NEWS RELEASE
For More Information Contact: Gary Ruskin (202) 387-8030
For Immediate Release: March 16th, 2005
Statement on Marketing to Children
Thank you very much, Senator Harkin, for the opportunity to participate in this news conference today.
Commercial Alert is a nonprofit organization that protects children and communities from commercialism.
I want to talk today about responsibility, honesty and traditional values in the schools.
We are gathered here because of an epidemic of marketing-related diseases that is afflicting American children. Obesity and type 2 diabetes are not acts of God or nature. For the most part, they are manufactured by adults who have decided that the health of children is less important than their own desire to make money.
And that brings us to the root cause, which is the breakdown of personal responsibility – and the system of enforcing it – on the part of these adults. The government actually has served as an enabler for this, and it has to stop.
Subsidies are a prime example. Junk food makers such as Coca-Cola and Kraft, PepsiCo and McDonald’s have developed a welfare mentality. Under Treasury regulation section 1.162-1(a), they have enjoyed tax deductions for advertising through which they lure children to eat fatty and sugar-laden food. This advertising drives a wedge between parents and their own children, and enlists children as nags for foods that many parents do not want their kids to have.
It’s sick. Yet the junk food industry thinks it is entitled to this subsidy. They think it’s their right in effect to take our tax dollars to use against us to degrade our health, and to meddle in our families.
It’s time to end the tax deduction for advertising of junk food – to children and adults too. If there are going to be subsidies they should be for the promotion of healthful living and healthy families, not the junk food and family strife the industry is promoting now.
Now honesty. The latest trend in the industry is stealth advertising. They call itproduct placement, but it really is the sneaking of ads into movies, TV shows, video games and the like. The TV show American Idol, for example, is essentially an infomercial for Coca-Cola. There isn’t much research on stealth ads that is available to the public. One study in the British medical journal Lancet found that half of teen age smoking probably can be traced to tobacco product appearances in movies. Let me repeat that – half of all the teenagers who start smoking, were helped along by the smoking that they saw in a movie. There’s no reason to think the effect is any different for junk food and other things. It’s no wonder that the junk food industry is using product placement so much. According to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, in the top 10 TV programs in 2004, the number one and three brands using product placement were Coca-Cola Classic and Pepsi-Cola.
Product placement is fundamentally dishonest. It pretends that an ad is something that it’s not. The Federal Trade Commission tells advertisers to disclose that their ads are ads, in infomercials, newspapers, magazines and search engines. Movies, video games and TV shows should be no different. And, of course, most of the European Union either bans product placement in TV shows or else restricts it severely.
Now the schools. In this country we traditionally have drawn a line at the school house door. We have said to corporations and their ad agencies,Schools are for learning, not for advertising. But over the last fifteen years or so the industry has breached that line. They’ve broken down the door and declared open season on our kids. Ads in the hallways. Vending machines there too. Even TV sets in classrooms where kids are compelled to sit and watch ads on something called Channel One.
Parents are starting to fight back. The once-mighty Channel One is collapsing. The junk food marketers have met partial or complete defeat in Arkansas, California, Maine, Texas, and in many cities, such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle.
Now it’s time for the Cokes and Pepsis of this country to take some responsibility for their own actions, and just leave the schools.
Sometimes you have to wonder if the people who run this industry have a special antipathy for American children. On January 6, 2004, Refreshments Canada, which is a Canadian beverage industry association, announced that it would pull all soda pop out of vending machines in elementary and middle schools in Canada. It’s an example of corporate self-restraint that the American junk food industry has yet to follow. Why not? What do they have against our kids? Americans are getting fed up with corporations that think children – and the rest of us too, for that matter—exist solely to pump up their quarterly profit figures. You can see the opposition building in public opinion, as well as school boards, state legislatures and in Congress. A poll last year by the Yankelovich Partners found that60% of consumers have a much more negative opinion of marketing and advertising now than a few years ago, and 65% think there should be more limits and regulations on marketing and advertising.
If these junk food companies keep it up, they can expect to be just as popular as telemarketers, Enron, Worldcom, HMOs, and, of course, tobacco companies. And that is a natural result of having no respect for our children or their health.
If these companies are growing unpopular, it’s their own fault. They are signing their own arrest warrant. We’re just helping to hold the pen. Thank you.
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