Disney has unveiled upgraded commitments around marketing healthier food to children including most notably nutritional criteria for food advertising on its TV channels. Other media companies are now under pressure to follow suit, Ben Cooper writes, while there is also growing support for broadcasting networks to join the food industry’s self-regulatory initiative.
The term ‘game changer’ tends to be somewhat over-used in the corporate responsibility field. Companies are prone to talking up the significance of voluntary actions but in the case of Disney’s announcement on child-directed food marketing, its use may well be justified.
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Moreover, these were not Disney’s words but those of none other than Michelle Obama, the star turn at the launch of the company’s enhanced commitments last week.
Disney has expanded on the commitments it made around children’s food in 2006, creating the ‘Mickey Check’, an icon to identify healthier foods, extending the range of more nutritious children’s offerings at its theme parks and resorts and further reducing sugar and sodium in its licensed foods. But the most significant new undertaking is undoubtedly the nutritional criteria Disney has introduced for child-directed advertising on its TV channels.
Under its new standards, all food and beverage products advertised, sponsored or promoted on the Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior, Radio Disney and Disney-owned online destinations targeted at families with younger children will be required by 2015 to meet certain nutrition guidelines. These are aligned to federal healthy eating standards and are broadly similar to the standards used by the food industry’s Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI).
Disney is the first major media company to make such a move and Dr Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the consumer advocacy group, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), believes that, in this sense, it really is a game changer.
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By GlobalData“It’s terrific to see such a big media company take responsibility for their advertising on television, radio and websites,” Wootan says. “Pretty much up until now, the media companies have only addressed the use of their licensed characters. Disney’s announcement is really unique in that a major media company is admitting that they have a responsibility, and that they should be very careful about what foods they allow to be promoted to kids through their media. It’s really a game changer in that way.”
The only operator to have launched similar guidelines is Qubo, a small children’s network owned by ION Media Networks, and the reaction of the other large players in this sector, notably Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network, will now be closely watched. “Disney’s announcement puts a lot of pressure on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network to do more,” Wootan asserts. “I think parents will hear the announcement and wonder why Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network aren’t doing the same.”
Meanwhile, Dr Lisa Powell of the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois, who has conducted research into children’s exposure to food advertising, heralded the move as “a large step in the right direction”.
Disney’s announcement comes at a time when marketing to children has been an extremely live issue in the US. At the behest of the Obama administration, an inter-agency working group (IWG) was convened to look into children’s food advertising while the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign has tackled the issue more broadly.
The food industry’s response was the upgrading of the CFBAI commitments last July, which saw the 16 member companies, including General Mills, Kellogg and Mars Inc, introduce uniform nutritional standards for the first time. These are pledged to be in place by the end of 2013.
The fact the IWG process is now effectively on hold suggests food companies have moved sufficiently on this issue to satisfy policymakers, at least for now.
Wootan says the response from the media industry has been less impressive and attention now may well turn to the networks. Indeed, Mrs Obama’s words more than suggest this. “Disney is doing what no major media company has ever done before in the US and what I hope every company will do going forward,” the First Lady said.
While Wootan says there has been pressure on the media companies to introduce voluntary nutritional criteria, “they just haven’t taken as meaningful a step as the food companies.” She adds: “The media companies have not taken their share of the responsibility. They have pretty much left it all to the food companies.”
While welcoming the Disney move, CFBAI director Elaine Kolish says a self-regulatory, harmonised response has “lots of advantages” over a company-specific initiative. Developing a company-wide policy is “a really good thing to do”, but being part of a coalition with independent oversight such as the CFBAI “is even better”.
Therefore, Disney’s move prompts the further question of whether the media companies could or should now join the CFBAI. The CFBAI comprises 14 manufacturers and two restaurant operators but no media companies. Kolish says the CFBAI has always been “open and willing” to speak to networks about joining.
CSPI is also pushing for media companies to join the CFBAI. “I think uniformity makes it much easier for parents, advocates and others to understand these marketing policies,” says Wootan. “Even if the CFBAI criteria are not ideal, there is an advantage in having the companies all working together in the same programme. We are encouraging the media companies to join CFBAI. So far they have been very resistant and we haven’t been able to convince any of them to join.”
If all media companies had similar nutritional criteria in place to those adopted by Disney another benefit would be that those companies not currently part of the CFBAI, representing around 20%-25% of the ad spend, would be subject to control by another means.
“If more media companies were to follow Disney’s lead then such companies could serve as ‘gate keepers’,” says Powell. “With stronger guidelines and broader application we may then have more luck in limiting children’s exposure to ads for unhealthy food and beverage products.”
However, food companies would prefer the media companies simply to join the CFBAI. Apart from a disquiet with networks deciding unilaterally the permissible nutritional thresholds for products that can be advertised, there is a pragmatic element to this.
“Obviously the networks have the right to do what they will do but if each network has its own disparate standards, it very well may be hard for advertisers to be able to coordinate, and that’s why we’d particularly like an across-the-board industry approach to this,” says Dan Jaffe of the Association of National Advertisers. “Then we would get a uniform approach. That is the ideal.”
A report published by the Institute of Medicine in May also calls for uniformity across the food manufacturing, foodservice and media sectors. In fact, Kolish used the opportunity of the publication of this report to reach out once more to media companies. “It’s been pretty much an open-door policy all along but I thought the IOM report was a good opportunity to renew that invitation,” she says.
Undoubtedly, the launch of Disney’s upgraded commitments on children’s food provides a further opportunity to exhort the other major media companies to take similar action or, as seems preferable to both food industry advocates and CSPI, to join with food companies in an initiative which has now been in place for six years and seems to have found favour with policymakers and, certain reservations notwithstanding, with public health campaigners.
