Yahoo Kids! encouraging kids to eat crap food?
I’m against censorship, but we all know controls are needed when it comes to children. In fact in the UK at least, advertising regulations for ads targeted at children are getting increasingly strict - especially when it comes to junk foods. We are after all becoming nations full of obese children doomed to an early death, according to many reports.
I was in London the other day and noticed a lot of Cadbury chocolate adverts for Dairy Milk bars, along the lines of "There’s a glass and a half of milk in every bar". This is a very disturbing ploy for which the ASA should be punishing Cadbury – effectively trying to sell their awful chocolate (which it has been argued can’t be called chocolate due to the high level of fats relative to cocoa) as a "healthy" food on the basis that most people, incorrectly, believe cow’s milk to be a healthy food product.
The conspiratorial side of me wondered if there was a joint promotion going on between the Dairy Council and Cadbury to do what is effectively promotion of both products.
Instead, I happened on a link of sorts. Yahoo appear to be in the beta testing phase of a new service called Yahoo Kids! One presumes this is to protect children from all the potentially offensive and/or insanely boring parts of Yahoo – or you could argue its to collate as much marketing information on children as possible… there is a caveat at the footer of their pages about collection personal information.
Anyway, I found the Food and Eating section. Oh the horror. Take out a couple of entries from oxfam about chocolate and tea, and you have direct links to:
- 4 (yes you read correctly, four) Cadbury chocolate sites, presumably "educational" in nature
- The British Egg Information Service – hey we all need more cholesterol
- Kellogg’s – those bastions of sweet cereals
- A site selling sweets
- The Dairy Council’s website – cow’s milk is for… cows
- Ribena – mmm more sugar
- Walkers – makers of crisps (who notably -do- make unsalted crisps)
There’s a couple of minor information sites there too, but that’s the section so far. No doubt Yahoo! will say it is early days yet, but I have this one question:
How long will it be before advertising regulations on children’s junk foods are extended to places where children will be given false "educational" material on the web?
You can bet this tactic is in use elsewhere on the web, where frankly pathetic people are paid to find sites like this to list links to the "educational" content they are providing to suck kids into their products.
2 Comments
elijahao
April 30, 2007Why on earth should the government be involved in this? It’s the parents’ responsibility to teach their children how to eat, and how to think for themselves instead of falling hook line and sinker for advertisements. In the U.S. the government schools don’t help this in any way shape or form, in fact I feel they do the opposite! The schools (the teachers probably don’t do this on purpose) actually in effect encourage the students to rely on others to do their thinking for them, to be part of the in crowd, and therefore to buy in to this mass media nonsense.
My children go to a private school, and we do not watch TV. I want my children to grow up thinking for themselves, and challenging the ideas around them, not buying into whatever people tell them to think. 95% of the reason that TV is not hooked up in my house is the Advertisements, the other 5% is “reality” TV and all the other worthless so-called “content”. It’s all just an anything goes advertising campaign.
Marc Palmer
May 4, 2007You’re entirely correct and seem to do the same things we are doing here with our family.
However you assume that all parents are equipped to do the same things, either in terms of understanding the issues and how these things affect their children, or frankly not caring. Children do need to be offered some protection from parents who do let them watch TV all day long etc.
It’s almost certainly too late to sort out bad parenting (people often don’t want help or see a problem) so they are unlikely to improve the lot for their children… in which case regulations like this might make a, very small, difference to the life outcome of those children.