« Food Prices on the Rise | Main | At the Table - On the road »
May 18, 2007
As if the Commercials Weren't Bad Enough
A new report out this week, published by the Center for Digital Democracy and the Berkley Media Studies group, details the tech-savvy ways that junk food companies are marketing to our nation's youth. The report, titled "Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age" lays out new, immersive trends in advertising using instant messaging, "avatars" (cartoonish characters kids create to represent themselves on social networking sites), mobile technology, free music downloads, viral video, and perhaps most troubling, behavioral profiling (where marketers "spy" on kids as they surf the net, to determine their interests).
Just in case that last sentence 1. was Greek to you or 2. didn't totally freak you out, here are some examples of what they're talking about. Cheetos has a huge site, complete with a multi-level game, mycoke.com combines social networking with free music and blog hosting, and Kraft's Lunchables site encourages kids to watch commercials closely for clues to enhance their online experience. And they all want your child's email address.
But there are tech-savvy folks spreading different food messages as well--while perusing the web looking for the aforementioned examples, I ran across this game about McDonald's, which exposes the big M's "dirty secrets". And Food Force, the World Food Programme's downloadable video game (which educates kids on humanitarian efforts to fight world hunger) recently surpassed 5 million downloads and is now available in seven different languages.
Posted by leslie at May 18, 2007 04:07 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.sustainabletable.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1011