US youths see nearly 4,000 food marketing messages on digital media each year

U.S. children and adolescents see thousands of food marketing messages on digital media platforms each year, according to new research published in JAMA Pediatrics. And 92% of the marketed food and beverage products are considered unhealthy.

The study, led by Lisa Powell, director of the Food Policy Research Program at the University of Illinois Chicago, used screen recordings to examine the food marketing that children and adolescents encountered while using their smartphones and tablets. Researchers recorded 1,011 youths aged 8 to 17 while they used their devices as they normally would for leisure activities during a 30-minute session.

“This approach provides a real-world picture of young people’s exposure across digital platforms, including social media, web browsing and mobile games,” Powell said. “It is the first U.S. real-time screen capture study, to our knowledge, to examine youth exposure to food marketing across digital media platforms and the largest globally to date. Learning more about how children and teens experience food marketing on their devices can help inform the need for policies that can protect youths from marketing of unhealthy products.”

Based on participants’ reported daily leisure-time screen use, the researchers estimated that, on average, each American youth sees 3,883 food marketing exposures on digital media per year. Food marketing exposure rose substantially with age: The study found 1,427 annual food marketing exposures among children aged 8 to 12, and 10,107 annual exposures for adolescents aged 13 to 17. The study also found that exposure was significantly higher for female versus male youths and for youths with non-college-educated versus college-educated parents or guardians.

Of the nearly 7,000 food-related items seen in marketing exposures, participants were most often exposed to fast-food marketing (28.8%), followed by sweets (20.4%) and beverages (20.1%), with soda making up the largest subcategory. Almost half of the marketed items came from companies participating in the self-regulatory industry Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, an initiative to regulate how children experience food and beverage advertising. In addition, 91.6% of the non-restaurant food (e.g., snack foods purchased at a vending machine or grocery store) did not meet the Pan American Health Organization’s nutrient profile standards for healthy food.

These results suggest that industry self-regulation is not curtailing youth exposure to unhealthy food marketing on digital media.

Powell said, “the study may have underestimated overall exposure by limiting its focus to smartphones and tablets only.”

“On the other hand, we did not allow the youths to use messaging apps, which may have pushed them to social media, web browsing and online gaming more than usual where there may be more marketing. It’s also possible that our participants changed their online behavior knowing they were being recorded,” she said.

Where and how digital marketing reaches youth

In previous decades, characters like Tony the Tiger and Ronald McDonald mostly hawked their products to children on television. In the current media landscape, where 43% of children aged 8 to 12 and 88% of adolescents aged 13 to 18 in the U.S. own smartphones, marketing tactics have evolved with digital platforms, providing food companies with numerous opportunities to market their products to young audiences.

Unlike traditional advertising, digital marketing can be integrated into entertainment and social interactions. Marketing can appear through social media posts, games, influencers and other forms of content, making it less distinct from the content young people are already consuming. This study found that almost 83% of the food marketing came through social media, with TikTok and YouTube comprising over 50%. Gaming contributed 14% of the estimated marketing exposures, and the remaining 3.5% was attributed to other platforms like web browsing.

Additionally, this study showed that while most marketing exposures were classified as paid marketing (49% directly from companies and 3.5% via sponsored third parties), earned marketing (e.g., unpaid user-generated social media content or liked or shared posts) made up 44% of exposures.

Powell said that “measuring exposure to and regulation of paid advertising on television is relatively straightforward, although no formal regulations exist in the U.S. But marketing in the digital landscape is more complex, and regulating it will be more challenging.”

The amount of exposure to food marketing online among youths is particularly relevant to cardiovascular health and other chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and obesity because many of the foods marketed to young people are high in nutrients such as sodium, saturated fat and free sugars. Eating patterns established during childhood and adolescence can contribute to health throughout the course of life.

Additional investigators include Samantha Marinello, Julien Leider, Rebecca M. Schermbeck, Isabel McGoldrick, Devoja Ganguli and Andrea A. Pipito from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health; and Laura Vergeer and Monique Potvin Kent from the University of Ottawa School of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine.

Written by Jenna Kurtzweil

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