Children and Fast Food Advertising

Children have been targeted by soda advertisers since the early twentieth century.

Television greatly expanded the ability of advertiser to reach children, especially on during children programs on saturday mornings, meant that advertisers could market directly to the age group of their choice.

By the 1960s, advertisers had identified children as a separate market, as fast food chains join soda companies in targeting children.

Food advertisements account for well over 50% of all advertisements targeting children on national network and food is the most frequently advertised product category on children’s TV.

In addition to television advertising, fast food chains also created child oriented characters such as Ronald MacDonald and began offering meals made especially for children, such as Happy Meals with toys and the creation of playgrounds for children.

Advertisers are trying to create situations where consumers are constantly exposed to their brand names.

Products are displayed in as many places as possible, whether it is on the grocery store shelf, in a television carton, or on the cover of a book.

Finally, the companies developed movie tie-ins and made special arrangements with theme parks such as Disneyland, which has had long history of selling fast food.

Children themselves have little buying power but they do have pester power. Busy parents simply take the easy way out and give in to children’s constant pestering. In addition, advertisers believe that childhood experiences will be remembered throughout a lifetime.

In United States in early 1991, a study reveled that children watching cartoon shows for a four hour period on atypical Saturday morning were bombarded with total food commercials.

The product advertised were dominated by sugar coated cereals, candy cookies, fruit flavored drinks, chocolate syrup, fast food meals and pizza.

Besides food advertisement, advertisements for fast food chains have strongly increased in the United States and in Europe during last 15 years reaching almost a third of all food advertisements in the United States.
Children and Fast Food Advertising

Fast Food Advertisement

Fast Food Advertisement
During the 1920s, White Castle, the first fast food advertised in newspapers. It was slow to value radio advertising but did have promotions on radio during the 1930s.

Most of its advertising was targeted at working class. This changed during the 1950s, when White Castle sponsored a children television show, The Cactus and Randy Show.

At that tine American spending in food continue to grow. The increase appears to have stemmed primarily from changes in foods purchased, including more food bought and eaten away from home.

During the second half of the century, consumers increasingly spent food dollars on meals outside the home.

McDonald’s did little national advertising in the 1950s. In 1959, Minneapolis McDonald’s operator, Jim Zein, began running radio advertisements and his sales skyrocketed.

Based on this success, Ray Kroc encouraged other franchises and managers to launch their own campaigns.

Following this directive, two Washington D.C., franchisees, John Gibson and Oscar Goldstein, began sponsoring a children’s television show, called Bozo’s Circus.

This resulted in the creation of Ronald MacDonald, the McDonald’s corporate clown icon who appeared in local Washington, DC television commercial beginning in 1963.

During the following year, he appeared in national television on Thanksgiving. The company has regularly used McDonald its advertising campaigns and like the Quaker Oats man, people dressed as Ronald MacDonald make personal appearances throughout the nation.

Ronald McDonald’s a household word with its “billion served” advertisement slogan serving as evidence of its leadership in this area of fast food.

The Happy Meal has been pleasing kids since 1979. The Ronald MacDonald Houses are noted for their continued good work with families and children suffering from incurable disease.

Through extensive advertising, McDonald’s became the nation’s largest fast food chain during the 1970s.

McDonald’s and other fast food restaurant don’t rely just on advertising to get young people hooked. McDonald’s operates more than 8,000 playgrounds at its US restaurants to lure children onto the premises.

While McDonald’s is re-finding its belief in beef as its core product, KFC is continuing to harry its competitors by promoting chicken as a lean and healthy product, confronting the obesity and food hygiene issue rather than shying away from it.

The new positioning by company is summed up used by company advertising and marketing: tasty and safe, balanced nutrition, high quality, and healthy living.

In 2000, the fast food industry spent $3 billion a year on television advertising, much of it targeted at children.
Fast Food Advertisement

Advertisement of Food in Telecommunication Era

Advertisement of Food in Telecommunication Era
While printed ads for food were primarily directed at wives and mothers, the visual form of television made it possible to reach consumers at earlier and earlier ages.

One 1991 study counted 222 junk food ads as in one Saturday morning’s set of cartoon shows.

Many fast food chains used toy giveaways – generally cross marketed with television or movie characters – to encourage children to eat at their outlets.

Schools were paid by soft drink manufacturers to stock their hands exclusively in order to build brand loyalty.

This approach has proven effective as children increasingly influence their own and even family’s dining choices.

According to one survey of children in the 1990s, some two thirds claimed to influence their of family’s a choice of restaurant.

Advertisers have undergone scrutiny for the way they market their wares to both children and adults, but both little real effect.

Intermittently, the government has stepped in to limit just what benefits advertisers could claim for their products.

Congress passed major legislation in several occasion between 1906 and 1967 to restrict the most brazen practices and unsubstantiated claims, but the deregulatory climate of the 1980s and 90s once again expanded the manufacturers options.

In an echo of the patent medicine sellers foods were once again touted for their supposed health attributes.

Around the run of the millennium, Lipton tea made claims that its beverage was an anticarcinogenic and Cheerios breakfast cereal blithely claimed that it lowered the incidence of heart disease.

But the business did not entirely stand still. Food companies emblazoned their names on everything from high school cafeterias to sport arenas.

Coke, Pepsi, Bacardi rum, and others got into the business of sponsoring pop music tours. Products were routinely placed in feature films and television shows.

Particularly successful was the use of Reese’s Pieces candy in the 1982 movie E.T, which led to an 85 percent sales increase.

In the 1990s, the coming of the internet promised to deliver consumers with ever greater accuracy, although there is some question about the effectiveness of this marketing technique when it comes to mass-market foods.

There is no doubt, however, that it has allowed marketers of the niche precuts such as heirloom turkeys and artisanal cheeses to promote their products at modest cost.

Early o on the 20th century, food advertising was ;largely instrumental in creating a common culinary out of a nation of immigrants, it projected that culture abroad. To most of the world, Coke and McDonald’s are the American Way.
Advertisement of Food in Telecommunication Era

Modern Advertising of Food and Drinks II

Modern Advertising of Food and Drinks II
Postum, created in 1895 by Charles W. Post, was just one of many new foods concocted around the turn of the 20th century. The most notable of these were breakfast cereals like Post’s own Grape-Nuts, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and the products of the Shredded Wheat Company.

Advertising was the heart and soul of the cereal business from the beginning, The pioneer in this regard was Henry Crowell of the Quaker Oats Company. He was to register a trademark for a cereal in 1877 and he promoted his brand by plastering signs on barns, trains and even the white cliffs of Dover.

Crowell came up with the idea of giving away bowls and saucers as a premium. In imitation of the patent medicine sellers his ads made various unsubstantiated medical claims.

Before Crowell campaign, oatmeal had been relatively rare in the United States but now who could turn down a food that promised to “supply what brains and bodies need....with more proteins, more phosphorus more lecithin than any other food”?

By 1942, Kellogg Company figures showed that they had spent approximately $100 million on advertising.

For most of the 19th century, there was no such thing as a breakfast cereal, by the mid 20th century, 50 percent of Americans would be eating an ounce or so of it every day.
Modern Advertising of Food and Drinks II

Modern Advertising of Food and Drinks I

Modern Advertising of Food and Drinks I
The invention of modern advertising can largely be credited to patent medicine sellers of the reconstruction era.

They came up with all sorts of spurious and even dangerous cures for such ill-defined diseases as neuralgia and dyspepsia, which seemed epidemic in that unsettled time.

To promote their nostrums, the hucksters scared their customers with “facts” almost guaranteed to induce psychosomatic symptoms, printed advertisements offering miraculous cures , enlisted celebrities as spokesman, and sponsored traveling medicine shows where quack doctors and their accomplishes testified to the efficacy of their potions.

Early soft drinks were sold and marketed as patent medicines. An 1892 advertisement for Coca-Cola was typical of the genre: the carbonated potion was recommended as “the ideal brain tonic for headache & exhaustion.”

Coffee substitute were originally was originally promoted in much the same way. As late as 1951, the Federal trade Commission was investigating the Post Company for running ads for its Postum beverage claiming that drinking coffee discourage marriage or that it results in “divorce business, business failures, factory accidents, juvenile delinquency, traffic accidents, fire or home foreclosures.”
Modern Advertising of Food and Drinks I