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From Tastes Great to Cool: Children's Food Marketing and the Rise of the Symbolic

Posted on: Friday, 1 June 2007, 06:00 CDT

By Schor, Juliet B; Ford, Margaret

The Commercialization of Childhood

It is now well recognized that the United States is a consumer- driven society. Private consumption comprises a rising fraction of GDP, advertising is proliferating, and consumerism, as an ideology and set of values, is widespread. Not surprisingly, those developments are not confined to adults ; they also characterize what some have called "the commercialization of childhood."1 Children are more involved than ever in media, celebrity, shopping, brand names, and other consumer practices. At the core of this change is children's growing role as independent consumers. In recent years, children's access to income has risen markedly, and they have gone from being purchasers of cheap plastic goods and a few select food items (e.g., candy) to being a major market for a diverse set of goods and services, including foodstuffs. Unofficial estimates suggest that children aged four to twelve spent a reported $6.1 billion in purchases from their own money in 1989, $23.4 billion in 1997, and $30 billion in 2002, for a total increase of four hundred percent.2 The largest product category is sweets, snacks, and beverages, which account for a third of children's total expenditures.3

As their participation in consumer markets has grown, children have become increasingly attractive targets for advertisers. This is partly driven by their high media use. According to the 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation study of children and media use, the average eight to eighteen year old is currently exposed to eight-and-a-half hours of media a day, almost all of which is "commercial" media. Actual media time (as opposed to media exposure, which double counts periods when more than one medium is being used simultaneously) is six hours and twenty-one minutes.4 Younger children, for whom the most recent data are not available, also have very high levels of media use. In a 1999 Kaiser study, children aged two to thirteen were found to watch more than two hours of television per day, and their total media time was five and a half hours of per day.5 Although pre-school children tend to have lower television viewing than schoolaged children, 25% of them have televisions in their bedrooms,6 and watch an average of two hours a day.7 Viewing time and exposure to junk food marketing is much higher for low-income children as well as racial and ethnic minority children, groups which also have higher rates of obesity and obesity-related illnesses. For example, in the 2005 study, black children were found to watch an average of four hours and five minutes of TV daily, compared to two hours forty-five minutes for white children. Latinos were in-between, at three hours twenty-three minutes.8

Heavy media use is the foundation of high levels of advertising exposure. The range of estimates is that children are exposed to between 20,000 and 40,000 ads per year. Our rough estimates suggest the former is the correct figure.9 Expenditure on marketing to children went from about $2 billion in 1999 to approximately $15 billion in 2004,10 suggesting that children's exposure to ads has risen significantly, a result of more television ads as well as the proliferation of other types of marketing aimed at children (see below).

Part of what has put children in marketers' sights is that they have become primary influencers of parental purchases, in addition to spenders of their own money. Children's marketer James McNeal estimates that in 2002, children aged four to twelve directly influenced $310 billion of adult purchasing and evoked another $340 billion.11 McNeal estimates that this so-called "influence" market is growing at 20% per year.12 The largest category of influence is food. This is due to a variety of factors, such as direct targeting of children with food ads, the rise of convenience food and restaurant meals, busier lifestyles, and more democratic decision- making in families. Indeed, food is at the core of the larger trend of the commercialization of childhood, both because it is the largest product category for spending and advertising, and because in many ways it is the paradigm case for a wider range of products. We turn now to recent developments in food marketing to children.

The Scope and Scale of Children's Food Advertising

The food, beverage, and restaurant industry is one of the nation's largest, with annual sales of nearly $900 billion. The industry is estimated to spend $33 billion a year in direct advertising.13 In 2004, one third, or $11 billion, went to direct advertising in media outlets, and $6.5 ofthat went to television.14 Seventy percent are for convenience foods, candy and snacks, alcoholic beverages, soft drinks, and desserts.15 Individual corporations spend vast sums advertising their brands. In 2004, McDonald's alone spent $528.8 billion for advertising,16 and an estimated 40% of their expenditures are targeted at children.17 Coca- Cola spent $123.4 million on its Coke Classic brand, and PepsiCo spent $104.0 on Pepsi-Cola.18 PepsiCo's expenditures on Lay's potato chips and Doritos alone were $33.4 million.19

It is hard to quantify exactly how much of this total is directed at children, because their viewing is no longer confined to a few children's time slots. They are now heavy viewers of prime time and other non-age segregated media. However, experts put the figure at roughly $10 billion, and believe the fraction directed at children is growing.20 Not surprisingly, food companies have succeeded in generating good will with young consumers. On the basis of the 20,000 per year estimate of children's television ad exposure, and a benchmark figure of 50% as the fraction of food product ads, the average child is exposed to about 27 food ads per day. A 1998 study by Campbell Mithim Esty found that food items dominate kids' favorite ads. Of the ten most popular ads that year, five were for junk foods (Pepsi, Coke, Snickers, McDonald's, and Hostess) in addition to the perennial favorite - Budweiser.21

Margaret Gamble and Nancy Cotugna's 1996 content analysis of Saturday morning cartoons by found that 63% of the 353 advertisements in this time slot were for food products. Among these commercials, cereal ads comprised 40% of the total, with the proportion in the high sugar category increasing from 23 to 34.5% between 1991 and 1996. The authors reported that among nearly 1,400 food ads studied between 1972 and 1996, there were no commercials advertising fruits and vegetables with the exception of a few Public Service Announcements.22 (The lack of fruit and vegetable advertising is due to the fact that almost none, with the prominent exception of Chiquita Bananas, are branded.)

Children are also heavily exposed to food ads during prime time viewing hours. A 1998 content analysis during the top-ranked prime- time shows for children aged two to eleven found that 23% of the commercials were for food, and 40% of those were for fast-food restaurants.23 Excluding fast-foods, 41% of the advertised foods were in the fats, oils and sweets category of the United States Department of Agriculture's food pyramid. A similar percentage fell into the grains category, and nearly half of those had either a high fat or sugar content.24 Preliminary content analyses done by the authors in the summer of 2006 have found that 44.4 % of ads on children's networks during weekend mornings and the after-school block are for foods.25 Notably, even as the range of products advertised directly to children rises, food remains by far the dominant category.

Food marketing to children has moved beyond the television set, however. Packaging has become a form of advertisement, as companies innovate by putting food into "cool" new containers or adding licensed characters, games, and ads for other branded foods. Another marketing strategy is product placement, in which food companies pay producers of music videos, radio, books, comic strips, songs, plays, and movies to place the product in the setting.26 This strategy is thought to have begun in 1982 when sales of Hershey's Reese's Pieces Candy rose 65% in the month following the release of the movie E.T., The Extra Terrestrial, where the product had a prominent placement.27 The effectiveness of product placement is thought to be on account of its ability to avoid seeming like a sales pitch, as well as its association with highly valued celebrities. Product placements also cannot be zapped out, unlike 30-second spots.

Another common promotional technique for food is giveaways, or premiums. Premiums have moved away from a simple toy or sticker in the cereal box to more expensive toy gifts, particularly at fast food outlets. McDonald's Happy Meals are arguably the most successful marketing strategy in human history, and are credited with turning a visit to a fast food restaurant into a favored activity for children. The current prize for the Happy Meal is a "fun game piece" from the Disney movie Pirates of the Caribbean, which was released in the summer of 2006 to record box office revenues,28 and is part of a ten-year global marketing agreement Disney signed with McDonal\d's in 1996.29

Character licensing has also become pervasive, especially for major movie releases. For example, breakfast cereal Cap'n Crunch launched a campaign with Warner Brother's 2006 Superman, creating a new cereal called "Superman Crunch" with advertisements for the movie on the box as well as in the television commercials. Other recent cross-promotions include Go-gurt and Disney/Pixar's movie Cars, and Burger King and Warner Brothers' The Ant Bully. Harry Potter famously "sold out," according to some, by cross-promoting with Coca-Cola.

Food corporations are also are collaborating with toy companies and book publishers to launch lines of branded books and toys, especially to pre-school aged children. Amazon.com sells more than 40 children's branded food counting and reading books such as: The M&M's Brand Counting Book, Kellogg's Fruit Loops! Counting Fun Book, Oreo Cookie Counting Book, Skittles Riddles Math, Hershey's Kisses Addition Book, and Reese's Math Fun: Addition 1 to 9.30 Other branded products include Mattel's Barbie Dolls with "Jell-o" t- shirts, free Jell-o and a mold, Barbie dressed in a McDonald's employee outfit, and Easy-Bake Ovens with food preparation sets from Oreo, Chips Ahoy, Pop Tarts, M&M's Cookies and Pizza Hut. McDonald's also has a number of Play Food Sets with a Fast Food Center, a Food Cart with Play Food from the restaurant and a miniature drive- through window replica featuring a play cash register, deep fryer, grill, food accessories such as burgers and fries, and a McFlurry machine. A number of branded board games have entered the market such as the Fischer-Price Oreo Matchin' Middles Game and Mattel's Teddy Grahams Game.31 Junk food also appears to have made its way into upscale tween fashions, with a trendy line by a company called "Junk Food Clothing" which sells expensive t-shirts featuring sweets and other food products.

Food companies are also sponsoring events, such as music group tours, where they advertise heavily. CocaCola sponsors Fox's American Idol, which recently launched an "Idols Tour" concert series in the summer of 2006.32 Food companies run promotional tours that give away free product samples on the streets of major cities from with specially outfitted vehicles. PopTarts sent the world's largest (branded) climbing wall touring the country for years. Motts juices sponsors concert tours by the musical group the Wiggles. Nabisco Nilla Wafers sponsored a banana pudding pie eating contest at theme parks around the country. Powerade has a national "hydration" tour. Nestl sponsored a "fun zone" with a number of musical groups at theme parks, air shows, fairs, camps, zoos, and sporting events, and Kellogg's has done an in-line skating tour to push its Cinnamon Krunchers to tween males.

A related tactic is viral, or peer-to-peer, marketing. Children are enlisted to serve as "brand representatives" to other kids, to talk up the product, give out free samples, and help create buzz.33 Although originally used more for music releases, fashion, and shoes, viral marketing is now common with food products as well. Viral marketing firms enlist children to be in regular relationship with them, by constructing programs that give them titles (one firm uses the title "secret agent"), and keep in email contact. The Girls Intelligence Agency gets tween girls, beginning at about age eight, to set up slumber parties at their homes to test and give out products.34 Proctor and Gamble's viral marketing arm, Tremor, has a reported 240,000 young people touting its products in everyday settings.35 Viral marketing is an increasingly popular form of marketing in the children and teen marketplace.

The Internet is another rapidly growing advertising venue. Census data indicate that the number of children using the Internet has risen dramatically. Among children aged ten to thirteen the percentage online rose from 38% in 1998 to 65% in 2001. Among youth aged fourteen to seventeen the increase was from 51% to 75%.36 As a result, leading marketers are spending more of their advertising budgets online, in both their own sites and through the major children's television networks, such as Nickelodeon, whose websites are heavy food marketers. A newly released study by the Kaiser Family foundation, "It's Child's Play: Advergaming and Online Marketing of Food to Children," is the first extensive analysis of internet food marketing. It analyzed the content of 77 unique websites from June through November 2005. A reported 85% of food brands that advertise through television have branded websites marketing to children online. Internet advertising provides a more extensive and deeper participation by children since they are viewing the product for an unlimited and extended period of time through several different marketing vehicles. These include advergames, which integrate the food product or characters associated with the brand, promotions or sweepstakes, clubs, email listservs, and software which allows the child to view television commercials online. Advergames were found on 73% of the websites studied, while viral marketing - encouraging children to contact their friends and peers and inform them about a specific brand or product - was found on 64% of the sites. Other marketing strategies that were found include: sweepstakes and promotions (found on 65% of sites), instant access to television commercials (53%), incentives for product purchase such as free toys or other premiums (38%), and membership opportunities (25%). Only about half (51%) of the websites had nutrition information and only 18% of the websites followed CARU's specific guidelines that state that any advertising content must be clearly identified.37

Schools have also become a centerpiece of the marketing arsenal. Snacks and processed food companies spend a reported $750 million in marketing dollars in schools nationwide.38 A report released by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) in 2000 found that the most significant type of commercial activity in schools was food sales, primarily sales of soft drinks from vending machines and short-term fundraising project sales. At that time, more that one-third of elementary schools, half of middle and junior high schools, and close to three-fourths of senior high schools had contracts giving soft drink companies the rights to sell their product at school.39 Fast food companies have gotten in on the action with incentive programs linked to educational activities. These include McDonald's "McSpellit Club" and Pizza Hut's "Book it." By using free or discounted foods as an incentive, the companies reward children for reading or getting perfect scores on spelling tests.40 Another major marketing effort in schools is through Channel One, which delivers a current events program plus two minutes of pure ads, to 38% of middle and high schools in the U.S.41 Until recently, there has been a high proportion of food ads on Channel One. In a study of one month in 1994 close to 70% of the 45 food commercials were for food products including fast foods, soft drinks, chips, and candy.42 (Recently, Channel One, a target of activists for years, has lost most of its advertisers, and has been relying on federal dollars for anti-drug and military recruiting ads.) Other in-school activities include food company sponsored curricula, in which candy companies, spaghetti sauce brands, fast-food chains and the like promote their brands in nutrition and science materials.43 Food marketing to children has literally become a major part of public school curriculum.

Controversy about marketing in schools has intensified in recent years, as the volume of marketing has increased. Proponents, who are typically superintendents, principals, and other administrators point to the money and in-kind resources that corporations provide. Critics argue that the actual amounts of money are often small and less than is promised, and that the benefits do not outweigh the negative impacts, especially when the products are junk food.44

Is Food Marketing Effective?

Decades of studies show that food marketing to children is effective. In the late 1970s, Marvin Goldberg studied differences between children who saw and did not see television advertising and found that sugared cereals were more likely to be present in the homes of the former.45 H. L. Taras and colleagues found that for children aged three to eight, weekly television viewing time is significantly correlated with requests for specified advertised products as well as overall caloric intake.46 More recently, Dina Borzekowski and Thomas Robinson's research on low-income pre- schoolers found that even brief exposure to ads led children to choose advertised food products more often.47 A study of fourth and fifth graders found that increased television viewing is related to poor nutritional habits, even controlling for social and other factors.48

A comprehensive review of the impact of marketing was recently done by the Institute of Medicine. A total of 123 empirical studies covering a range of methodologies were included in a systemic evidence review whose basic question was how food and beverage marketing influences the diets and diet-related health status of American children. In view of the fact that detailed discussion of the findings are available in chapter five of the report, as well as a summary evidence table (Appendix F-2) listing all the studies and their findings, we will not provide a full discussion. In general, however, the review found that television advertising "influences children to prefer and request high-calorie and low-nutrient foods and beverages,"49 and "influences the short term consumption of children ages 2-12," (with insufficient evidence about teens).50 The strength of the evidence on whether TV ads influence the "usual dietary intake of children" varies by age, with stronger impacts seen on younger children.51It may be worth noting that, far from undermining the claim that ads do not influence dietary intake, the weakness or absence of findings for older children and teens is to be expected because of hysteresis in food preferences. If advertising shapes preferences early on, it can become a non- predictor in older children (having no significant eifects in the model). This is because both those who are exposed to ads and those who are not will both have preferences for advertised foods. Finally, the report concludes: "Statistically, there is strong evidence that exposure to television advertising is associated with adiposity in children 2-11 years and teens ages 12-18 years."52

Deteriorating Diets and Rising Obesity

The increase of marketing to children has coincided with significant deterioration in the healthfulness of children's diets, higher caloric intake and a rapid increase in rates of obesity and overweight. The additional calories are typically and more frequently coming from energy-dense snack foods lacking in nutrients, and children are receiving a declining fraction of their calories from meals, which tend to be healthier than snacks.53 Children's diets are now significantly deviating from the recommended diet.54 There has also been a dramatic rise in soft drink consumption. Between 1965 and 1996, the per capita daily soft drink consumption for boys aged eleven to eighteen rose from 179g to 520g, and from 148g to 337g for girls.55 One cross-sectional study reported that school-age children who consumed soft-drinks had a daily calorie intake ten percent higher than those who did not.56 And the widely-reported prospective observational study by obesity researcher David Ludwig et al. found a 60% increased risk of developing childhood obesity in middle-school aged children for every additional serving of soft drink consumed after controlling for potentially confounding factors.57

Another important change is the growth of meals eaten outside the home, and fast food consumption in particular. In the late 1970's, children ate 17% of their meals away from home and fast food accounted for 2% of their energy intake. By the mid to late 1990s, those figures had increased to 30% and 10%.58 Ludwig and his colleagues note that an average large-sized fast food meal contains about 2200 kcal, an amount that requires running a complete marathon to burn off.59

Obesity rates among children have grown rapidly, with an estimated 25% of youth now reportedly obese and in the eighty-fifth Body Mass Index (BMI) percentile. Fifteen percent fall into the ninety-fifth BMI percentile. These rates have nearly doubled for children and tripled for teenagers since 1980.60 Rates of increase have been roughly twice as high among racial minorities.61 These trends have been well documented.

Different Approaches to Advertising Effectiveness

While there is considerable evidence that food advertising affects beliefs, preferences, diet, and diet-related health outcomes, there have been far fewer studies that spell out the actual mechanisms of impact, and the literature has not coalesced around one causal model. Among those who study advertising in general, views differ on what makes it effective, and the issue is not well resolved. Early discussions of the creation of desire62 have been criticized for making the simplistic assumption that advertising can produce product desire in a kind of "hypodermic needle" process of injecting want. Advertisers themselves object to this characterization, arguing that they cannot create desire out of whole cloth, but are merely evoking pre-existing desires and preferences that already lurk inside the consumer.

This view is consistent with much of the literature. For example, some accounts argue that children have innate, evolutionarily driven tastes for foods high in fat, sugar and salt.63 These preferences may be triggered by the visual cues of advertisements. Such approaches, as well as others in psychology, medicine, and public health are based on a stimulus/response model in which ads interact with innate processes to activate product desire or choice. In these accounts, food choice is seen mainly in physiological or biological terms.64

Children's marketers typically operate with a modified model of this type, in which they posit a set of innate "needs" and attempt to create ads whose message is that the product will satisfy the need. Needs include love, mastery, power, and glamour.65 Food advertisers are also heavy users of reward models in which toys, prizes, or other "premia" are given in return for purchase. The most well-known example of this is the McDonald's Happy Meal, noted above. It is also likely that food advertisers know much more about how to stimulate desire than they share with outsiders. Almost all of their research is proprietary and unavailable to academic researchers. In the legal fight against the tobacco companies, proprietary research revealed that the companies had considerable knowledge about the addictiveness of their product and used product manipulation and advertising to ensure demand.

Another advertising model, most common in economics, holds that ads provide information that helps consumers make optimal consumption choices. In this approach, ads do not affect desire at all, but merely help consumers to make choices that best reflect an exogenous, or pre-determined set of preferences.

At the other end of the spectrum are interpretive, anthropological and sociological accounts of consumer desires. In these approaches, advertising is effective through its intervention in powerful systems of symbolic meaning that are at the root of how humans understand the world and act in it.66 Advertising messages that skillfully engage symbolic structures of meaning and identity formation motivate people to act (and spend). A recent example is Douglas Holt's cultural branding model,67 which argues that the most enduring and popular brands tap into existing cultural myths by positing themselves as solutions to cultural contradictions.

It is possible that the failure of the literature to settle on one model of advertising effectiveness is due to the co-existence of these different effective strategies by advertisers. In the field of children's food marketing, we can find both stimulus/response ads, as well as commercials which access underlying symbolic fields. We turn now to the latter, which we believe represents a relatively new and powerful approach to food marketing.

The Shift from Product Attributes to Symbolic Messages in Children's Marketing

In its early decades (1950s-1980s), children's advertising was low-budget, drew on little research or creative talent, and tended to follow well-established formulae. Children were not a lucrative market, and as a consequence companies did not commit large sums to create compelling advertising for them.68 In general, commercials conveyed intrinsic product benefits. Toy commercials tended to show children playing with the toy, and focused on the things it could do. This strategy is part of what got many toy companies and their ad agencies into legal trouble in the 1960s and 1970s - the ads frequently portrayed toys doing things they really could not. In the case of food, the intrinsic product benefit approach meant that the ad promised the food would taste good. The implicit advertising model was thus either the economists' informational one, or a latent stimulus/response approach in which product characteristics were assumed to trigger desire. Symbolic messaging was rare.

In contrast, adult-oriented advertising had already begun to reject the intrinsic product benefit model in the 1960s and 1970s. This was partly due to the realities of marketing commodities in a mass consumer society. If, for example, Coke and Pepsi or Nike and Reebok barely differ in terms of real product attributes, other advertising strategies are necessary to avoid damaging price cutting. In the earlier decades of the 20th century, advertisers had turned to crude appeals to status positioning and consumer insecurities (for example, consumers' fears of body odor or social isolation) to market these types of goods.69 But these messages became less effective as consumers' skepticism of advertising, particularly hard-sell techniques of industries such as automobiles, began to grow in the late 1950s and 1960s.70 Often dubbed the "creative revolution," advertisers turned instead to more symbolically and culturally-driven messages, building brand value on the basis of popularly-held cultural traits. They stressed brand image with campaigns designed to convince consumers that Nike equals power and athleticism or Pepsi is the brand of youth rebellion.

As Thomas Frank71 has argued, the core of the creative revolution was an appeal to non-conformity and the counter-cultural quality of "cool." The association of a brand with "coolness" became a common strategy in adult and teen marketing. In the 1990s, with the expansion of the children's market and rising expenditures on research and production as well as marketers' perceptions of children's growing sophistication, symbolic appeals to children became more feasible.72 In the last 15 years it appears that children have increasingly been appealed to on the basis of the social value or coolness of products. This symbolic positioning is used for virtually all products, not only obvious candidates such as fashion, footwear, or music. At first glance, this extension may be unexpected in food - what is the connection between "coolness" and a brand of yogurt or a candy bar or a condiment? However, if advertisers' insights are correct, the relationship is profound, as the "cool factor" has become a dominant messaging strategy.

Content analyses of food marketing have tended to focus on analyzing the nature of the product, rather than the type of messaging, so we do not have quantitative data to support the \claim of a shift to symbolic advertising. However, the importance of this approach came up repeatedly in Schor's interviews with industry practitioners73 and cursory viewing of commercials reveals numerous symbolic approaches. We are currently conducting a study of food commercials seen by children which analizes message content. Preliminary analysis of 55 commercials reveals that 15, or about 28% have a symbolic message as their primary theme.74 These include the "cool factor," as well as specific dimensions of cool (such as "anti- adult" themes, or drug themes, that we discuss below). Notably, this sample comes from children's television in the after-school and weekend morning time slots, times which are targeted to very young children, indicating that symbolic messages have permeated even this demographic. We are currently conducting analyses of prime-time shows viewed heavily by older children, and expect even higher levels of symbolic pitches.

The shift to symbolic marketing of food is worth considering for a moment. What it implies is that children are being persuaded to eat particular foods, not on the basis of their tastiness, or other benefits, but because of their place in a social matrix of meaning. As this process expands, branded (i.e., junk) food comes to occupy an increasingly central position in children's sense of identity, their relationships to other children and adults, and the construction of meaning and value that structures their lives. These dynamics are operating alongside more widely recognized physiological processes such as sugar habituation, but have been less recognized in the literature.

Specific Themes in Symbolic Marketing: Junk Food as Oppositional

As noted above, "cool" is the core of symbolic appeals in children's advertising; however, cool is an expansive category, which takes on a variety of specific meanings. To understand how to combat diet deterioration and obesity, perhaps the most important of its manifestations is the message that oppositional attitudes are cool, that junk food is oppositional, and that therefore junk food is cool. This issue has been posed most intriguingly by anthropologist Allison James, whose research was triggered by the accidental finding that the British word for children's sweets, "kets," means "rubbish" in adult dialect. "It is thus of great significance that something which is despised and regarded as diseased and inedible by the adult world should be given great prestige as a particularly desirable form of food by the child."75

To appreciate the context of James' work, a brief detour into childhood theories may be useful. The dominant, indeed hegemonic conceptualization of humans assumes a biologically-based developmental process of growth from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. However, recent social scientific and historical work has shown that the very concept of the child is a social construction, and not merely a biological, or natural category. Historical and comparative investigations reveal that children occupy very different places in different societies. Philippe Aries' pioneering work showed that in pre-modern Europe, the modern concept of the child didn't exist. Youth were mainly segregated until about age seven, at which point they were incorporated into society as "little adults."76 Childhood, as we know it, arose in the modern period, and reached its high mark in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when children were segregated from adults socially and symbolically. The hegemonic status of the "child" can be seen in the ongoing adult panic over the "disappearance of childhood" as adults bemoan the progressive breakdown of the rigid child-adult distinctions that prevailed until the second half of the 20th century.77 At the core of the social construction of the child is that it is defined in relation to - and often in opposition to - the category adult. For example, adults are corrupt; children are innocent. Adults are competent; children are incompetent. Adults are rational; children are irrational.

Allison James' findings reproduce these categorizations. She finds that the names, colors, sensations, textures and shapes of British children's sweets, or kets, make these candies unpalatable for adults, who prefer not to eat foods which are named after robots, are neon-colored, or pop and fizz in the mouth. And the inedibility of these products for adults - their "rubbish-y" quality - makes them especially appealing to children.78 Indeed, she finds that children exhibit strong preferences for these sweets and reject the "meals" given by adults. Eating kets is an important mechanism by which children define themselves, a "metaphoric chewing up of adult order."79 James notes that food (in contrast to sweets) "belongs to the adult world and is symbolic of the adult's control over children."80 This is an example of a larger point that anthropologists of food have made, which is that ideas about edibility and categorizations of food are tied to larger symbolic distinctions and categorizations.

Although James was not addressing the contemporary discourse around junk food (kets are not advertised items), she might well have been. Food advertisers have become sophisticated anthropologists, working from the symbolic structure discussed by James. Their ads build on basic social relationships and the connections of food to those relationships, and their power derives from these symbolic meanings. The adult/child field is a pervasive one. For example, in our preliminary analysis of 55 commercials, 29 included both adult and child characters.81

These ads often portray children and adults as occupying separate and frequently oppositional symbolic spaces. The strategy typically aligns the marketer (or the company) with the audience, and against adults. This "anti-adultism" is evident in commercial messages in which adults are portrayed as stupid, uncool, boring, nerdy, out of touch, controlling, or evil.82 Ads often transport children to adult- free Utopian spaces, devoid of the unwelcome stresses and pressures caused by adults. Classic examples of this technique include a Starburst (candy) commercial in a classroom which ' goes back and forth between a drab, black-and-white format in which a very nerdy teacher is facing the class and in control, to a riotous, colorful party atmosphere of candy consumption when his back is turned and the students assume control over the classroom. A recent Captain Crunch cereal commercial portrays an ominous, "battle-axe" babysitter arriving to two defiant children. Of course they conquer her with the aid of the cereal.

It may be worth noting that the approach to mothers is almost diametrically opposite. When addressing mothers, advertisers tap into the symbolic association of food with maternal love and concern, associating giving food with caring for a child, making a warm, emotional connection, or providing nutritious substances.

Junk Food as a "Drug"

The symbolic field of adult/child relationships underlies a high proportion of contemporary junk food advertising. However, these relationships are often only the backdrop for a more specific message. The association of junk foods with energy, power, physiological transformation or an altered state is another common tactic.

Wynne Tyree, a longtime children's food marketer, explains what she has found over many years of focus group and interviews about energy-dense foods:

Kids say they use sugar like adults use coffee - to give them a boost. Since coffee isn't allowed, and they have no other means to 'get them going' or 'give them energy,' they use soda, chocolate, candy and sugary fruit drinks. It gives them the jolts they say they need throughout the day.83

Tyree reports that this is a pervasive finding for many types of food brands and products. When one of the authors (Schor) sat in on focus groups with tweens for a sugary drink, she found that the children talked about their desire to get "hyper," or to "bounce off the walls." They said they wanted Coke because it has "caffeine." They were well versed in and took great delight in the transformative properties of sugar and caffeine.84 Not surprisingly, the soft drink companies have heavily promoted the concepts of high- energy and hyper. Pepsi's Mountain Dew, with its Code Red brand, is one example, with its themes of extreme sports and excess. So is the rise of "energy drinks" such as Red Bull, with their high levels of caffeine and appeals to youth.

What Tyree does not say, but what is implicit in her analysis, is that junk food is to a certain extent being positioned symbolically to children as a "drug." In our preliminary analysis of food commercials, we found that two of the 55 had subtle associations to drugs as a dominant theme.85 The association to drugs is partly based on the transformative physiological processes associated with high-sugar foods, in which they produce positive sensations (as drugs do), make the user feel differently. An example is a Dunkin' Donuts commercial showing bored people in an office. The scene is re- run after they drink a smoothie and their mood has switched to happy. Subtle associations are also found in ads portraying rock music or Utopian environments.

A second theme is that junk foods are increasingly being marked by adults as dangerous, illicit and forbidden substances. Like many drugs, the pleasurability of junk food is acknowledged, but it is seen to be addictive, and its ingestion is accompanied by serious bad consequences (obesity, diabetes, ill-health). Ads recognize this forbidden fruit dimension of the product in order to enhance its desirability to young viewers. Candy ads sometimes use this illicit pleasure theme. On the other hand, this is a double-edged sword for marketers, because there are countervailing reasons to portray their foods as healthy and wholesome. They are involved in a delicate balancing act b\etween raising the appeal of their products by associating them with the qualities of pleasure and danger, and at the same time attempting to avoid associations of disease and decay.

There is a strong analogy here to tobacco, which has long been advertised on the basis of its symbolic value. Cigarette smoking is socially coded as "cool," with a variety of more specific associations that are the basis of this cool status. These include defiance of authority, seductiveness, creativity, hedonism, and masculinity.86 These social meanings are deeply ingrained in our culture, are often held unconsciously, and serve as a powerful reservoir of emotion and meaning which advertisers use to induce sales of the product. Furthermore, tobacco is often symbolically associated with other drugs, such as alcohol and caffeine.

The relationship between tobacco and junk food is not merely symbolic. Since Phillip Morris acquired Seven-Up in 1978, tobacco companies have owned some of the nations largest junk food marketers. These include the 1988 purchase of Kraft, also by Phillip Morris, the 1989 buyout of Nabisco by tobacco company R. J. Reynolds, and its subsequent 2000 acquisition by Phillip Morris. Phillip Morris has also acquired cereal-maker General Foods, Swiss confectioner Suchard, Taco Bell, and Miller Brewing Company.87 Significantly, participants from the legal fights against tobacco are now active (on both sides) in struggles about junk food marketing to children, and newspaper headlines have drawn the connection. "Is Junk Food the New Tobacco?" became a frequent refrain in 2003 as the conflict about junk food began to heat up.88

Connections to Existing Research

Symbolic messaging has not been addressed much in the literature on childhood obesity, but there are literatures that are related to this line of argument. One body of studies looks at how children respond to parental restrictions or disapproval of junk foods and discovers what is colloquially known as the "forbidden fruit syndrome" - forbidden foods are more desirable.89 For example, Jennifer O. Fisher and Leann L. Birch have found that maternal restrictions on highfat, high-sugar foods lead daughters to increase their consumption of these foods when they are in environments where access is unlimited.90 Thomas Robinson and colleagues, using selfreports of over seven hundred third graders, have found that parental control of children's food intake is inversely related to weight in girls, although not in boys.91 Another study found that pre-school children are more attracted to foods that are not available to them, and that the effect was stronger with children whose mothers were more restrictive.92 A third found that five-year- old girls are inclined to do the opposite of what they think their parents desire with respect to junk food consumption.93

The Debate about Food Marketing to Children

Since the publication, in late 2001, of the Surgeon General's report on the obesity epidemic, the debate about junk food marketing has heated up on a number of fronts. Medical professionals, children's advocates and parents began to organize against in- school junk food marketing. By the summer of 2003, more than thirty state legislatures were considering bills that would require fast food labeling or restrictions on inschool junk food sales.94 Soft drinks, which research had shown to have a unique impact on obesity, have been singled out for attention.95 School districts began to reject exclusive contracts with Coke and Pepsi, and by 2006, former President Bill Clinton helped broker a deal that industry claimed would eventually reduce the presence of carbonated soft drinks.96 A number of lawsuits have also been filed, claiming damages from companies such as McDonald's, for marketing harmful and addictive food to children. In Massachusetts, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has initiated a legal process against Kellogg and Viacom, parent company of Nickelodeon, a major children's food marketer, accusing them of harm associated with excessive levels of food advertising.97

The food industry responded to these attacks with a multi- pronged strategy. Companies were aggressive in attempting to deflect attention from food, arguing that lack of exercise was the reason for rising obesity, not their products. Coke and Pepsi began sponsoring fitness activities, and McDonald's handed out free pedometers. This was reminiscent of Big Tobacco's longstanding claims that tobacco does not cause lung cancer. Indeed, the food companies' initial responses to their opponents followed the tobacco strategy fairly faithfully.98 The food industry, which gives heavily to Congress and the Bush Administration, enlisted the latter to promote its position, which the Administration has done, both domestically and abroad. In 2001, the Administration undermined a World Health Organization (WHO) anti-obesity initiative.99 The restaurant and beverage companies also founded and generously funded a political front-group, the Center for Consumer Freedom, which ridicules public health activists (calling them "food fascists"), and argues that efforts to curb obesity are anti-freedom.100

More recently, some companies have realized that they cannot afford the negative reputation associated with making children fat, so they have downplayed their initial claims that food doesn't matter, and tried to position themselves as part of the solution to the obesity epidemic. Kraft gained headlines by claiming that it would stop in-school activities,101 and the marketing of the least nutritious of its brands, such as Oreos, to young children. McDonald's, Pepsi, and others have introduced new, "healthier" products. Soft drink companies are trying to sell sweetened fruit drinks and energy drinks, perhaps hoping that consumers will (mistakenly) think these are significantly different from sodas.

Industry has also argued in favor of, and begun to practice pro- nutrition advertising to children. While these eiforts have not yet been systematically documented, they are at the core of the industry response. Little criticism of these efforts has surfaced; however, there are reasons to think this is a problematic response. At the most general level, one can question the wisdom of using advertising as the solution to a problem that has itself been defined as stemming from, among other things, excessive advertising. More specifically, studies of anti-tobacco advertising have found that government campaigns against smoking are effective, but that industry-funded campaigns are either neutral or lead to increased levels of smoking (among youth).102 A 1984 study of kindergarten children found that ten days of exposure to pro-nutrition messages affected recall and information, but not preferences or consumption.103

Second, the analysis of symbolic messaging above suggests that appeals to eat "healthy food" risk having it labeled as adult- sanctioned, and therefore undesirable. This positioning plays into the powerful symbolic environment the companies are attempting to reproduce through their regular advertising, and may, paradoxically, reinforce the effectiveness of those attempts. Both the marketers' deliberate symbolic positioning of their products as forbidden and oppositional, and parents' or health professionals' coding of them as unhealthy (diseased) may make these products particularly desirable, and render their opposites (healthy foods) unpalatable. At the very least, before governments, health professionals, advocacy organizations, and others jump on the bandwagon of pro- nutritional messaging, its efficacy should be carefully studied.

Along these lines, the track record of both family and in-school intervention programs which focus on behavior modification and pro- nutritional messaging suggests that these are relatively ineffective strategies.101 However, one documented intervention that has yielded reduced BMI for youth is an in-school television reduction program.105 Whether the positive results from this study are due to reduced ad exposure, activity substitution, lower food consumption during television viewing, or other benefits is not known.

Summary

The combination of evidence on the effectiveness of food marketing in inducing consumption, as well as the ineffectiveness of educational interventions suggests that one key to effective change will be a reduction in advertising exposure. While industry has resolutely resisted increased healthy advertising, children's advocates should stress the necessity of reducing screen time, getting food marketing out of schools, and cleaning up the internet. Particularly in low-income areas, these changes will require public support and collective action.

Children's exposure to food marketing has exploded in recent years, along with rates of obesity and overweight. Children of color and from low-income fami lies are disproportionately at risk for both marketing exposure and overweight. Comprehensive reviews of the literature show that advertising is effective in changing children's food preferences and diets. Here we have surveyed the scope and scale of current marketing practices and have focused on the growing use of symbolic appeals. These portray food within pervasive symbolic fields, such as oppositional relations between children and adults. Such approaches place food brands at the center of themes such as finding an identity, and feeling powerful and in control. These themes are so potent because they are central to children in their development and constitution of self. Reduction of exposure to marketing will undoubtedly be a central part of any successful anti- obesity strategy.

Food is at the core of the larger trend of the commercialization of childhood, both because it is the largest product category for spending and advertising, and because in many ways it is the paradigm case for a wider range of products.

Children's marketers pos\it a set of innate "needs" and attempt to create ads whose message is that the product will satisfy the need. Needs include love, mastery, power, and glamour. It is likely that food advertisers know much more about how to stimulate desire than they share with outsiders.

Food advertisers have become sophisticated anthropologists. Their ads build on basic social relationships and the connections of food to those relationships, and their power derives from these symbolic meanings.

Children's exposure to food marketing has exploded in recent years, along with rates of obesity and overweight. Children of color and low-income children are disproportionately at risk for both marketing exposure and becoming overweight. Comprehensive reviews of the literature show that advertising is effective in changing children's food preferences and diets. This paper surveys the scope and scale of current marketing practices, and focuses on the growing use of symbolic appeals that are central in food brands to themes such as finding an identity and feeling powerful and in control. These themes are so potent because they are central to children in their development and constitution of self. The paper concludes that reduction of exposure to marketing will be a central part of any successful anti-obesity strategy.

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94. See Schor, supra note 1.

95. D. Ludwig, "Relation Between Consumption of Sugar-sweetened Drinks and Childhood Obesity: A Prospective, Observational Analysis,"Lancet 357 (2001): 505-508.

96. M. Burros and M. Warner, "Bottlers Agree to a School Ban on Soft Drinks," New York Times, May 4, 2006.

97. Center for Science in the Publi

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