CFK Reports From: It’s Child’s Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children
Event: Forum
Organized By: Kaiser Family Foundation
Where/When: Barbara Jordan Conference Center; July 19, 2006

Report By: Martha Pitts

The seemingly innocuous online games kids play at the Web sites of companies such as McDonald’s, Kraft, and Hershey are targeted marketing tools for food products, according to a study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The study—It’s Child’s Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children—was the focus of this forum, which featured health professionals and executives from the food and advertising industry.

The report found that more than 85% of the top food brands that target children through TV advertising also use branded Web sites to market to children online. Elizabeth Moore, associate professor of marketing, University of Notre Dame, and her colleagues conducted the research over a three-month period, analyzing 77 Web sites, including more than 4,000 individual Web pages.

At the forum, Vicky Rideout, vice president and director of Kaiser’s Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health, clicked through various corporate-sponsored Web sites to show the level of marketing and advertising on the Internet. For example, in a section on the Hershey site, a kid can squirt moving bowls of ice cream with chocolate syrup; on Kellogg’s FunKtown children can “race against time while collecting delicious Kellogg’s cereal;” and at the Lucky Charms site kids can play Lucky’s Magic Adventure and “learn the powers of all eight charms” found in Lucky Charms cereal. Many of these Web sites also contained printable coloring pages and offered CD covers, screensavers and desktop icons featuring the product or company logo.

Some of the study’s finding includes the following:

73% of the Web sites used “advergames,” which are online games in which a company’s product or brand characters are featured.

53% of the sites have television commercials available for viewing. On Skittles.com, for example, users are told they can watch the ads “over and over right now” instead of having to wait for them to appear on TV.

64% of sites use viral marketing in which children are encouraged to send emails to their friends about a product, or invite them to visit the company’s Web site.

73% of sites incorporate some mechanism to personalize or customize the user’s experience. For example, at wonka.com, if a user becomes a member, he or she can get a personally flavored Web page.

Concerned about the growing rate of childhood obesity, policymakers have expressed interest in the area of online food marketing. However, the effect of children’s exposure to online marketing and whether the government will regulate it remains to be seen.

Daniel Jaffe, executive vice president, government relations, Association of National Advertisers, said online food marketing to children represents a small part of food advertising.

“It’s a slice of a small slice,” he said, referencing that online food marketing in general is a relatively small market.

Jaffe’s comment didn’t stop Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy, Center for Science in the Public Interest, from criticizing major companies for marketing their unhealthy foods to kids and contributing to childhood obesity.

“They’re promoting foods of poor nutritional quality—high in saturated fats,” she said.

Nancy Daigler, vice president, corporate and government affairs, Kraft Foods, said that online marketing was a “way to talk to consumers,” and she said that it represented a small part of Kraft’s marketing, particularly to children.

Dale Kunkel, a communications professor at the University of Arizona and member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Food Marketing to Children and Youth has studied the effect of food marketing to the diets of children. He said that kids are particularly vulnerable to advertisements because they do not understand the persuasive content of advertisements.

“We’re rewarding children to become agents of advertisements,” he said. “When you do that then you pose some ethical issues.”

Resources:

It’s Child’s Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children

Web cast of the forum