What’s Inside That FTC Report on Junk Food Marketing?

The FTC detailed this week how much money is spent marketing junk food to kids. Most stories, like this one in the New York Times, went with the headline number: $1.6 billion.

But the full report is more than 100 pages long, and filled with scary hidden gems that mostly went unnoticed. Here’s a selection:

• Companies reported spending $745 million, or 46 percent of all reported youth marketing expenditures, on TV ads.
• The cost of TV ads and “happy meal” toys promoted by fast-food chains was $520 million in 2006, “more than twice the amount spent on child-directed marketing in any other food category.”
• Companies spent $116 million marketing soda in schools. In total, soda companies spend $20 per teenager promoting soft drinks, which now account for 11% of those kids’ daily caloric intake.
• The FTC lists more than 80 kids’ movies and TV shows that have food marketing tie-ins, from Dora the Explorer to Yu-Gi-Oh! (Dora, in fact, has eight food brands attached to her.)
• Although most companies have promised to curtail in-school marketing, “one company tested a beverage product by providing samples in middle and senior high school cafeterias.”

No wonder there’s an obesity epidemic in America.

The FTC also recommended that companies who have promised to market only “healthy” foods to kids “should re-examine whether the fact that a product has ‘less’ of, or is ‘reduced’ in, calories or certain nutrients (e.g., sodium, sugar, or fat) is, by itself, a sufficient basis for qualifying as a ‘healthy dietary choice’.”

Why is that last point interesting? Because companies who have vowed to reduce their marketing to kids have pledged to only market products if they have, for instance, 25 percent less sugar than a “reference” product. What counts as a reference product? Good question. Here’s the Council for Better Business Bureau’s guide to those self-enforced guidelines.

It is impossible to figure out what “25 percent less than” is actually less than. (The fact that pages 7, 8 and 9 of the report are given over to an explanation of these terms tells you how “simple” they are.)

Thus the FTC has, sensibly, suggested that food companies ought to adopt a standard that everyone can actually understand.