Promoting Public Health in the Digital Era
The new media can be a boon to fostering healthy behaviors, including access to more information about drugs and lifestyle choices. But marketers also have the power to encourage the consumption of products and drugs that may be harmful to one's health. From investigating the online marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to children and teens to analyzing the threats from digital marketing of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, CDD is working to promote global public health.
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Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age
Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age
Written by Jeff Chester, Center for Digital Democracy, and Kathryn Montgomery, American University
A report from Berkeley Media Studies Group
Today, U.S. children are confronting myriad diseases associated with excessive weight gain and poor nutrition. Type 2 diabetes, a serious medical condition previously found only in adults, has become common in children and adolescents. Government agencies and public health professionals have become increasingly concerned over the role of advertising in promoting "high-calorie, low-nutrient" products to young people. Most of the policy debate has focused on TV commercials targeted at young children. However, marketing now extends far beyond the confines of television and even the Internet, into an expanding and ubiquitous digital media culture. The proliferation of media in children's lives has created a new "marketing ecosystem" that encompasses cell phones, mobile music devices, instant messaging, videogames, and virtual, three-dimensional worlds. These new marketing practices are fundamentally transforming how food and beverage companies do business with young people in the twenty-first century.
We Are Coming for Your Children
We Are Coming for Your Children
The Guardian
July 2007
Commercials for junk food are being banned on children's television. For campaigners, this is just the first victory in a war against advertising to youngsters. But those whose job it is to sell sweets, toys and fizzy drinks will not give up without a fight. Helen Pidd joins them as they move into a new battlefield - the internet. more