Can Parents Compete with Clever Food Marketing Directed at Kids?

If parents said nothing, about 71 percent of the children who had watched French fry ads chose that coupon. But when parents urged their kids to make the healthy choice, only 55 percent of the kids chose French fries. For the kids who had seen the apples and dipping sauce ad, only 46 percent made the unhealthy French fry choice when the parents remained neutral.

This difference in and of itself underlines the power of advertising. But when the parents encouraged them to go for the apples, only 33 percent of them opted for the fries.

While there’s a clear trend in the results of the study, it wasn’t as great as had been expected. Lead author Christopher Ferguson says, “Parental encouragement to eat healthy was somewhat able to help undo the message of commercials, although the effects of parents were smaller than we had anticipated.”

But small or not, the effect was there, so parents should not feel that they don’t play an important role in their kids’ food choices. It’s not easy to compete with Scooby Doo packaging, but, as Ferguson says, “parents are not powerless.”

The authors point out that there’s been some talk of banning child-directed advertising, but a better way might be simply to encourage advocates, food producers, and politicians to focus on the other end of the equation — ways of promoting healthy food choices to kids as well. Ferguson underlines that “[a]dvertisement effects can work both for and against healthy eating.”

(Source: The Atlantic)