cent as obese). While the ABS data shows that almost 10 per cent of boys between the ages of five and 17 are obese (a figure that has doubled in the past 12 years), the proportion of obese girls remains unchanged at six per cent.

And, regardless of whether childhood obesity is still on the increase, it does not negate the stark reality that there has been a massive increase in the number of overweight and obese children in the past two decades.

AANA CEO Scott McClellan says that any level of childhood obesity should concern us all but that advertisers are being unfairly singled out.

He points to empirical evidence from an actual implementation of an advertising ban. In 1980, the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec banned advertising of energy dense, nutrient poor foods to children under 13 years. Insulated from peripheral advertising from neighbouring English language provinces, an entire generation of children have grown up without junk food advertising. Yet last December, data examined by Frontier Economics demonstrated that Quebec's childhood obesity rate corresponds with levels in other provinces.

‘Clearly, if advertising was responsible for weight gain, thereshould be a marked difference in this demographic,' says McClellan.

‘Australian parents and health care experts are right to pursue [childhood obesity] and to look to governments for a whole-of-community response. National advertisers are doing their part. Under the Responsible Children's Marketing Initiative, leading food companies have committed to not advertise to children under 12 unless their products represent healthy dietary choices, consistent with established scientific or Australian standards.'
He adds: ‘No causal link between advertising and obesity has ever been established anywhere in the world, as research commissioned by Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) demonstrated last year'.
 
Does focus on advertising over-shadow other marketing activities?
While obesity is probably the most visible outcome of poor eating practices, with serious long-term consequences for young Australians (it has been linked to diabetes, heart disease and cancer), it also has the potential of over-shadowing other important considerations when it comes to food marketing, such as whether food products that are high in fat, sodium and sugar should be clearly labelled as unhealthy, and whether there should be much tighter restrictions on how, when and to whom these products are advertised.

During its review of the Children's Television Standard last year (the new standards are expected to be gazetted in the middle of this year), McClellan said ACMA estimated that advertising accounts for, at most, only two per cent of influence over children's total food consumption.

Kathy Chapman, who is nutrition manager at Cancer Council NSW and chair of the Coalition of Food Advertising to Children (CFAC), says market research shows that while there is a lot of concern among parents about food advertising on television, there is considerably less awareness about other types of food marketing.

Chapman says a new report, based on research conducted by Newspoll with parents of children aged five to 17 years of age about the influence of food marketing other that TV advertisements, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health and will be published in Spring. It looks at other forms of food marketing that targets children, such as point of sale (for example confectionary at supermarket checkouts) and print advertisements in children's magazines and on children's web sites.

A report published by ACMA in May 2007 titled Television Advertising to Children concluded that ‘pester power' appears to be enhanced when advertising is part of a larger marketing mix, including in-store displays and labelling.

Learning from best practice in food marketing
Research News contacted a number of Australia's top food manufacturers  (Nestle, Kelloggs, Campbell Arnotts, Macdonalds and Sanitarium) but none were willing or able to comment about their market research before the magazine went to press.

An ethical debate about conducting market research about food with children fits into the broader debate about food marketing and advertising.

Kathy Chapman at Cancer Council NSW, which has recently commissioned both Newspoll and Ipsos-Eureka to conduct market research about food marketing, said her main concern about market research ‘conducted for commercial gain' is that it isn't subject to the same stringent ethical interrogation as that commissioned by public health organisations.

‘We have to get ethics committee approval for everything we do,' she explains. ‘We have to jump through a lot of hoops to justify the methodology, and to justify who we want to involve in the research. Every research proposal is reviewed by an independent panel with a very diverse background.'

Food manufacturers are also much less likely to publish their findings in the public domain, as Research News discovered when writing this story.

Chapman is also critical of the fact that market research conducted for commercial gain is often not subject to peer review and she cites examples of media releases that lack details about the sample, questionnaire design and other methodological details.

Justine Hodge, manager of The Parents Jury, says that while the lobby group focuses on food marketing in general (advocating to substantially reduce the marketing of junk foods to young children, initially through a ban on television advertisements for these products during children's viewing hours) it does not have a specific position on market research.

However The Parents Jury also believes in rewarding good practice and, along with its annual Shame Awards for Smoke and Mirrors and Pester Power, it congratulates companies that run food marketing campaigns that promote healthy eating to children in a fun and appealing way in its annual Fame Award for Parents' Choice. Woolworths has won the award in the past two years running for its Fresh Food Kids campaign.

Clare Buchanan at Wooworths says the original concept for Fresh Food Kids was driven by the groundswell of community, media and government interest in the subject of childhood obesity, which started to get traction a couple of years ago.

‘Clearly there was a natural fit for our brand and we were already active in the space of children's health via our support of children's hospitals. There was a lot of external research and expert opinion floating around at the time and clearly it was on the Rudd Government's policy agenda - all of which fuelled the public debate.

‘Given the weight of external opinion, we did not feel the need to research the validity of the concept before launching the program. We have, however, subsequently tested several aspects of the program with customers such as receptivity to the advertising message, relevance and usability of online website content and so on.  Testing with children has been done on an informal basis with staff and their own families.

‘Primarily though, our program has been largely directed by feedback from customers - at store level and via other channels such as online comment forms.  Above all, this has been a very practical program created in response to a real social issue. The whole purpose was to try and make fresh food fun and appealing, rather than be instructive about having to eat X amount of fruit and veg a day, or scaremongering about health risks. I think this basic premise has been the secret of its success to date.'

The Parents Jury also has good things to say about food marketing by Sanitarium Weet-Bix, Uncle Toby's Vita Brits, Farmpride Eggs and Australian Avocados.

‘Unfortunately, though, fruit and vegetable marketers don't have the marketing budgets that some other food manufacturers do,' says Hodge.

Are there any market researchers out there who would be willing to help them?

Kerry Sunderland, managing editor, Research News
 

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