Auk 1042

The Role of Television Advertising in Children’s Food Choice
by
Brian Young and Paul Webley

University of Exeter
and
Marion Hetherington and Suzanne Zeedyk

University of Dundee
Acknowledgement
This review was commissioned by MAFF under their R & D programme in Food Acceptability and
Choice.
Table of Contents
Page
Executive Summary
Introduction 6
Where we looked 6
Who we looked at 7
Part 1
Overview of the physiological,
psychological and cultural influences
on children’s eating habits
The origins of eating behaviour in children 10

Background 10
Terminology 14
Early feeding experiences 14
Evidence for nutritional wisdom 15
Social influences on food selection 19
Evidence of cultural wisdom in food choice 22
Media influences 22
What is advertising? 23
Questions of definition 23
The scope of advertising 23
Function of advertising 24
Advertising in its cultural context 25
Advertising literacy: how children develop an 28
understanding of advertising
Attention to television commercials 28
Distinguishing television commercials 30
from programmes
Understanding the intent behind advertising 31
Models of child development 33
Understanding of pictorial representation 34
Theory of mind 34
Understanding others’ intentions 35
Metacognition 36
Behaviour modelling 37
Summary of Part 1 37
Part 2
Role of advertising in children’s food choice
Introduction 40
What’s on?: the frequency and content of TV food 40
advertisements
Background 40
Review of research studies 41
Analysis of research findings 52
Recommendations for future research 56
Purchase requests resulting from TV food advertising 57
Questionnaire and interview studies 58
Supermarket observation studies 63
Advertising’s influence on food-related behaviour 72
Methods 72
Studies 73
Advertising’s influence on attitudes and values 88
Introduction 88
Summary and conclusions of Part 2 94
Frequency and content of TV food 94
advertising to children
Purchase-request behaviour 95
Advertising’s influence on 96
food-related behaviour
Advertising’s influence on 98
attitudes and values
Overall Conclusions 99
Major projects 100
Minor studies 104
References 108
Appendices 121
Details on search strategy 122
Addendum 124
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.
Research findings suggest that very young children do not understand the objectives of television
advertising and that there is some question about whether these children are taking the advertisers’
information as fact. Whether or not they do believe what they see in television advertising we
know that very young children are neophobic and that visual exposure alone does not influence
liking for novel foods. Moreover, whether or not children understand commercials, the translation
from exposure to advertising to modifications in eating behaviour takes a rather complex route.
This process includes exposure to the stimuli, comprehension of the messages presented, translation
of that information into a stated request for the food item, success in acquisition of that food item
(e.g. a caregiver in the supermarket being asked to purchase that food), the child’s taste response to
the novel food and the postingestive consequences of consuming that food (e.g. if positive, then the
item may be requested again, if negative the item is not likely to be requested again). This process
is complex and must be considered in the light of already developing food acceptance patterns from
the more influential route of exposure to foods from caregivers and within the context of what
children understand about television advertising (see Figure 3).
There is no evidence to suggest that advertising is the principal influence on children’s
eating behaviour. Indeed the opposite is likely to be true, in that advertising is just one influence
among many factors and that the child herself also brings to the relationship a greater or lesser
vulnerability to the messages contained within the advertisement. Taking into account what the
child brings to the eating episode and the relative importance of a variety of social learning
experiences, the following approach gives due attention to the child’s own internal cues of appetite
regulation:
Social influences
(peers, parents, media)
physiological requirements wants requests parental decision further requests
previous eating experiences
Overall, the relationship between advertising and eating in children is a complex one and must be
considered in the context of the physiological, psychological, and sociocultural domains of
influence within the child’s eating world. Therefore, future research must evaluate the relative
contribution of each domain to the development of food choice patterns, food preferences, and
eating style. In particular, studies must identify the critical time in the child’s development where
internal mechanisms of nutritional wisdom become less important than externally driven processes
of dietary choice. Although parents believe that advertising adversely affects their children’s eating
behaviour, the present discussion has highlighted the place of advertising in the child’s eating
world, in that advertising is only one of many factors shaping that world. This is not to say that
advertising may be particularly influential at certain stages of development. Previous studies,
however, have not addressed this issue adequately. It is therefore critical to identify the most
important factors which form children’s eating behaviour at different points in their development
and which set the foundation for a pattern of eating for life.
Like adults, children’s food choices are based on a complex set of factors ranging from
what is appropriate in the culture, what is available to the child in that society, what foods are
offered to the child by parents, peers and institutions, and what the child herself brings to the eating
episode. What has not been addressed in the literature so far is the stage at PRúinsert figure 3
herewhich the nutritional wisdom that children clearly demonstrate at an early age becomes less
important than other factors in determining the amount and type of food consumed. What are the
competing factors which compromise nutritional wisdom? Where does advertising fit into this
equation? Specifically, what are the direct effects of television advertising on eating behaviour in
the UK?
Parents’ beliefs and opinions have only recently gained the attention of researchers in this
field. Parental knowledge, attitudes, and dietary patterns are likely to influence the development of
eating behaviour in their children. One would predict that parental responses to advertising will
also influence the relationship between any proposed mediation between advertising and eating
behaviour. Advertising exerts its influence on eating within the social domain, therefore, its effects
must be considered alongside the role of parents, peers and institutions such as schools. Children’s
eating behaviour is also determined by the child’s own internal controls as well as parental
regulation of food availability, meal times, and attitudes about foods. Therefore, future research
must give due consideration to each of these domains in the development of food habits in children.
Thus far, no published research has taken account of each of these domains of influence leaving
open the question of relative importance in the development of childhood eating patterns.
Children are faced with a complex task in their development from a univore, existing
entirely on a single food source at the beginning of life, to an omnivore consuming a wide range of
foods to meet physiological demands for energy and nutrients. Evidence suggests that very young
children are capable of regulating their intake appropriately. That is, given a variety of foods
children self-select a diet which maintains good health and well-being (Davis, 1922; Birch, 1990).
Children are able to compensate for the loss of calories in a food which is sweetened by intense
sweeteners rather than sucrose, and show strong preferences for foods containing dietary fat
relative to foods containing fat substitutes. Future research should examine the major influences on
children’s eating behaviour from internal, physiological controls to external, parental and societal
factors.
In particular, studies must identify the critical time in the child’s development where
internal mechanisms of nutritional wisdom become less important than externally driven processes
of dietary choice. Although parents believe that advertising, in particular television advertising,
adversely affects their children’s eating behaviour, this Review highlights the place of such
advertising in the child’s eating world, and demonstrates that it is only one of many factors shaping
that world. We do not know whether advertising is particularly influential at certain stages of
development as studies have not so far adequately addressed this issue. It is therefore, critical to
identify the most important factors which form children’s eating behaviour at different points in
their development and which set the foundation for a pattern of eating for life.
INTRODUCTION.
This review was commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) to
provide information on how television commercials for food products affect the food choice of
children focussing on those aged eight to 12 years. MAFF wanted to know what studies had been
done and what conclusions had been drawn from them and whether they could be relied on. We
were asked to point to the important unanswered questions and provide clear guidance on what
future research is needed. We were also asked to put the influence of television advertising of food
into the context of factors governing food choice by children and families and the influences that
form or change dietary habits. Our review examines the available research critically, paying
particular attention to methodologies. It is not our aim to weigh the evidence for and against a case
that advertising influences children’s food choice by counting the number of studies on both sides.
Rather we would want to evaluate the evidence and consider its relevance in the cultural context of
Britain today. The review is structured as follows. In Part 1 children’s eating behaviour is
introduced and the three sets of influence - physiological, psychological, and cultural - are
described. Advertising can be regarded as within the domain of cultural influence and a discussion
of findings in the general area of children and television advertising follows. In Part 2 a detailed
review of the literature on the role of advertising in children’s food choice is presented. The Report
concludes with a final summary and guidelines for future research.
Where we looked.
Findings from any review of the literature ultimately depend on what literature is reviewed. Our
search strategy was guided by two principles. Firstly the research should have been published in an
academic journal. Although it is optimistic to assume that all academic research is free from bias in
the research agenda and the selection of methodology, it is relatively objective in its approach to
data. Publication as an academic paper is guided by the integrity of the procedures used and in
addition the use of peer review ensures that these standards are adhered to. Secondly, we wanted
evidence from observations, experiments, or surveys. There is much that has been written on
advertising and its role in society and the economy that is speculative and based on one person’s
opinion or a school of thought. If there is a bias in this Report it is toward scientific, published
literature.
The search procedure was to use databases such as PsycLit and BIDS to obtain abstracts of
articles and identify researchers in the field with citation indices. Original articles were obtained
and read paying particular attention to methodologies used and the relevance of the results in a UK
context. There are several previous summaries of work in this area (c.f. Adler, 1980; Young; 1990;
McNeal, 1991) that were used to guide our review but, where possible, we relied on the original
published papers. More detail on this procedure can be found in Appendix 1.
Who we looked at.
The question of defining the age range of the population under review needed to be answered. We
argued that the review should exclude the influence or role of advertising in the life of adolescents.
Once the child becomes an adolescent or teenager, there are a host of other important influences
both in terms of child development and marketing strategies that can impact on food preference and
choice. We are not saying that these influences and the food-related behaviour of adolescents are
unimportant. Also, it is quite possible that some of these influences are detectable in an incipient
form in childhood. Extending the review into adolescence however would entail two reviews, of
children and adolescents. Although the original brief focussed on the age range eight to 12 years
we felt that some reference to early childhood and infancy had to be made as part of the argument
is that food-related behaviour cannot be understood without examining the establishment of earlier
patterns of preference and choice.
PART 1
OVERVIEW OF THE
PHYSIOLOGICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL
AND CULTURAL INUENCES ON
CHILDREN’S EATING BEHAVIOUR.
THE ORIGINS OF EATING BEHAVIOUR IN CHIREN.
Background.
Eating behaviour occurs within physiological, psychological and sociocultural constraints. We

must eat to survive, and so eating behaviour is driven by the fundamental need to obtain fuel and
adequate nutrients for energy, growth, repair and well-being. However, human eating behaviour is
highly complex and influenced by a multitude of factors. This is particularly relevant in the
Western world where food is available in abundance and serious food shortages are extremely rare.
The factors which influence food intake range from those mainly in the physiological domain such
as a need for energy and particular nutrients to those in the psychological domain such as eating for
comfort (Figure 1).
Both obesity and eating disorders appear to be increasing, and diet has been linked to the
development of a variety of disease states such as coronary heart disease, cancer, hypertension and
atherosclerosis. It is therefore important to understand the factors that influence eating behaviours
across the life span. For example, the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (1995) has shown that,
by age five years, children in the UK are eating diets containing twice as much sugar and salt than
is recommended. Investigations are needed into the factors shaping children’s eating behaviour to
help us make sense of these findings.
Little is known about how physiological, psychological and sociocultural factors interact to
influence food intake and food choice, although it is clear from the existing literature that the
relationship between need and consumption is anticipatory. In general humans do not choose to
wait for significant energy depletion to initiate eating and quite often eating occurs as a function of
situational factors such as time of day, food
insert figure 1 here

availability and social setting. Given the anticipatory nature of eating behaviour it is very likely
that outside influences can override the more internally based, or physiological factors which guide
food intake and food choice.
Feeding behaviour for the young child is initially centred around the single food source of
milk and then gradually a variety of new foods are introduced into the child’s diet. Children can
exist exclusively on milk for the first 18 months of life but beyond this age a variety of foods must
be included in the diet for adequate development (Birch, 1990). The process of moving from a
single food source to multiple food sources is both an interesting and complicated one (Figure 2)
involving both innate and learned mechanisms. The child is born with specific taste preferences
which develop through learning to include a large variety of complex foods.
In order to meet nutritional and energy needs, the child must include a variety of different
foods in her repertoire, and yet young children are notoriously neophobic. Most young children
approach new food sources with suspicion and this phenomenon has been termed by Birch and
Marlin (1982) “I don’t like it, I never tried it”.
Birch (1990) has highlighted how little research has been done on the development of food
acceptance patterns within psychology despite the central role of early feeding interactions for the
child’s socioemotional development and health. Nevertheless, in order to address questions about
the influence of specific physiological, psychological or sociocultural factors in the development of
food intake and preference, it is important to evaluate the context of eating behaviour for the child.
To understand the specific role of advertising on children’s eating behaviour, it is essential that the
complexity and multifactorial nature of the influences on children’s eating behaviour be clarified.
In this part of the review, the context of early feeding experiences will be examined, the
ways in which children acquire food preferences and
insert figure 2 here
aversions will be explored and the relative importance of internal and external influences on eating
behaviour for children will be reviewed. Examples of influence shall be drawn from the
physiological domain (nutritional wisdom), the psychological domain (social learning), and the
cultural domain (the media). Research on the development of food acceptance patterns, internal
cues influencing eating patterns, the input of peers and caregivers in shaping these patterns and the
role of external forces such as the media will be examined.
Terminology.
It is important to define certain terms which are used interchangeably in the literature, but which,
for the purposes of this review will have quite specific definitions. Food choice refers to the actual
selection of a food or foods, in relation to other foods. Food acceptance refers to judgements about
liking a food when the food is presented to the child, whereas food preference refers to judgements
about liking in relation to other foods from memory (Cardello and Maller, 1982). Food intake is
the measured amount of food consumed within a specified period of time and can refer to weight of
food eaten or to energy intake (in kilocalories) derived from the foods.
Early feeding experiences.
In this section, factors which shape the child’s early eating experiences will be explored. In
particular, evidence will be forwarded which suggests that children bring considerable nutritional
wisdom to eating episodes before exposure to novel, solid foods by caregivers. In addition,
children’s ability to learn from both associative conditioning and social learning processes in the
development of food acceptance patterns will be investigated.
The task for the young infant is to move from a complete reliance on milk, a single source
of nutrition, to a diet which is complex, diverse and culturally relevant. For the most part, food
acceptance is acquired through an interaction between biology, culture and individual experience
(Birch, 1990). There is a significant contribution of genetics to the development of taste
preferences and even an inherent predisposition to accept certain tastes over others. In cultural
terms, food repertoires are constructed within particular social groups, and foods which are
considered acceptable for one culture may be considered inedible by another culture. Even within
cultures, there is enormous variability of familial and community patterns of food acceptance.
However, given the constraints imposed on the newborn infant from her own biology and cultural
setting, there is the added level of her own experience of the food world. Eating behaviour
develops as a function of what the child brings to the eating episode in biological preparedness,
what is given to her by the cultural context, and how her own experience with foods shapes liking,
acceptance, pattern of eating and amount of food consumed. Some tastes are innately accepted or
disliked, whereas others are developed as a function of learning. Although there are general rules
about the universality of some taste preferences (e.g. the sweet taste), there are also specific factors
which shape individual taste preferences derived both from genetic endowment (e.g. supertasters)
and from personal experience (e.g. associative conditioning).
Evidence for nutritional wisdom in young children.
If one asks what the infant brings to the eating situation, the issue of how ‘wise’ infants are in
maintaining nutritional well-being is raised. That is, to what extent can infants adjust intake
appropriately to match nutritional needs and if given a range of food choices, can the infant secure
a diet which is adequate for energy, growth and development? In the now classic studies of Clara
Davis (1928, 1933, 1935, 1939), a ‘natural’ experiment was conducted with 15 infants aged six to
11 months who were just being exposed to solid foods following weaning. In this study, the infants
were allowed to choose food items from a variety of natural (raw) foods provided on a tray, without
adult intervention, that is, without the caregiver selecting the items for the child. Davis hoped to
demonstrate that the infant has an innate capacity to obtain a healthy diet. Certainly the children
maintained excellent health throughout the period of the study. Indeed one child with rickets
selected sufficient cod liver oil from the tray to ameliorate his symptoms. These behaviours were
interpreted by Davis as evidence for the child’s nutritional wisdom. However, as Birch (1987)
noted, the infants also sampled the spoons, dishes and tray, and although they tended to select two
or three solid foods and a drink, they did develop clear likes and dislikes presumably on the basis of
learning to associate particular sensory features with positive postingestive consequences. Since
the foods offered by Davis were ‘natural’ and wholesome, the tendency which the infants displayed
to eat a variety of foods rather than their most preferred food item ensured that they ate a balanced
diet (Rolls, 1988). Had the tray included items considered to be less wholesome such as high fat or
high carbohydrate mixtures, the infant’s diet might not have been so well balanced. Nevertheless,
what appears to be innate in the infants is the capacity to learn about the consequences of eating
particular foods and to associate sensory cues with positive postingestive effects. Also, these
studies demonstrated that the infants tended to select a variety of foods, which in itself has adaptive
value and there is evidence that phenomena such as sensory-specific satiety encourages a variety of
foods to be eaten (Rolls and Hetherington, 1989).
Birch and Deysher (1986) investigated sensory-specific satiety in young children and found
that liking for foods which have been eaten in a meal declines more than the liking for other foods.
Also, Rolls (1988) reported strong evidence of sensory-specific satiety in adolescents consuming
their favourite colour of a chocolate candy. Therefore, children and adolescents demonstrate an
ability to respond to internal cues of satiety even when the food consumed is a highly liked food
such as confectionery. This is in contrast to the elderly who show weak sensory-specific satiety
(Rolls and McDermott, 1991). Aging appears to affect responsiveness to internal cues whereas in
childhood children show strong evidence of awareness of such cues.
An example of the child’s ability to respond to internal cues of hunger and satiety comes
from studies of energy regulation in children. In one study, children aged two and a half to five
years were offered a low-calorie version of dessert created by replacing the sucrose of a standard
pudding with aspartame. By comparing food intake at lunch following the two versions of the
pudding Birch and Deysher (1986) were able to assess the ability of the children to compensate for
dilution of energy density. Compared with adults, children showed clearer caloric compensation by
increasing energy intake at lunch following the low-calorie pudding. Similarly, in an experiment
using foods containing fat substitutes or dietary fats, compensation for this energy dilution over the
next 24 hours in two- to five-year-old children was monitored. The children responded
appropriately by adjusting their cumulative intake over the rest of the day to account for the
missing fat calories (Birch et al., 1993). Therefore, children are able to detect differences in energy
density and to behave in ways which will ensure that their daily energy intake is unaffected by the
dilution. This can be taken as evidence of nutritional wisdom.
Perhaps a more convincing case indicating that young children can self-regulate accurately
comes from Fomon (1974) who demonstrated caloric compensation in much younger children. In
this study, infants were given ad libitum access to a calorically dense formula, a calorically dilute
formula, and a standard formula. By around 40 days, infants consumed significantly more of the
dilute formula and significantly less of the dense formula, bringing adjustment for the manipulation
to an almost perfect match with intake of the standard formula.
Both this study and that conducted by Davis illustrate the capacity of infants to learn
through repeated exposure to foods. Therefore, rather than a hard-wired mechanism for regulation,
evidence from Fomon and Davis highlight the importance of associative conditioning.
In a case study of one infant’s ability to self-regulate energy intake, Adair (1984) monitored
the ad libitum intake of formula by an infant from one week to nine months of age, and in particular
recorded the infant’s response to supplemental feeding in terms of adjustments in formula volume.
The child’s growth followed predicted rates and the infant altered intake of formula accurately
according to the caloric density of the solid foods. Interestingly, as with the study by Fomon
(1974), intake adjustment took a few days and was not immediate, again suggesting the role of
learning in self-regulation.
However, an example of a relatively pre-wired mechanism of food acceptance can be taken
from work showing liking for the sweet taste in newborns. Steiner (1977) filmed the responses of
day old infants, with no prior experience of feeding, to the application of sweet, bitter, salty and
sour solutions to the tongue. The facial expressions of the infants indicated positive hedonic
responses (such as smiling, licking, lapping) to the sweet taste and negative responses (e.g.
grimacing, spitting, ejecting the fluids) to sour and bitter tastes. It has been argued by Rozin (1982)
that the presence of clearly defined likes and dislikes at birth is adaptive since sweet generally
signals a safe source of carbohydrate, whereas sour and bitter tastes may signal danger. In studies
of acceptance, infants preferentially consumed sugar solutions to water (Desor et al., 1973) and
even to formula (Desor et al., 1977).
Children learn to prefer flavours associated with foods containing a higher energy density
compared to flavours associated with foods of a lower energy density (Birch et al., 1990; Johnson
et al., 1991). In studies of conditioned flavour preferences, distinctive, novel flavours were
repeatedly presented with foods which were calorically dilute using either intense sweeteners
(Birch et al., 1990) or fat substitutes (Johnson et al., 1991). Liking and intake of these flavours
were then compared with flavours which had been paired with foods which contain starch or
dietary fat and are therefore higher in energy density. Since clear preferences for flavours
associated with greater caloric values are observed in children, Birch (1992) has concluded that
high energy density foods produce stronger postingestive satiety responses than low energy density
foods and it is adaptive for the infant to select preferentially flavours associated with stronger rather
than weaker satiety effects.
Thus the infant brings to the eating situation a preference for the sweet taste and an innate
ability to learn the relationship between consuming specific foods and their energy value, both of
which appear to be highly adaptive. These mechanisms contribute to food acceptance patterns
early in the child’s development and can explain, in part, the tendency for children to like foods
which are sweet, high calorie, and high in fat. Clearly these influences occur early in the child’s
development before any input from outside influences including parents, peers and the wider social
context such as the media.
Social influences on food selection.
Bandura’s classic work in the 1960s demonstrated that children’s behaviour could, indeed, be
influenced by observing the actions of others. It was not necessary to reinforce children directly for
their behaviour, as had been previously believed as children’s actions could be altered simply by
observing the rewards or punishments administered to others. Such findings have stimulated a
wealth of research about the effects of social learning on children’s behaviour. In the following
discussion, social learning in the development of food acceptance patterns will be illustrated.
Caregivers are responsible for offering young children culturally appropriate foods during
the weaning stage. Since variety in the diet is essential to meet energy and nutrient requirements it
might be predicted that the transition from milk to solid foods would be smooth and unremarkable.
However, as infants are generally neophobic they are likely to reject foods during their first
exposure to them. Repeated exposure to novel foods with no negative consequences such as nausea
or gastrointestinal upset leads to increased acceptance of initially novel food items (Rozin, 1977).
Thus, mere exposure to foods can enhance liking (Pliner, 1982) and this principle is true across a
variety of activities (Zajonc, 1968).
Exposure to foods can occur along any sensory dimension, and so Birch and her colleagues
tested the relative effectiveness of visual and taste exposure to seven novel fruits in establishing
taste acceptance judgements (Birch et al., 1987). Frequency of exposure to the fruits correlated
with taste preference. However visual experience alone produced increased visual preference, but
did not affect taste preference. Taste experience enhanced taste preference, but just looking at the
novel foods did not increase liking. Reluctance to eat unfamiliar foods can only be overcome by
exposure to the taste of the foods.
Social learning is another method by which children begin to explore unfamiliar foods.
Eating is a very social behaviour, especially for young children and so exposure to novel foods
tends to occur in the presence of others. Social facilitation may influence the development of food
preferences as well as aid in overcoming neophobia.
In a study of the influence of peers on food acceptance patterns, Birch (1980) identified
children with a particular preference for a specific vegetable and then seated the target child in
groups with other children who preferred a different vegetable. Children were exposed to four
consecutive lunches and asked to select a vegetable. The target children demonstrated a significant
shift over time from their preferred vegetable to the vegetable preferred by the group. Thus,
willingness to consume foods can be influenced by peers who model different preferences.
A study conducted by Harper and Sanders (1975) compared willingness to ingest a novel
food under two different social learning conditions. In one condition, the adult simply offered the
food to the child and in the second condition, the adult consumed the food at the same time as
offering the food item. The results of this study suggested that children were more likely to eat the
novel foods if the adult also consumed the food and this was particularly true for younger children
(14 to 20 months).
Birch and her colleagues (1984) further investigated this form of simple social facilitation
by examining the use of rewards in encouraging children to consume novel foods. In this
experiment, children were asked to consume a beverage and then given either no reward, or verbal
praise, or a tangible reward (a ticket to see a children’s film). In the instrumental conditions (where
the reward was contingent upon consumption) a significant decline in ratings of liking the beverage
was found, whereas there was a slight increase in liking in the control condition.
In an investigation of foods used as reinforcers, Birch and her colleagues (1980) found that
when foods were given as a reward for good behaviour, or paired with praise from an adult, an
increase in acceptability of those foods was found. Thus, when consumption of a typically less
liked food is associated with some form of coercion (e.g. eat your broccoli and then you can watch
TV) that food will decline in liking whereas foods which are highly liked and used as rewards for
prosocial behaviour (e.g. tidy your room and you can have some sweets), actually increases liking
for those foods. Birch (1988) has suggested that such changes in liking (a decline or increase) may
be linked to the perceived emotional tone of the social context (persuasion versus reward).
Evidence of cultural wisdom in food choice.
Children’s food acceptance and intake appear to be influenced by innate preferences, associative
conditioning and social learning. Sociocultural influences are also important in shaping children’s
food choices and food intake. Cultural rules regarding what is and what is not appropriate to eat
and when to eat certain foods govern adult eating behaviour, and studies in children indicate that
even by three years of age, children also follow these cultural rules.
Birch et al. (1984) tracked acceptance for foods across the day in adults and children aged
three to four years, as well as the appropriateness of a variety of foods for breakfast compared to
dinner. In this study, children demonstrated significant shifts in liking across the day and were
clearly able to categorise food items according to their appropriateness for either breakfast or
dinner. Thus even at three years of age, children are following cultural rules regarding
appropriateness of foods for particular meals and therefore, young children are clearly able to
recognise and implement culture-specific rules about foods.
Media influences.
Young children’s exposure to foods is principally determined by caregivers (including parents,

other family members, nursery school personnel etc.), siblings, peers and the mass media. Media
represent foods in various ways ranging from people eating and drinking in soaps on television,
through restaurant listings and recipes in magazines, to the advertising of foods (particularly on
television). It is the last of these that provides the focus of this Review.
WHAT IS ADVERTISING?
Questions of definition.
The extent to which advertising is a ubiquitous phenomenon of commercial life in the late twentieth
century is not in doubt. If the researcher attempts to define the nature of advertising then (at least)
two problems arise. These are to do with the scope of advertising and the function of advertising.
Where is the line between advertising and other forms of promotional activity to be drawn? Is it
possible to list a series of functions of advertising, what advertising is designed to do? These two
problems will be looked at in turn.
The scope of advertising.
Branded goods and services are universal in the economic and commercial world. Foods are
presented as brands and the strategies used by advertising agencies encourage this approach to
marketing (Southgate, 1994). It is important to acknowledge at the outset that it is much more
common to encounter foods in their packaged and promoted state than in their ‘raw’ condition.
Consequently advertising exists across a spectrum of activities ranging from the simple existence of
branded goods, and promotional logos through point-of-sale displays to media campaigns involving
television advertising, print advertising, mail shots and so on.
The term ‘hybrid messages’ has been coined to cover those forms of communication where
the messages are commercially funded but the sponsor is not identified (Balasubramanian, 1991).
So-called product placement where the sponsor pays money and the brand appears in important
scenes from a cinema film or television production can be regarded as a type of hybrid message.
The extent to which advertising is admitted or acknowledged is not made explicit within this
spectrum of hybrid messages.
Most studies have examined the role of television commercials when considering
advertising to children which is reasonable given that is where most marketing to children occurs.
It should be pointed out, however, that other forms of promotional activity such as package designs
and displays in shops, supermarkets and stores could have a role to play in food preference and
choice and that this is a relatively unexplored area in the academic literature. In this review we
concentrate on television commercials.
Seiter (1993) discusses a marketing trend that developed in the 1980s where programme
length cartoons were produced with characters such as The Care Bears, My Little Pony, and
Strawberry Shortcake. These characters were developed specifically for marketing purposes - to tie
in with products based on these characters and available in shops. This is another example of how
advertising cannot be corralled in one place but is part of a network of marketing activities directed
at children. Another issue of concern is called ‘host selling’ where the same characters in
commercials are featured in the adjacent programme content. Although host-selling has been
banned since 1974 in the USA, there is a trend toward “product-related programs that feature well-
known characters who are seen frequently in commercials as well as program content” (Kunkel,
1988; p.73).
Function of advertising.
The second problem of definition is concerned with the function of advertising. The end function
of advertising, what advertisers are being paid to do, is to maintain or increase sales of brand X. In
service of this function, there are other functional characteristics of advertising. Advertising is
entertaining in order to hold and maintain attention in a cluttered marketplace. Advertising is
persuasive and uses various forms of visual, verbal, and auditory rhetoric which is designed to
enhance the attractiveness and desirability of the brand. Advertising is informative so that people
will be more knowledgeable when making consumer decisions, although the information provided
will necessarily be advocatory and present only positive information about the brand. This aspect
of advertising, its advocatory role, has been relatively neglected as an area of study. It is important
to recognise the multi-functional nature of advertising in any discussion of advertising’s role,
influence, or effect.
Advertising in its cultural context.
There are two cultural issues that need examining before we leave the general subject of
advertising. One is to emphasise that advertising is an important aspect of contemporary culture
and that an alternative model of the role of advertising in children’s food choice is one where
advertising is viewed as a cultural resource that feeds into the everyday activities of people,
including children. Looked at this way, advertising is discussed, is joked about, is admired, is
scoffed at for its naivete, and so on. There is a temptation and tendency to take the other view
where advertising is seen as a force or influence that emerges from television. It is a threat to the
sanctity of the home and children can fall prey to its seductive powers, especially if they are not
equipped with ‘cognitive defences’. This vision of the relationship between advertising and
children where the image of the child as innocent is adopted and advertising is seen as the seducer
is a very powerful one and it has been argued by Young (1990) that much of the research in the
field of television advertising and children has been affected by this implicit relationship.
Conceptualising advertising as an effect, an identifiable source of influence that changes an
individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviour is a vision of advertising that needs to be
reconsidered. Advertising is an intrinsic part of cultural life and needs to be examined in this
context. It is somewhat disingenuous to argue that advertising merely reflects cultural changes in
tastes, preferences, and fashions and that advertising follows where others lead. This would place
advertising beyond the cultural pale as all cultural manifestations and institutions are mutually
interactive and synergistic where change in one influences and is influenced by many others. It is
equally limiting, however, to argue that advertising as part of culture moulds, influences and shapes
society and has a privileged and special role to play in this respect.
Much of the research in the area of food advertising and children has been conducted in the
United States and Canada. The second cultural question then arises: are results that are established
in the United States and Canada applicable in the context of the United Kingdom? Do they travel
well? The answer to this question would be that some results are generalisable to the UK while
others are specific to the culture where they were obtained. Questions that are cognitive, that deal
with how children process information in advertising, how they think - answers to these questions
are relevant irrespective of country of origin. Questions that are cultural or social, that deal with
how much food advertising is out there, how children negotiate for brands within the family, what
children of different ages feel about advertising - answers to these questions are culture-specific
and need not apply in other cultural contexts. But in order to identify just where these differences
might lie it is necessary to make a brief excursion into the differences between North American
views of advertising and children and UK views. Discussion of cultural differences must be
speculative and (occasionally) controversial - we make no apology but the following should be read
with that in mind.
Kessen (1979) in an article on the American child argues that our views of children,
domesticity and the family are largely shaped by historical developments. In particular, the 19th
century saw great changes in the patterns of social and economic life in the United States.
Urbanisation and the rise of a economically powerful federation of states led to a separation of
domestic life from economic life. Men went out to work and “the public work of men was seen as
ugly, corrupting, chaotic, sinful...the increasingly private world of women was...sweet, chaste,
calm, cultured, loving, protective, and godly” (p.817). The family was romanticised and childhood
sentimentalised. The tension that is inherent in American society between freedom of speech and a
stern morality, based on Puritanism, that values honesty, directness, and purity and frowns on
rhetoric, circumlocution and decadence should also be considered. Advertising, then, is firmly
located within the economic sphere, in the world of men. Children are to be found at home and are
to be protected from the evils of advertising which is part of that other world. Advertising
embodies the principles of freedom of speech and is a symbol of American values but is also
potentially threatening to the values at the core of American society.
In contrast, although the UK went through a rapid process of industrialisation in the 19th
century, the description of the roles of advertising and children outlined above seem somewhat less
relevant. Advertising has always been less direct, more soft-sell than hard-sell, more in the
tradition of humorous, ironic discourse. Television advertising came in in the 1950s as part of
commercial television broadcasting competing with the well-established and respected traditions of
the BBC. Campaigns have featured characters who have been part of British cultural life for many
decades. In this sense television advertising is part of British cultural life and an approach to
advertising which acknowledges this tradition would be more appropriate.
In the review of the literature, because of the dominance of North American studies, if the
country where the study was carried out is not mentioned then the reader should assume it is the
United States or Canada. In all other cases the country is cited.
ADVERTISING LITERACY: HOW CHIREN DEVELOP AN UNDERSTANDING OF

ADVERTISING.
The term advertising literacy was first coined by Young (1986) to refer to the child’s developing
abilities to understand and process the information in advertising, from early childhood to
adolescence. The analogy was drawn with television literacy which was a popular term at the time
(Dorr, Graves, and Phelps; 1980) and has appeared in the practitioner literature (Appleton, 1992;
Rabinowitz, 1994). In this section we shall review, in general terms, the major findings from this
area which will give a picture of relevant features of child development in this area. The research
referred to has been selected from a larger body of work which has been comprehensively reviewed
elsewhere (c.f. Adler et al., 1980; Young, 1990). A critique of work in this area is also presented.
Attention to television commercials.
There are three main strands to research on attention to television commercials. One is the
development of schemata - mental structures used to anticipate events based on past experience.
Young children have not yet developed a mature and complex organisation of schemata. They will
be more stimulus-driven than schema-driven when watching TV. They are influenced by what’s on
right now and their attention to the commercial is largely dependent on the properties of the visual
and auditory image, rather than any system of mental organisation based on past experience with
television advertising. It is known, from the experimental literature on children watching
television, that there is a general drift, with increasing age, from stimulus-driven attention to
schema-driven attention (Hudson, 1982; Anderson and Lorch, 1983). The second strand is the
development of attentional control. The older child is able to use strategies of attention such as
attending to relevant parts of the commercial or sampling sections of a commercial so that
television viewing is integrated into other attractive or important tasks such as doing homework or
talking to friends. The younger child is less able to exert such control and is more under the sway
of the stimulus properties of the ad itself. Finally, the phenomenon of attentional inertia should be
described (Anderson et al., 1979; Krull and Husson, 1980). Attentional inertia means that the
longer a viewer continuously maintains looking at television the more likely it is that he or she will
continue to do so. Conversely, the longer it has been since the viewer last looked at television, the
less probable it is that he or she will look back. Attentional inertia is relatively independent of
content and can be observed in children as young as twelve months through to adulthood. It would
seem to build up as an influence over 15 seconds when it remains as a steady effect. It can be
broken of course or else we would never start or stop watching and it can be overridden by
stimulus-driven and schema-driven information that is inherent in the content or features of what is
seen or what is expected. As more complex and powerful schemata develop as the child grows
older, attentional inertia becomes less important as a source of influence. Children can then expect,
predict and sample the parts of the television programme they want to rather than relying on the
rather crude, content-free process of attentional inertia. For younger children, however, attentional
inertia is a useful maintenance process that carries them over the parts of the programme that are
uninteresting or incomprehensible when stimuli or schema do not drive attention to the screen.
The attention a child gives to any particular television commercial is not just a function of
the stage of development of the child and consequently subject to the processes described above but
is also dependent on the content of the commercial itself and the context within which that
commercial is found. The context encompasses the influence of neighbouring commercials and
programmes as well as the context of viewing or so-called ‘viewing ecology’. There is practically
no published research that systematically explores these sources of influence on attention, although
the available literature does produce general findings that can be described using the three
developmental sequences discussed. More studies on viewing in natural settings would be useful.
Distinguishing television commercials from programmes.
The child’s ability to distinguish a television commercial from an adjacent programme is an area of
research that has a small associated research literature. It is necessary for children to be able to
distinguish between the two before they can begin to attribute functions to either. Consequently we
would anticipate that any recognition that television commercials are different from other
categories of television discourse is an early achievement and should be established before any of
the norms on the child’s knowledge of advertising intent, for example. Much of the available
literature does not adequately distinguish between recognising that a difference exists between the
two categories of ‘television advertising’ and ‘the rest of television’ and perceiving that they have
different functions. One research project (Jaglom and Gardner, 1981) used a variety of
methodologies on a small number of children and claimed that the two cognitive categories of
‘television advertising’ and ‘the rest of television’ emerged very early in development, about three
years of age. There is no theoretical difficulty in claiming an early emergence for this distinction as
the difference between ads and the rest is carried on very salient perceptual features. Ads are short
and programmes are long. Other research that uses verbal or behavioural indicators requires
children to communicate to the experimenter when they thought they saw a programme or saw a
commercial. Evidence from this kind of research places the beginning of awareness of a distinction
at some age between four and seven years as results are dependent on the methodology used
(Palmer and McDowell, 1979; Butter et al., 1981; Levin, Petros and Petrella, 1982). Stutts and
Hunnicutt (1987) found that children as young as five years of age could correctly identify
disclaimers which accompany television commercials. It would seem to be the case that the basic
conceptual equipment whereby the category of ‘television advertisement’ is conceived of as distinct
and different from other television genres is available in the pre-school period although the
distinction is carried in the first instance on salient perceptual features that distinguish ads from
programmes.
Understanding the intent behind advertising.
Early work on children understanding the intent behind advertising had established that there was
an important cognitive change in middle childhood (Ward, Reale and Levinson, 1972; Ward and
Wackman, 1973). If children were asked about the difference between television commercials and
programmes, most children in the age group five to eight years would refer to salient perceptual
characteristics of difference such as a programme being long and a commercial being short. The
majority of older children, aged nine to twelve years, would use a functional distinction that exists
between commercials and programmes, such as commercials being about selling things and
programmes being about telling stories. Using an interview methodology, a complete
understanding of advertising’s intent takes some time to emerge and one study (Ward, Reale, and
Levinson; 1972) gave evidence that only a quarter of 11- to 12-year-olds were able to provide an
explanation of why commercials were shown on TV that demonstrated an understanding of selling
and profit motives. It would appear that knowledge of the economic and commercial function of
television advertising is built upon a basic ability to infer functional characteristics of advertising as
opposed to just being able to perceive and conceive of advertising in terms of perceptually salient
features. This developmental change from a set of inference procedures based on perceptually
available features to deeper inferences based on conceptually based characteristics of the world is a
well-known structural change in the child’s mental world. By the end of the 1970s a consensus had
emerged in the literature that the child’s understanding of the purpose and intent of advertising
emerged at some stage in middle childhood, although the norms of emergence differed greatly
depending on the nature of the questions asked. Non-verbal techniques that bypass verbal
expression were being used more frequently in the research published in the early 1980s and the
norms of emergence were placed somewhat earlier than middle childhood. Some children as young
as four or five years seemed to understand the intent of television advertising by choosing correct
pictures or performing appropriate actions (Gaines and Esserman, 1981).
There is evidence (Blosser and Roberts, 1985) that understanding that television
commercials are ‘to do with’ buying and selling things precedes any understanding that persuasion
is intrinsic to advertising. The former should be kept theoretically distinct from the latter in any
account of the development of advertising literacy. Knowing that advertising is to do with buying
and selling, that it is a genre firmly located in the context of the exchange of goods and services,
and that it is the communicative arm of commerce and industry are all to do with learning about the
arrangements and organisation of the economic and social world. This knowledge and
understanding should be viewed as a part of economic psychology that is concerned with economic
socialisation. Understanding that ads persuade and advocate constitutes a different skill which is
better placed with a range of other abilities that emerge in middle childhood and develop through to
early adolescence. They cover being able to ‘read between the lines’, being able to recognise that a
literal interpretation of a communication is not the only interpretation, and that classes of
communication differ in their ground rules for production and comprehension depending on
assumptions shared by the individual participants or their culture. In other words there should be a
developmental psychology of rhetoric within which the child’s comprehension of the persuasive
and advocatory function of advertising is found.
Models of child development.
Much of the general work done on the effects of advertising on children utilise a stage
developmental model of child development based loosely on the theories and findings of Jean
Piaget. The central feature of this approach is that children progress through stages during which
different psychological structures are available to them. These psychological structures are created
through the interaction of biological and experiential components (Piaget, 1952). Thus, research on
the impact of advertising on children’s behaviour focussed on the developmental progression across
time of children’s understanding of the content and purpose of advertising, revealing age-specific
behaviours related to advertising. However, criticisms of a Piagetian approach to the relationship
between the child and the external world, as well as the prominence of theory of mind research, has
lead to a move away from a dependence on fixed stages in the child’s development. There are
many strands in research on child development that can inform a theory of how children understand
advertising.
Macklin (1983) has suggested that results from research on the comprehension of
commercials by children depends on the theoretical model used by the investigator. When a stage
theory has driven the investigation, this sets limitations on the expectation of performance by the
children, and thus prevents estimation of true abilities (see Gelman, 1978 for a review). For
example, the notion of centration, which is a characteristic of children within the age range two to
seven years to take account of only one feature of an object, might preclude young children
understanding and acting on the content and intention of advertising.
It is suggested that recent findings in developmental psychology should be drawn upon
when considering the effects or influence of advertising on children. These could include:
Understanding of pictorial representation.
Children have to understand that a picture, word, gesture, toy, or other entities stand for other
things. In other words they need to have mastered representational skills. In the case of television
advertising, they need to understand that the pictures stand for reality. Flavell et al. (1990) have
shown that three-year-olds have difficulty with this relation. For example, children were shown a
child holding an inflated balloon on a television and were asked “If I take the top off the TV and
then I shake it, would a real balloon come floating out into the room?” Most three-year-olds said
yes (though training can reduce this trend). Flavell et al. interpreted their findings as showing that
three-year-olds understand that televised objects and events are not real, but they tend to encode
them as real because their real-world referents are usually extremely salient.
Theory of mind.
One argument for advertising is that it provides additional information, allowing individuals greater
scope for evaluating goods and services. To accomplish that end, viewers need to understand that
other people can represent the world differently from them. If an actor says that an object is
desirable, viewers need to understand that other people, themselves included, may have a different
opinion. The recent upsurge of research on children’s theory of mind (i.e. children’s natural
theories about the minds of other people) indicates that children do not acquire this skill until four
years of age (e.g. Flavell et al., 1990). Prior to this age, they believe that others see the world from
their own (i.e. the child’s) perspective, and vice versa. Subsequently, it is not until four or five
years of age that children understand that different information leads to different representations.
For this reason, children have difficulty with the concept of deception. Deception is a
possible component of advertising. If children cannot represent states of affairs in multiple ways,
they do not have the capacity to understand deception.
Children also shift from viewing the mind as passive to viewing it as active, as capable of
interpreting and evaluating information. For instance, it is during the primary years that children
change from viewing emotions as determined by external events without mediation by internal
states, to viewing emotional reactions to an event as influenced by a prior emotional state or
experience (Gnepp, 1989; Harris and Olthof, 1982). With regard to advertising, they would need to
understand this to realise that while a particular item may not appeal to them, it may appeal to
others.
Understanding others’ intentions.
Understanding the intention of others is crucial when making sense of human behaviour as
intention motivates behaviour. To understand the purpose of advertising, children must be able to
understand this relation and to determine another’s specific intentions.
Literature on children’s understanding of intention grew from the study of moral reasoning.
Children were asked, for example, which of two children had been naughty. Was it the one who
intended to break a cup but did not, or the one who had accidentally broken a cup? It is not until
age nine or 10 years that children can differentiate correctly between these situations. Researchers
have concluded that children have to be this age before they become aware of intentions. More
recently, children’s understanding of intention has been studied more directly, rather than inferred
from moral judgements. A different pattern is appearing. Shultz (1980) and Astington (1991) have
shown that three-year-olds can distinguish between intended and unintended actions, such as
purposely or accidentally tripping someone. However, they have difficulty when the desire and
outcome are mismatched (i.e., someone desires to trip another, but it happens by accident before
they can enact the action). Children gain this more complex conception of intention at the age of
four or five years. By the primary years, they fully understand that intention is a mental state,
separate from, though related to, the outcome of actions.
Metacognition.
As children get older, they acquire the skills of metacognition or the ability to think about their own
thinking. In the case of advertising, this would enable them to consider why they desire a particular
food or why a particular advertisement is effective in creating such a desire. Metacognitive skills
are acquired at different ages for different domains (e.g., persons, tasks, and strategies). The
increase in this ability is often explained by an increasing ability to interrelate pieces of
information. Indeed, within Piagetian theory, increasing metacognitive skills have been used to
account for children moving to new stages.
Behaviour modelling.
With regard to food advertising, it is likely that children may model the behaviours they observe,
reinforced (negatively or positively) by the actions and preferences of their peers. Certainly
evidence from Leann Birch suggests that modelling is highly influential for overcoming neophobia
and can influence children’s food choices. In particular, children are more likely to consume a food
when they see an adult eating it (see Ray and Klesges, 1993 for a review).
That concludes the first part of this Review where the issue of advertising food to children and its
influence on food choice is put in context. We have made several points which are summarised in
the next section.
SUMMARY OF PART 1.
A variety of factors influence the development of human eating patterns. Physiological factors can
override outside influences to initiate eating behaviour. The task of the young infant is to shift
from a reliance on the single source of milk to a more complex, culturally appropriate food
repertoire. The infant displays evidence for nutritional ‘wisdom’ and can adjust intake to match
nutritional needs. Associative conditioning is important in the control of food intake. For example,
children seem to have an innate tendency to learn about the consequences of eating particular foods
and to associate sensory cues with positive postingestive effects. There is also evidence that
preference for sweet foods is innate. Early in the child’s life, before any cultural influence from
family or the media play a part, the infant brings to the eating situation a preference for the sweet
taste and an innate ability to learn the relationship between consuming particular foods and their
energy value. When the child does move from milk to various other foods, the mother or caretaker
can introduce the child to new foods and simple exposure to the taste of these foods is an effective
mechanism for enhancing liking of these foods. Social learning where peers express particular
preferences also help the child experience new foods and sample a varied range of foods. There is
evidence for ‘cultural wisdom’ in food choice, i.e. exhibiting culturally appropriate food behaviour.
For example, children as young as three years of age are capable of following cultural rules such as
the appropriateness of different foods for different meals such as breakfast and dinner.
We considered media influences and in particular children’s understanding of advertising.
Advertising covers a wide range of promotional activity and, while much of the research has
examined the role of television spot advertising, other forms have not received similar attention.
Whereas the persuasive and possibly deceptive nature of advertising has been much studied, there
is a lack of research on the effect of other functions of advertising such as its advocatory function
where only positive information about brands is presented.
The child can distinguish between television commercials and the adjacent programme at
some age between four and seven years. In general children understand the economic and
commercial function of advertising before they understand advertising’s persuasive and rhetorical
function and an understanding of both of these usually emerges in middle childhood. There are
various current research themes in developmental psychology that could and should inform
discussion of advertising’s influence on children. These include: the models of child development
that are used; the child’s understanding of pictorial representation; children’s understanding of the
motives, beliefs, and intentions of others; mental representations of stories; and the ability to think
about one’s own thinking.
PART 2
ROLE OF ADVERTISING
IN CHILDREN’S FOOD CHOICE.
Introduction.
In the following sections a more detailed review of the literature on the role of advertising in
children’s food related behaviour will be presented. Each section is structured as follows: a review
of the literature, an analysis of the research for future studies, and recommendations. After a
description of each study, an evaluation in terms of research adequacy is made. This includes
sampling and statistical considerations as well as a critical examination of the methodology used.
The main conclusions of the study, together with an assessment of their validity, are presented.
The following analysis extends this and attempts to draw together the studies and their conclusions.
Finally, in the recommendations future research that could be done in this area is outlined.
WHAT’S ON? - THE FREQUENCY AND CONTENT OF TV FOOD ADVERTISEMENTS.
Background.
In this section we shall examine the research that has been done on the frequency and content of
television advertising of food products to children. Many articles looking at the general issue of
advertising to children will cite the oft-quoted statistic taken from Adler et al. (1980) that the
average American child is exposed to over 20,000 television commercials a year. It is important to
pause and look at the assumptions in this statement. Firstly that 20,000 is in some way too much
and the very size of this figure suggests that advertising must be having some effect. Secondly that
the child is a passive recipient subject to a treatment where commercials flow in a unending stream
from the television set. Both of these assumptions can be criticised. 20,000 events is not a small or
large number per se and it can only be small or large relative to some other set of events. Set
against the number of health promotion messages available to the child it is certainly large and in
this case the point is made and should be taken. In terms of the degree of influence, however, on
the individual psychology of the child then the figure should be compared with other events in the
life of the child such as the number of conversations the child has, the number of social interactions
with parents and peers, or the number of goods and services seen in a commercial environment in
the 1990s. In the absence of data on the frequency of these other events, we cannot evaluate the
relative size of 20,000. Good sense would suggest that, in this context, 20,000 is not so great. The
second point is that much current research in the psychology of advertising (Buckingham, 1993;
Willis, 1990) and television viewing (Livingstone, 1990) adopts a model where the literate viewer
samples information from the advertisement or television programme depending on how much
information is needed to maintain understanding and constructs meaning as an active participant in
the viewing process. These processes can occur in the midst of other activities such as talking,
reading, or eating. Given an active, participatory model of viewing much of the power of large
numbers is lost. Thirty seconds of advertising time is in no way an index of thirty seconds of input
or influence.
Review of research studies.
The first research in this area was conducted by Barcus (1971a,b) and Cuozzo (1971) in the United
States. Cuozzo’s research consisted of an unpublished MA thesis cited by Winick, Williamson,
Chuzmir and Winick who claimed (1973; chapter 2; footnote 18) that Cuozzo had found that 99 per
cent of televised food commercials in the USA emphasised “sensory pleasure”, that about one third
of those commercials were addressed to children and that sugar was the food promoted in 25 per
cent of the cases, and that snacks made up the content of nearly half the messages. Winick et al.
were unable to obtain a copy of this thesis and had to rely on the information in the abstract.
Choate (1972) reiterated the original findings of Cuozzo stressing that the content of television
advertising of food products to children provides a menu that no nutritionist would recommend. He
stated (Choate, op. cit.; p.146) that children’s programmes in the United States were interrupted on
average twenty times per hour for advertisements. Half of these ads were for edible products and
nine out of ten of these ads for edible products promoted these products on the basis of their
sugared, sweetened or “crisped” (i.e. fried) qualities. Choate’s methodology was to sample
advertising in children’s programmes during one week in April 1971 - given the reservations we
have with representativeness (discussed later in this section), of sampling television commercials it
must be concluded that Choate’s study is wanting in this regard.
Gussow (1972, 1973) monitored 388 networked television commercials on children’s
television in the United States and found that 82 per cent were for ingestible items like food, drink,
candy (sweets), gum (chewing gum) or vitamin pills. Her sampling strategy was similar to that of
Choate, to monitor advertising during “children’s television” on US broadcast television for one
week (identified as January 1972 in Gussow, 1972) and similar criticisms apply. She reckoned that
these figures erred on the side of being an underestimate as they omitted local spot announcements
which were heavily weighted toward food. Out of these commercials, almost 40 per cent were for
cereals.
Winick et al. (op. cit.) produced the first book-length study on the content of children’s
television commercials in the USA. The foreword to the study by Paul Lazarsfeld, an eminent
media communications researcher and writer, praises the rigour of the work and the research was
supported by the National Association of Broadcasters in the United States. The approach is
scholarly and we have no problems with the academic credentials of this report in book form.
Unlike previous studies, the frequency of television commercials was not recorded directly off the
air. Instead, the authors wrote to advertising agencies in order to collect copies of commercials of
products directed to children, excluding toys. A total of 236 commercials were included for study
this way. Out of these only 15 were classified as miscellaneous. The remainder were for food or
food-related products/services (such as restaurants and vitamins) (op. cit.; Table 4.l). The
instrument used to code the content of commercials was extremely comprehensive. A hundred and
forty five dimensions were used and each dimension was rated on a four-point scale
(none/some/much/very much). For example, under the heading SALES PERSUASION
TECHNIQUES there is a coding dimension called Fun Food/Fun Notion. This is defined as
referring “... to a copy reference specifically associating the product with fun, joy, happiness, or
pleasure. Also refers to an audio or video representation of fun, joy, happiness or pleasure that
stems from the use of the product. A general fun context would not in itself be sufficient for
coding”. (Winick op. cit.; Appendix A). A coder would then rate a commercial on this dimension
using a number from one to four depending how intensely that dimension was used in the coder’s
opinion. The reliability of coders was acceptable by social science standards, a correlation of 0.9
being quoted. When the commercials for food products to children were studied, it was found that
81 per cent of the products made no reference to sweetness. This statistic should be interpreted
with caution however as there are certain products (like sweets) which are inherently likely to be
sweet and no specific reference to sweetness is made in the commercial because there is no need to.
Reference to sweetness would provide no new information. Reference to physical or oral
characteristics, such as crunchiness or smoothness, are found in about one-third of the commercials.
The lack of such reference in the majority of commercials is explained by the authors as a
consequence of the well-known market research finding that children up to preadolescence tend to
reject products that have ‘bits’ in them, coconut and nut chocolate bars for example. 85 per cent of
the commercials established no relationship between good eating habits and health. 60 per cent of
the commercials emphasised taste and flavour as a selling point of the product. 43 per cent
associated the product with fun, joy, happiness or pleasure. 45 per cent of the messages employed
what the authors call a comparative claim. A comparative claim occurs when any comparison, not
necessarily competitive, is made. For example, the claim that “chocolate melts in your mouth, not
in your hand” is comparative as is “no other chocolate tastes quite like it”. 19 per cent of
commercials made claims of superiority where there is audio or video representation of the
superiority of the product or attribute over anything else (e.g. use of the word “best”). 44 per cent
of commercials used cartoon or fantasy characters as spokespersons and in 56 per cent of the
commercials cartoon or fantasy characters appeared. 61 per cent of commercials employed fantasy
and 59 per cent of commercials employed humour. Animation was employed in 46 per cent of the
commercials but the use of this technique varied depending on the product. 91 per cent of crunchy
snacks employed animation “very much”, for example. The language of commercials for children
is interesting as only four per cent of commercials used language which was classified as ‘coaxing
or prodding language’, where such language is defined as “of an imploring, teasing or persistently
provoking nature”. Winick et al. suggested that the language of commercials is similar to the
language of fairy tales, and this would appear to hold for many child-directed ads both in terms of
language and of setting. The results cited above suggest that about half of the ads directed at
children involved an unreal context in the sense the product is situated in a cartoon format or
associated with cartoon and fantasy characters. Winick et al. attempted to make sense of the vast
matrix of data, on 236 observations (commercials) of 143 variables (content dimensions), by using
the technique of factor analysis. This method would enable the analyst to obtain an indication of
which variables ‘went with’ other variables. A first factor that could be called
‘animated/cartoon/fantasy’ was extracted. Variables such as the presence of animation as a
technique, the presence of fantasy, the use of animals with added human qualities loaded highly on
this factor. Interestingly, ‘sweetness’ is a variable that loads significantly on this factor suggesting
that those ads that emphasise sweetness tend to use animation and fantasy as techniques.
Winick et al.’s study is extremely comprehensive but the data produced is somewhat
indigestible apart from the fantasy/animated cartoon findings and the few others cited above. Can
it be considered as providing an extensive data base on the content of advertising to children in the
United States at that time? The major limitation is the sampling procedure which was not “off-the-
air” but rather taken from the portfolio of accounts held by various advertising agencies. In this
case sampling adequacy depends on the extent to which each agency provides a complete range and
the extent to which all agencies were contacted and the response rate and this will limit the validity
of the analysis with respect to the child’s viewing pattern. Winick (p.10) contacted all 66
advertising agencies that were known to represent companies selling or making products directed to
children (excluding toys) and obtained the 236 commercials from 42 of them. For a content
analysis however, it is only necessary to obtain a wide and representative sample of what is shown.
If, for example, it is established that about half of these commercials use animation in a fantasy
context and that this figure is much greater if the product is ‘crunchy snacks’ then that is a useful
statement about the pool of commercials that will be or are being targeted at children. What
children see, on the other hand, is a question that raises a different set of criteria that have to be
considered and satisfied such as representativeness of the sample in terms of time of day, day of
week, and season of the year. Winick’s study is a useful indication of the content of television
advertising directed at children at a particular time (1971) and place (the United States) and as such
can provide a baseline against which other analyses in other places or at other times are compared.
Of all the studies examined on the content of television advertising, this provides the most
sophisticated procedures.
Atkin and Heald (1977) monitored all Saturday morning advertising that was broadcast on
all three of the United States networks on a pair of comparable days in November 1972 and
November 1973. Saturday morning had been viewed by broadcasters and advertisers as a time
when the child audience was available and could be entertained and sold to. The expression “kid-
vid ghetto” was coined at that time to describe, in a journalistic phrase, the extent to which
advertisers aimed at children on Saturday mornings. Foods comprised 48 per cent of all ads in
1972 and 32 per cent in 1973, the remainder being mainly toys. About half of these food ads were
for cereals. All statistics were based on the incident of an advertisement as the unit rather than
considering the repetition of a commercial as not contributing to the analysis. So, a version of an
ad that was presented three times was counted three times in the analysis while a single
presentation was tabulated only once. 62 per cent of the food commercials used some animation
either totally animated as a cartoon or mixed with live-action film whereas 99 per cent of the toy
ads used only live-action film. Toy ads also tended to be serious (71 per cent) whereas 92 per cent
of the food ads contained some humour. Food ads almost exclusively promoted the product for its
fun quality, as in for example, fun to eat. 94 per cent were like this whereas the corresponding
figure for toy ads was 43 per cent. Reference to sweetness such as a sugary or sweet taste occurred
in 21 per cent of the food ads sampled. Toy products are almost always illustrated in use (either a
photograph of the real product or a portrayal of it). Food products are almost always shown being
consumed. Food commercials generally show the characters as highly satisfied with the product.
Atkin and Heald’s study is an example of poor sampling. Two days in November on
Saturday mornings does not provide a representative sample of advertising for children. It is well-
known that other times such as after-school hours include much advertising aimed at children and
Young (1985) has established that, in the UK, there are systematic seasonal variations in
advertising to children.
Doolittle and Pepper (1975) selected one Saturday morning in February 1974 and analysed
all network television commercials broadcast then. Sixty separate commercials were logged in 162
separate incidents. It is possible to compute an index that can be called the commercial type-token
ratio (CTTR) which is the number of different commercials (types) divided by the number of
commercial incidents recorded (tokens). The CTTR is a useful metric to estimate the
repetitiveness of commercials over time. The CTTR for Doolittle and Pepper’s study was 0.37 and
a similar study by Barcus and Wolkin (1977) yielded a CTTR of 0.34. Eighty two per cent of these
commercials were analysed using a coding instrument with 28 variables. A statistical analysis
yielded five key variables consisting of: product category; minority group membership; general
perspective of commercials’ presentation (fantasy versus reality); sex (in terms of product use,
dominance of presentation and authority figures); and character presence (whether child, teen, or
adult in a major or minor role). Reliability of coding was calculated as 94 per cent agreement
between raters. The results tend to confirm the earlier findings of Winick et al., thus extending the
validity of Winick’s large-scale research to off-the-air samples.
And yet the results of Doolittle and Pepper must again be criticised on the basis of sampling
inadequacy and the comments we directed at Atkin and Heald are very relevant here.
Barcus is one of the important figures in the small literature dealing with the content of
television advertising to children in the United States. A useful summary of his findings will be
found in Barcus (1980) while prime sources would be parts of Barcus and Wolkin (1977) and
Barcus and McLaughlin (1978). There are earlier studies cited in these later sources. Barcus
sampled both weekend television (Saturdays and Sunday mornings) and television during the after-
school period when the child audience constituted a significant percentage of the viewing audience.
The first study (Barcus, 1971b) sampled television commercials in June of 1971 when it was found
that 20 per cent of programme time on Saturday morning was devoted to commercial material on
average, with some stations using one quarter of the time for such material. By October 1977, the
network affiliated stations had reduced this figure to 14 per cent for children’s television. Barcus
and McLaughlin (op. cit.), recorded 33 hours of children’s programming in Boston, Massachusetts.
Both national and independent networks were sampled on Saturday mornings and weekday early
mornings and afternoons. A total of 495 commercials were broadcast, averaging 19 per cent of
total broadcast time. Food products constituted 58 per cent of all these commercial
announcements. The CTTR ratio was 0.28. This is lower than in previous studies suggesting that
more repetition of the same food commercial occurred than for all commercials. 50 other different
commercials sampled in October 1977 were added and the final data base consisted of 133
television commercials for food products to children. All these commercials were different from
each other and statistics are based on type of commercial as the unit rather than the incident of
advertising as the unit (as contrasted with Atkin and Heald, 1977). The reliability of coding was
established as varying between 80 per cent and 96 per cent agreement between coders. More than
half the food products advertised fell into three categories which were sugared cereals (24 per cent),
candy bars and packaged candies (sweets) (21 per cent) and cakes and cookies (biscuits) (10 per
cent). Many food products were never advertised. These included fruits, fruit juices, vegetables,
meats, bread and dairy products.
Barcus and McLaughlin calculated sugared foods advertised as a percentage of all foods
advertised for all Barcus’ studies. One third of all children’s television advertising is for sugared
food products, food products comprising one half of all television advertising for children. When
these food commercials to children were analysed it was found that some animation was used in 41
per cent of commercials and that 47 per cent of the characters in commercials are engaged in
leisure activities (as opposed to work, daily living, adventure and indeterminable, nonsensical
activities). Most product advertising tries to associate the product with pleasant or valued activities
and foods are no exception. 71 per cent of commercials associated the product with “fun,
happiness” associations, the most frequent categories being “energy or sporting ability” (26 per
cent), “adventure” (21 per cent) and “nature” (20 per cent). Only seven per cent were coded as
using popularity or peer status as a visual association although Barcus and McLaughlin state this
coding was made only where the inference was fairly obvious. Barcus and McLaughlin calculated
that 57 per cent of food commercials employ “fantasy situations, settings or characterizations” (op.
cit.; p.24) and that these were often used as attention-getting devices in the commercials.
Advertisers frequently make a variety of verbal claims about products and their benefits and
assertions were found in 30 per cent of the food ads studied. There are statements in the ad,
however, which refer to some qualities of the product (e.g. ‘tastes great’, ‘is new’) which are often
opinion statements and difficult to verify. These were present in 87 per cent of the ads. The most
common attributed quality was taste or flavour found in 82 per cent of the ads studied, with novelty
second at 11 per cent. Another category of attribution is the physical property of the product
(excluding ingredients). This occurred in 71 per cent of the ads studied. The three most frequent
types of reference were to the “texture” of the product (as in crispy, crunchy, thick, creamy) with
41 per cent; the size, weight, or quantity of the product (“enough to share”, “you get lots”) with 20
per cent and the shape or form (“they’re round”) with 16 per cent.
Barcus and McLaughlin’s study and the Barcus studies in general provide reasonably valid
information on the content of advertising at that time in the United States. If one is interested in the
content of the output of advertising then maintaining a record of different commercials is a valid
procedure. This is what Barcus and McLaughlin did when they took the type of commercial as the
unit rather than the incident of advertising as the unit. If the commercials are recorded off air and
that raw corpus is then analysed then it can be argued that five incidents of the same commercial
give a spuriously high weight (of five) to the events analysed within that commercial whereas if
another commercial only occurs once then the events in that other commercial have unitary
weights. Maintaining an edited record of the corpus where all repetitions are removed avoids this
problem of weighting. If one is concerned with auditing frequency however then a complete record
of ‘what’s showing’ at representative times with (preferably) some record of how many people are
watching must be maintained.
Young (1985; 1987; 1990, pps.217-235) analysed the frequency and content of food
advertising to children in the UK. Television commercials were videotaped from programmes
broadcast in the North West of England over a period of seven weeks in October and November
1983 and selected days from January to March 1984. A complete log of commercials broadcast
over a period of 47 days in 1983 and 1984 was also obtained. Television advertising that was
child-directed was selected on two criteria - the time of broadcasting and the product advertised.
Saturday morning and after-school advertising has an audience that consists predominantly of
children (audience share) although there are more children viewing in absolute terms given
audience ratings at other times such as early evening. In addition the programme content at these
times is child-directed and one would expect to find advertisement directed at children. Young
found that there was a defined Saturday morning market of television commercials for children
where the product was toys. In the period before Christmas toy advertising to children dominated
the screen on Saturday mornings. However, outside the pre-Christmas period there was less toy
advertising, more advertising of foods for children and, importantly, advertising of adult products.
There is evidence from this study that the ‘kid-vid ghetto’ does not exist to the same extent in the
UK as it was claimed in the USA in the 1970s. Young found that one third of his sample of
television commercials for children were for food products and one third of those food products
advertised for children were foods containing more than ten per cent sugar. No other food
constituent was examined in this study.
A study by Condry et al. (1988) looked at the non-programme content of children’s
television broadcast on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons in the USA. The result that is
relevant for this Report is that there was a drop in the percentage of commercials that advertised
food products over a period of three years (1983 to 1987) and an increase in advertising for toys
and games. Condry’s study sampled television at different times of the year and on different days
and his study should be regarded as sound in this respect. In contrast, Cotugna (1988) randomly
selected three hours on a Saturday in January 1987 in the USA and taped commercials from all
three broadcast channels (ABC, CBS, NBC). She found that 71 per cent of the 225 commercials
recorded were for food products and she judged 80 per cent of these to be “...of low nutritional
value” (op. cit., p.125). The results have to be questioned on the basis of lack of representativeness
in the sampling.
Analysis of research findings.
The major criticism that can be directed at the studies described above is the lack of standardised
procedures used to gather, count, and analyse the evidence. Consequently, it is difficult to establish
comparisons between the studies of, for example, Condry (op. cit.) who adopted a random sampling
strategy with a frame that took into account both seasonal and weekly variations in advertising and
Cotugna (op. cit..) or Doolittle and Pepper (op. cit.) who both selected one day. Promotional
activity of any sort is strategic with short-, medium-, and long-term considerations. Constant
‘maintenance’ advertising is only one strategy, others being for example controlled bursts of
marketing expenditure, and any sampling strategy must take that into account. Further criticism
should be directed at those studies where the content as well as the frequency of advertising is
examined and where some model of interpretation of the rhetoric of advertising is utilised (e.g.
Winick, op. cit.). Again there is no generally acceptable model for analysing advertising and
researchers have tended either to construct their own (e.g. Young, 1990) or rely, like Winick, on
raters using coded categories. Consequently, in the absence of a standard procedure, comparative
analyses are fraught with problems. The question of what it means to talk about television
advertising for children needs to be addressed by researchers and a consistent set of criteria
adopted. We would suggest that the following should be taken into account: the brand advertised is
either purchasable by children (within pocket money prices) or is a brand that children are
interested in and would negotiate within the family to purchase, even if the advertising could not be
said to be directed only at children, and the content of the commercial is child-directed (uses, for
example, other children as endorsers or employs a style that children like with simple jingles and
fast pacing). As there are fuzzy edges to this area, more than one individual should judge what are
or are not
insert table 1 here
advertisements to children and reliability measures published. The sampling frame should be
designed to best find these commercials and previous research has identified the demographically
purer times of after-school commercial television and Saturday mornings as suitable places to
search. In addition, the sampling frame should accommodate possible seasonal and weekly
variations in frequency.
A summary of the findings reported in this section can be found in Table 1.
Recommendations for future research.
It is important to establish and maintain a distinction between auditing the frequency of television
food advertising and the analysis of its content. The research questions will differ in the two
approaches. A record of frequency presumes a research issue focussed on the distribution and
availability of different kinds of advertising. How much advertising of foods is there as compared
with toy advertising? Methodological questions on, for example, sampling adequacy will be
different in the two approaches (as discussed above). An analysis of content is concerned with the
forms and types of rhetorical devices used in promoting goods and services. For example, although
many of the studies described in the review have sampling problems, a general conclusion reached
by many of them is that, in the United States at particular times, much food advertising to children
used animation and fantasy scenarios.
A reliable and consistent set of procedures for tracking the frequency and content of
television advertising of food products to children in the UK is recommended. This should cover
both frequency records on the brand and product category as well as analysis of the content of the
commercial. The former is available as commercial information coordinated by the Broadcasters’
Audience Research Board (BARB). A research project that provided sound information on the
frequency of television advertising of food products seen by children, taking into account seasonal
variations, and that analysed and presented the content of such advertising using an established
model of analysis should be high priority. A research programme on these lines would be a viable
proposition as much of the work is coding and entering data which can be easily costed and
procedurally defined. Having such information available would facilitate discussion of the role of
food advertising in the UK as there would be ‘data on the table’. The programme could be
extended into the future in order to record any changes over time. The programme could be located
in the framework of other information on food that children and families are exposed to -
information in magazines, on television food programmes and morning ‘magazine shows’.
PURCHASE REQUESTS RESULTING FROM TV FOOD ADVERTISING.
Purchase request behaviour, or to use the more emotive journalistic expression ‘pester power’ has
been investigated by several researchers. As children have limited economic power to consume
goods and services, they will negotiate their wants and needs within the family. Often this takes
the form of making requests to the mother. Methodology usually involves either asking people
about purchase requests by their children (questionnaires, interviews) or direct observation (in
supermarkets for example). These two will be looked at in turn.
Questionnaire and interview studies.
Ward and Wackman (1973), using a detailed questionnaire on 132 mothers of children aged from
five to 12 years of age, concluded that mothers had a greater tendency to yield to the requests of
older children than to those of younger children. Mothers who spent more time watching television
and those who had a positive attitude towards commercials yielded more often to children’s
attempts to influence purchasing. Mothers saw commercials for food products relevant to children
as having the strongest influence on children and mothers were most likely to yield to requests for
such products. Ward, Popper and Wackman (1977) interviewed and administered questionnaires to
615 mother-child pairs on purchase-request behaviour as part of a larger study on consumer
behaviour in children (Ward, Wackman and Wartella; 1975, 1977). They conclude that “the data
consistently show that television advertising as a perceived influence on children’s requests has
little impact on mothers’ responses” (Ward, Popper and Wackman, op. cit.; p.57). Ward and his
associates have extended this methodology cross-culturally, including the UK (Ward, Robertson,
Klees, Takarada, and Young, 1984; Robertson, Ward, Gatignon, and Klees, 1989) and discovered
that parent-child conflict is highly associated with the number of purchase requests.
If we examine the methodology of the Ward studies together, as they are all of a type, the
major criticism can be directed at the questionnaire/interview technique of obtaining results. There
is an obvious trade-off here between sample size and method - to obtain results from 615 mother-
child pairs for example, one has to use standardised methods that produce codable categories of
response. Nevertheless, questionnaire and diary studies (where mothers keep records on their
child’s behaviour over a period of time) have problems with their methodology. Self-report
techniques, where people answer questions about themselves, can produce results that are an
artefact of the technique itself rather than reflecting what actually happened or what one really
thought. For example, if one asks questions about child-rearing practices and yielding to purchase
requests a mother who views herself as strict and consistent in the upbringing of her child will
probably see herself as ‘strong’ and unyielding when it comes to giving in to the child’s requests
for sweets. The actual state of affairs may be quite different. In other words, a spurious
consistency of responses over several questions emerges and the real inconsistency and
contradictory behaviour of everyday life is hidden. If the statistical techniques involve
correlational analysis then apparent correlations will emerge because of this generated consistency.
If, on the other hand, the result is cited as one where no relationship is found then, given this
argument, one would be inclined to take this finding as valid. Given the sample size of Ward,
Popper, and Wackman (1977) and the lack of a relationship it is likely that their statement that “the
data consistently show that television advertising as a perceived influence on children’s requests
has little impact on mothers’ responses” is valid.
Donkin, Tilston, Neale, and Gregson (1992) and Donkin, Neale, and Tilston (1993) reported
on a survey conducted with 507 parents or guardians of seven- to 11-year-old children in Central
England. Demographic information and information on money spent on food was obtained as was
the child’s food consumption pattern, details of purchase requests by the child “over the previous
month”, child’s pocket money and “the propensity of the household shopper to buy advertised
foods in general” (p.7). In addition a log of foods advertised on television in that region was
available from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB) so it was possible to look at
the relationship between purchase requests for brands and the amount of advertising devoted to
them. A healthy eating profile was defined as the degree to which a child had “greater or lesser
consumption of certain food and drink products in line with what is deemed to be good nutritional
practice given the current state of the national diet” (p.8). Using a multivariate analysis, the authors
claimed that income was the most important influence on this profile followed by television
viewing habits, then the number of times the family sat down to eat together in a week. They also
state that 39 per cent of the products requested by the children had been advertised in the six-month
period prior to the survey and that “in some cases” the frequency of requests for types of products
was significantly related to the intensity of the advertising campaigns. Finally, a small but
significant positive correlation was found between television viewing by the child and number of
requests for advertised products although Donkin et al. point out that the high number of requests
for fruit and vegetables does not reflect the influence of television advertising.
The methodology used by Donkin et al. where a large sample of parents complete a
questionnaire that asks them, amongst other questions, to recall purchase requests last month from
memory is suspect to the extent that memory for events over a month cannot be estimated
accurately. There is no information from the papers on the methods used to assess television
viewing by children. The correlations cited in Donkin et al. (1993) (R = 0.029) and level of
significance quoted (p > 0.001) for the relation between television viewing and purchase requests
(p.7) cannot be correct but, assuming a misprint where R = 0.29 and p < 0.001, then only eight per
cent of the variance is accounted for by this relationship. The fact that “39 per cent of the products
requested by the children had been advertised in the six-month period prior to the survey” (p.7)
tells us little about the relationship between advertising and purchase requests by children as, apart
from the fact that there is no independent assessment of the extent to which children saw or
remembered food advertising, no causality can be inferred from this observation. The results from
Donkin’s study as reported in published papers are limited by the methodology used and tell us
little about the role of advertising in children’s purchase request behaviour.
Taras, Sallis, Patterson, Nader, and Nelson (1989) interviewed 66 mothers in the USA about
one child in their family. The ages of that child sampled ranged from three to eight years. Mothers
reported on hours of television viewed by child and (of interest here) “...each mother listed only
those foods her child asked her to buy in the preceding six months which she felt were requested
because of TV’s influence” (op. cit.; p.177). They concluded that “foods that children requested
because they had seen them on TV paralleled the frequencies with which these foods were
advertised on TV” (op. cit.; p.176). The same criticism that was leveled at Donkin’s work can be
used with Taras - the relationship between requests and frequency of advertising leaves out the
variable of exposure of advertising to the child and causality cannot be established. The
methodology used here is particularly weak because of its circular argument and the absence of a
clear distinction between independent and dependent variables.
Wiman (1983) interviewed 222 children aged between eight and nine years and their
parents in order to establish how different forms of parental influence within the family affected
children’s responses to television advertising. He found that children whose parents see themselves
as strictly controlling their child’s viewing behaviour have more negative attitudes toward
television advertising. Such children tend to come from a higher socioeconomic level and have
better educated parents. They make fewer purchase requests to their parents and understand the
purpose and nature of advertising better. Children who talk frequently with their parents about
television advertising tend to make more purchase requests. Wiman’s methodology, with a large
sample and face-to-face interviews, is sound and the results obtained are, in our opinion, valid at
least for the United States at that time. That is: parental control over viewing is related to the
child’s attitudes toward television advertising; children whose parents control viewing tend to make
fewer parental purchase requests and have a better understanding of the intent of advertising;
talking with parents about television advertising is related to purchase requests by the child.
Sheikh and Moleski (1977) interviewed 144 children consisting of three groups of six- to
seven-year-olds, eight- to nine-year-olds and 10- to 11-year-olds respectively. They presented each
child with a story which had the basic structure of a child watching a favourite television
programme at home that was interrupted frequently by ads for child-related products, including a
food product. Children were questioned at the end on whether they would expect the child in the
story to make purchase requests and what would then happen. This methodology presumes that the
child will project his or her own circumstances into the story and that replies will reflect the child’s
own experience. Over two-thirds of the children thought that the parents would yield to requests.
The main problem with this study is the assumption that the child’s comments about how the child
in the story would respond reflects the child’s own response. Projection, where a person projects
(in the Freudian sense) his or her own feelings onto a story might work for some people where the
story is deliberately vague or ambiguous but if the story is specific then the child is quite likely to
allow the character to have ‘a life of his own’ and create a story that’s independent of the child’s
experience.
Greenberg, Fazal, and Wober (1986) conducted a panel study using a postal questionnaire
with 553 returns from British children aged from four to 13 years (there’s no indication which
respondents were parents and which were direct from children although one would assume the
replies from the younger children would be completed by a parent). Dibb (1993; p.18) cites this
source as evidence that “children are highly influenced by advertising in general”. Although 85 per
cent of the sample claim that they have asked their mum or dad to buy them something they saw in
an advert on TV (from the wording of the question this could be any number of requests including a
single request), the majority of items requested were popular branded toys such as My Little Pony.
Only 15 per cent of requests were classified as foods or cereals. In addition, by examining the
relationship between amount of commercial television viewed (from viewing diaries) and responses
to questions assessing attitudes toward advertising, the authors conclude that “...how much
commercial television is viewed does not impact on attitudes toward televised adverts” (op. cit.,
p.11). The main methodological weakness in this study is the measure of purchase request which
does not distinguish between a single request and multiple requests. Frequency of purchase
requests cannot be established with this measure. This study does not provide adequate evidence to
support Dibb’s claim that children are highly influenced by advertising in general.
Atkin (1975a,b) cited by Adler et al. (1980; p.104) in a US study claim however that from
personal interviews with 301 mothers of children from three- to 11 years of age, 211 stated that
their children “sometimes” request specific cereals seen on television. The differences between the
Greenberg et al. study and Atkin’s earlier work in North America could be attributed to cultural
differences but we tend to agree with Adler et al.’s comments (1980; p.104) that “one may question
the validity of mothers’ reports of their children’s attempts to influence purchases”.
Supermarket observation studies.
In contrast to the verbal interviews used by Ward and others, the work in Atkin (1975a) is based in
the setting of a supermarket. He observed, unobtrusively, 516 family units in the process of
selecting breakfast cereals in a supermarket. The child started any interaction concerned with
purchase requests in two-thirds of the cases. Parents were twice as likely to approve rather than
refuse proposed purchases. Child activity that was classified as ‘demand’ was more successful in
getting acceptance from the parent than behaviour that was categorised as ‘request’. Success in
obtaining the desired cereal increased over the age range and about a quarter of all interaction
sequences ended in behaviour that was regarded as ‘parent-child conflict’. Atkin recorded conflict
in 65 per cent of the cases where the request was denied by the parent and unhappiness in 48 per
cent of them. There is some tendency for conflict and unhappiness to be highest among six- to
eight-year-olds. However, Atkin noted that conflict was seldom intense or persistent and that
displays of child anger or sadness were also short-lived. Atkin’s work has the advantage over other
supermarket observation studies as it uses a large sample of observations and studies of actual
behaviour in real-life situations are obviously better than studies where people are asked questions
about previous or anticipated behaviour. However, there is one problem with supermarket studies
and that is also a sampling issue. Not all children shop with their mother (or father). If the sample
of non-shopping children was not systematically different from the sample of shopping children
then at least one could assume that shopping children were representative of children at large.
However, this is not known. It could be that some children who do shop with their parents enjoy
the experience and participate in family consumer decision-making. On the other hand, other
children might go along because the mother does not have support at home and under these
circumstances the child is an unwilling partner in the supermarket. A systematic investigation into
the reasons for shopping and the role of the child in consumer decision making would shed some
light on this factor.
In an oft-cited study, Galst and White (1976) used an ingenious procedure to simulate
interest in television commercials. A videotape of television programmes and commercials was
presented to the child who had control with a button press over viewing. In this way a measure of
voluntary viewing of commercials, programmes and television content, could be made. Each child
was observed in situ in a supermarket shopping situation with mother and the number of ‘purchase-
influencing attempts’ (PIAs) (such as asking or pointing to an item) was recorded. 41 children
between four and six years of age participated in the study. A significant positive relationship was
found between viewing television and PIAs and, more importantly, between viewing commercials
and PIAs. To cite Galst and White (op. cit., p.1092) “...the more reinforcing [rewarding] children
found the television programs in general and the harder they worked to worked to maintain
commercial presentations in particular on their monitors, as compared with program narratives, the
greater the total number of PIAs they made”. On a cautionary note Galst and White add (p.1094)
that “...one must keep the role of television advertising on children’s food preferences and requests
in its proper perspective. Children in the present study did request meats, fruits, vegetables, and
dairy products, foods which are infrequently advertised on television”. The mothers also kept
records of the amount of commercial and noncommercial television viewed on four days in one
week by checking off on programme listings the programmes they reckoned the child had seen for
15 minutes or more, this criterion defining “viewing” a programme. Again there was a significant
correlation between commercial television viewing and PIAs but no significant correlation between
total television viewing and PIAs. The authors conclude (p.1093) that “...those children who
watched more commercial television at home made more purchase demands at the supermarket”.
Although this study used a small sample the fact that the correlations obtained were significant is
important. Indeed the correlations cited, of the order of 0.5 for the relationship between
maintaining commercial presentations on the monitor and various measures of PIAs, are large and
consequently account for about a quarter of the variance. The correlations between viewing
commercial television (as reported by the mother) and various measures of PIAs are of the order of
0.3. This study is important and it can be said that, if maintenance of commercials reflects interest
in television advertising, children who enjoy and are interested in television advertising will
participate in consumer decision making in the supermarket.
A study by Stoneman and Brody (1982) also looked at behaviour by mothers and children
in the supermarket after watching specially designed television programmes. The families were not
aware of the real purpose behind the experiment. Eighteen families watched a television
programme with children’s food commercials edited in and another, similar, 18 families watched
the TV programme with no commercials. Children who were exposed to commercials made
significantly more purchase requests to their mother overall and made significantly more purchase
requests for advertised products. Mothers who had watched television commercials with their
children used power assertion techniques, defined as saying ‘no’ to requests, telling the child to put
the item back on the shelf or putting the item back, and also offered more alternatives in response
to children’s purchase requests. In Stoneman and Brody’s apt phrase “the food advertisements
served to increase the vigor with which the child approached grocery shopping” (op. cit.; p.374).
Consequently, the mother employs control and power strategies. Stoneman and Brody conclude
that “the experience of grocery shopping with their mothers was characterized by increased strife
and conflict for those children who viewed food commercials prior to shopping” (op. cit.; p.374).
Given the small sample size and yet statistically significant results, the initial impression of a robust
effect is created. However this study demonstrates a short-term effect where viewing commercials
creates an effect just afterwards and the experiment is limited in its relevance. Television
advertising rarely works this way - one does not immediately go out to buy after watching.
Insert table 2 here
Taking the methodologies used in turn, there are several problems that are typically characteristic
of interview, diary, or questionnaire studies. Self-report techniques where mothers are asked how
much television they watch, how they bring up their children, how they cope with purchase
requests and so on tend to generate their own demand characteristics, where the task requirements
drive the responses as opposed to the remembered events. Demand characteristics means that
people reply because the methodology used, when confronted by a questionnaire for example, will
partly influence the responses whereas the responses should come from attitudes that are held by
the respondent or events that are remembered. So (and this example is also given above) if a
respondent gives the reply that one is strict in bringing up one’s child then one is likely to reply that
one would not give in to a child’s repeated request for sweets in a supermarket. Responding to
several questionnaires produces a tendency to reply in a particular way that is consonant with one’s
own self-image. Also, surveys tend to adopt multivariate or correlational forms of data analysis
where relationships between measures are cited. This gives little indication of the processes
involved that mediate between independent and dependent variables or if any causal relationships
exist. For example, from the Donkin studies (1992, 1993) described above one is unable to
establish whether the relationship (if one indeed exists) between purchase requests by children of
various food types and the advertising of different foods to children is a consequence of the child
responding to advertising or the advertiser responding to the wants of the child market. The well-
known adage that correlation does not imply causality applies here. Observational studies,
conducted at point-of-purchase sites, are an improvement as they objectively record the behaviour
in a natural setting. On the basis of these studies we can conclude that there is research evidence
that children ask for food products advertised on television and that parents will often acquiesce to
these requests. In addition, there is some evidence that purchase requests by children cause short-
lived conflict between parent and child although this will depend on the ways children negotiate
within the family and ways parents have of handling these strategies of negotiation.
The research issue should be extended in two directions. Firstly the model of child-family
negotiation is limited often to the child requesting and the mother either complying or denying.
The whole process of negotiation within the family needs to be considered and different styles of
family life taken into account. The work of Grossbart and his colleagues (Crosby and Grossbart,
1984; Carlson, Grossbart, and Walsh, 1990; Carlson and Grossbart, 1988) where parental style is
taken into consideration and the whole issue of consumer socialisation is given priority is an
example of a move in this direction. The methodology of Reid and Frazer (Reid, 1979; Reid and
Frazer, 1980a, 1980b; Frazer and Reid, 1979) where detailed records of the interaction patterns of
individual families are taken that then exemplify how children construct and negotiate the meaning
of television commercials would be appropriate as there is evidence from these studies that children
demonstrate a more subtle and sophisticated approach to advertising than that obtained with
questionnaire methods. Secondly, it would be useful to consider the totality of information about
foods (including advertising) that is available within the family and how this information is
evaluated, discussed and taken into account. Such an analysis, within the context of economic
socialisation and family decision-making about goods and services, would do justice to a complex
situation. It is suggested that an initial study with up to 50 families using extensive interviews
would be a useful and viable project.
ADVERTISING’S INUENCE ON FOOD-RELATED BEHAVIOUR.
Methods.
Goldberg and Gorn have done much important research that examined the direct behavioural effect
of watching television advertising. The typical paradigm can be described as ‘watching then
choosing’ where children are exposed to a videotape of a TV programme with commercials edited
in. They are then required to select from a range of alternative brands or products what they would
like with the brand or product advertised included in the range. One novel variation on this theme
is to present children with a choice of either playing with the product or playing with friends or
parents thus obtaining a measure of the strength of product attraction. According to Comstock and
Paik (1987), this technique was mentioned by Goldberg and Gorn (1977) in an unpublished paper.
Dawson, Jeffrey, and Walsh (1988) use a different measure based on the ‘resistance to temptation
paradigm’ (c.f. Wolf and Cheyne, 1972). In a typical treatment condition the child is shown a
television commercial in one room with an adult experimenter and afterwards told to wait in an
adjacent room while the experimenter completes some work. The child is told to think about the
commercial they had just watched together. A bowl of the stimulus food is in the waiting room and
the experimenter explains that it must be for a children’s party and not to eat it. The child’s
behaviour is then recorded through a one way mirror.
Studies.
Goldberg, Gorn and Gibson (1978) used the first paradigm of choosing from a mixed set of
alternative brands and products with 80 five- to six-year-old children and found that short-term
snack and breakfast food preferences tended to reflect their exposure experience. Children are
more likely to select highly sugared foods if they have previously viewed television commercials
for them and they are more likely to choose nutritious snack and breakfast foods if they have just
seen pro-nutrition public service announcements. The experimental design is satisfactory with
adequate control groups and significant results were obtained with analysis of variance. In other
words the study is scientific and possesses good internal validity. Internal validity is the extent to
which the results obtained are true and valid for the experiment itself - within the world of the
experimental paradigm. External or ecological validity is a different concept and refers to the
extent to which the experimental results can be generalisable to the outside world - to what extent
does the experiment simulate truthfully the role of advertising in food choice and preference?
‘Watching then doing’ studies have good internal validity but poor external validity. But such
studies can tell us something about the relative effectiveness of different stimulus presentations.
For example, in the same paper, Goldberg, Gorn and Gibson presented a full television programme
called Fat Albert that conveyed the message that junk food is bad and fruit and vegetables are good.
This programme used animation and comedy and starred the well-known American actor, Bill
Cosby. Even when this programme contained commercials for sugared foods, it was more effective
at reducing the number of sugared foods selected than presenting pro-nutrition public service
announcements in the context of a neutral programme. Interestingly, this arrangement has a certain
ironic external validity as the Fat Albert junk food programme was actually broadcast one Saturday
morning in the United States and sponsored, in part, by highly sugared snack food and cereal
products. This result is important and the effect of adjacent programme context on food advertising
needs further investigation.
Gorn and Goldberg (1980) were interested in the effects of repeating the same commercial
to children and constructed several videotapes, some of which repeated the same commercial (a
new brand of ice cream) at intervals in a half-hour cartoon programme. Several groups of up to 40
children between eight and 10 years of age participated in different versions of the same basic
experiment. They were shown one of the videotapes and various measures of product preference
and recognition were taken. The child’s brand choice was assessed from a range of ice creams
including the advertised brand and actual consumption behaviour was measured by allowing the
child to eat the chosen brand and, afterwards, weighing what was left. Exposure to a television
commercial for the brand influenced choice of that brand in the expected direction and there was
also evidence that exposure to more than one commercial for that brand increased the probability
that the brand would be chosen from the array of different brands of ice cream at the end. There
was no effect on actual consumption behaviour though. That is, with this procedure, more
commercials does not mean the child eats more of the product at a single sitting. There is also
evidence that viewing five commercials in the cartoon programme affected the child’s second
choice of the product they would prefer. They would much prefer ice cream than, say, bubble gum.
In terms of methodology, the experimental design (a factorial design with matched groups in each
condition) and statistical analysis (analysis of variance with covariants introduced such as weighing
each child and introducing that variable into the analysis) is certainly adequate but the problem of
external validity remains. It would be irresponsible, for example, to selectively take one of the
findings - that increased exposure does not lead to increased product consumption but to increased
brand choice - as support for the argument that advertising only increases brand sales but does not
increase consumption of the generic product when we have argued that these studies have poor
external validity. In a review paper Gorn and Goldberg (1987) summarise their research on
commercial repetition by claiming that it is likely that a single commercial exposure can make a
product salient for half an hour and needs no repetition but that over a two-week period daily
exposure is likely to be useful in maintaining the salience of the product. From an examination of
their research, this would appear to be an accurate summary of what has been demonstrated within
the experimental paradigms associated with their work.
Gorn and Goldberg (1982) pursued the issue of behavioural change as a function of viewing
commercials and reported on a study they had conducted with 72 five- to eight-year-olds. The
study was set in a summer camp and it was possible, with the cooperation of the camp supervisors,
to offer no fresh fruit or candy (sweets) to the children other than that offered experimentally as
part of the afternoon snack. In addition, children did not watch television apart from the half-hour
per day that was the critical part of the experimental treatment. The camp counsellors were
unaware of the particular experimental treatment for each group of children and the children were
unaware of the experiment, although they may have made attributions about why they were being
asked these questions. The study was well-designed and provided complete control in the time
available over such variables as amount of television viewed and brand and product consumption,
factors that can often vary in other studies. The basic procedure was watching then choosing,
where the child had to select a drink and a snack. The choice was between orange juice or Kool
Aid and, for the snack, two out of four choices of two candy bars and two fruits. Food choice was
made in a separate room, just after viewing a videotape with commercials for either fruit or candy
products. Control groups either watched a video with no commercials or else one with health
messages concerned with a balanced diet and limiting sugar intake. Under these well-controlled
conditions, children who were exposed to orange juice commercials selected the most orange juice.
Children who were exposed to candy commercials chose the most candy. Children in all conditions
indicated that they knew the camp doctor wanted them to eat fruit as opposed to candy. Whether
they acted upon this awareness and actually chose fruit seemed to depend on whether or not they
had been exposed to commercials for candy. One condition that did not affect consumption
behaviour was where the half-hour video that the children watched contained the health messages.
Children under this condition behaved in a similar way to children who had seen no advertisements
in their videotape. This study has good internal validity especially as control over television that
was viewed and the availability of fruit and candy was complete. The paradigm however, which
was built into a two-way factorial design (age x viewing condition), was ‘watch then choose’ which
we have argued has limited external validity. Consequently this study does not tell us much about
how advertising affects children’s food choice although these studies can provide information on
which particular viewing condition is the most effective.
Goldberg (1990) in an important study used a questionnaire to investigate how much
American children’s commercial television (ACTV) children in Montreal watched, their awareness
of toys in the marketplace and the ‘children’s cereals’ available in their home. A children’s cereal
would be, for example, one that is targeted to children by the use of cartoon characters. Montreal
was chosen because commercials directed to children are banned by Quebec state law. American
border television channels are available however and children can watch television commercials for
toys and cereals. Goldberg sampled 144 English-speaking children and 331 French-speaking
children from both upper-middle and working class backgrounds and found that, as expected,
French-speaking children watched less ACTV than English-speaking children. In addition,
English-speaking children had more children’s cereals in their home than French-speaking children.
This could be, of course, because the French cultural milieu was different from the English one and
one way the cultures differed was in their consumption of children’s cereals. However when
Goldberg examined the results within the French- and English-speaking groups he found a
significant relationship between amount of ACTV viewed and children’s cereals available in the
home. In addition, although English-speaking children watched more ACTV than French-speaking
children, if children were categorised in terms of the amount of ACTV they watched at comparable
levels of ACTV viewing English- and French-speaking children purchased equivalent numbers of
children’s cereals. In other words, irrespective of cultural background, the more television
commercials a child sees for cereals marketed for children, the more likely it is that that product
will be found in the household. Although this experiment tells us nothing about the processes
occurring between watching and purchase, it demonstrates that a link does exist although the power
of advertising’s influence relative to other sources of influence cannot be determined with this
study.
In a research programme at the University of Montana (Fox, Jeffrey, McLellarn, Hickey,
and Dahlkoetter, 1980; Jeffrey, McLellarn, Hickey, Lemnitzer, Hess, and Stroud, 1980; Jeffrey,
McLellarn, and Fox, 1982) the impact of commercials on eating behaviour was examined. They
developed a behavioural eating test which involves children selecting and eating from a range of
six pro-nutrition and six low-nutrition (junk food) alternatives arranged randomly on a standardised
tray. The amount of the different foods consumed can then be calculated. These measures can then
be related to antecedent conditions such as the child being exposed to different kinds of television
commercials embedded in a television programme. This procedure is suitable for very young
children and results with four- and five-year-olds indicated that exposure to television commercials
for low-nutrition foods significantly increased caloric consumption of low-nutrition foods whereas
television commercials for high-nutrition foods such as fruit and vegetables only brought about
small increases in high-nutrition foods. Similar results were found with nine-year-olds,
demonstrating that, although the mediators of understanding and defending will be different
between the two groups, the behaviours do not differ much. Although the studies are well-designed
with sophisticated analysis of the data, the comments made concerning internal versus external
validity in connection with the research of Gorn and Goldberg apply here.
Galst (1980) presented 65 children between three and a half years and seven years of age
with videotapes of cartoon programmes. These programmes were constructed with different
combinations of food commercials and/or pro-nutritional public service announcements edited in.
Each child selected a drink and a food from a range of snacks after viewing. Children viewed and
chose each day for four weeks. In addition, one condition was the presence or absence of
comments from an adult after the commercial, these comments being designed to promote a pro-
nutritional message. Although there was a tendency for children to select sugared snacks in any
case, Galst found that the most effective combination for reducing the children’s selection of
snacks with added sugar was the presentation of commercials for food products without added
sugar together with pro-nutritional public service announcements with accompanying positive
evaluative comments by an adult co-observer. The condition where an adult commented after
watching the presentation by the child (positive evaluative comments by an adult co-observer) was
particularly effective. Galst’s study can be criticised however because “at no point during the
experimental weeks did any of the groups select unsugared snacks the majority of the time”
(p.937). So although statistical significance was obtained this is against a backdrop of selection of
sugared snacks where the average proportion of sugared snacks chosen is 0.79 (calculated from
Table 1; p.937). One possible reason children predominantly chose sugared snacks is peer
influence (and Galst admits this) as children chose their snacks in groups. This methodological
flaw could be corrected in future research and indeed would provide a useful measure of peer group
influence by introducing an extra condition into the design where children either chose in private or
publicly in groups. Nevertheless Galst’s study does provide an indication that the presence of a
live person commenting on television is an important influence on the child’s choice of food - there
is an obvious implication here for the role of the mother or caretaker in the child’s behaviour.
In an attempt to evaluate the relative effectiveness of different kinds of appeals in ads,
Cantor (1981) placed either a humorous or a serious public service announcement
advocating the eating of oranges and the avoidance of sweets before a commercial for either a
sweet dessert or a toy. These were embedded in a videotape of a children’s programme and shown
to 37 children aged from three years to nine years at a child care centre. The behavioural measure
was an index of the frequency of choosing a fruit or sweet at lunch over a week. The results were
not completely conclusive but suggested that a serious ad for good nutrition will be more effective
than a humorous one, at least in the absence of an immediately subsequent counter-advertisement
(the ad for the sweet dessert). Cantor does criticise her own methodology by suggesting that, as the
present study involved only one exposure to communication, and improvement would be the
inclusion of a condition where the child is exposed to repeated exposure of the same message
which reflects what happens in real-life media exposure. This would improve the external validity
of the experiment.
Stoneman and Brody (1981) were interested in considering television advertising in the
context of the other sources of influence that impact on the child and chose to examine television
food advertising and the observed food preferences of peers. They simulated peer pressure on
behaviour by getting children (peers) to indicate to other children (experimental subjects) which
one out of an array of foods they (the peers) preferred. The peer would stand in front of the group
of experimental subjects and point to the food he or she liked on a projected slide of a selection of
foods. Unknown to the experimental subjects their peers had been told to choose a category of
food (salty snacks) by the experimenter. A similar experimental paradigm to other researchers in
this area was used with several treatment conditions followed by a food choice task. Results were
examined with analysis of variance. They found that television advertising increased the likelihood
that the advertised food would be chosen afterwards, a result that confirms what other researchers
have established in this area. It is not possible to establish from their data the relative weight or
power of peer group pressure compared with advertising pressure on food choice but they did
establish that, when peers chose the same food as advertised there was a statistically significant
increase in the experimental subject’s choice of that food (when compared with the condition where
children only watched television and there was no peer pressure). It worked in the other direction
too - when peers chose a food that was different to that advertised then there was a statistically
significant decrease in the experimental subject’s choice of that food (when compared with the
condition where children only watched television and there was no peer pressure).
Bolton (1983) identified the key constructs underlying children’s dietary behaviour and
their relationships. For example, the extent to which the child has been exposed to food
commercials, the kind of supervision and behaviour of the parents and the prevailing patterns of
diet and other characteristics of the child all have a role to play in influencing the eventual diet of
the child and the nutritional status of that diet. These variables were operationalised using
questionnaires and diaries on diet and television viewing and a selection of households were given
them to keep. The sample was made up of 262 children aged from two to 11 years. Using
multivariate statistical analysis, Bolton found that children’s exposure to television food advertising
significantly increased the number of their snacks and that such viewing had a subsequent and
independent effect on the child’s dietary efficiency and caloric intake. The effect was small
however and Bolton concludes that “it is unlikely that effects of this magnitude could seriously
affect their nutritional and physical well-being” (op. cit., p.194). Bolton’s study is important in
several respects. The theoretical model used considers television food advertising as one variable
amongst many in the establishment and maintenance of children’s diet and such a multifactorial
approach translates into a sophisticated multivariate analysis with a large sample from a wide age
range. Limitations include the questionnaire/diary methodology with its attendant problems that
have already been discussed in this Report. Results are built into a mathematical model which can
be used for prediction - the statements that are made, it should be emphasised, are model-driven.
Bolton estimated that an additional 25 minutes a week of food commercials will result in the
consumption of one (0.97) additional snack a week, with the consequent result of in an increased
caloric intake of 1.39 per cent and a decrease in nutrient efficiency of 1.41 per cent. She also
calculated that the child would have to increase her viewing by a third to access 25 minutes of food
commercials. The conclusion that the effect was small and that “it is unlikely that effects of this
magnitude could seriously affect their nutritional and physical well-being” (op. cit., p.194) is
justified in our opinion.
Heslop and Ryans (1980) sampled 280 children in two groups; four- to six-year-olds and
seven- to eight-year-olds. Children either viewed a videotape of a cartoon programme with
television commercials for a pre-sweetened cereal inserted or in a control condition with no cereal
commercial. After this, children were taken to an area and left alone with their mother. They were
told they could choose products, as payment for participation in the study, one of the products
being the advertised cereal. Each child was interviewed and asked which cereal they preferred.
Using this technique, they concluded that whereas there was a positive relationship between stated
preference and advertised cereal, the effect of the advertising on behaviour was minimal. There
was little relationship between brand advertised and brand selected and taken home. Heslop and
Ryans pose the question whether this result was a result of weak experimental manipulation or
reflected a real lack of effect. They conclude the latter, arguing that optimum conditions were there
for an effect to occur (the commercials were repeated, choice was immediately after viewing, and
the mothers “probably were more lenient in granting requests as the products were free and the
child had cooperated and, thus, deserved a reward” (p.419)). The influence of the mother (and the
choice by the child with the mother was quite private) had not been controlled for so, in our
opinion, the role of the mother, which may have been critical in the final choice, is conjecture and
this is a weakness in the experiment.
Despite the lack of evidence that advertising leads to specific changes in eating behaviour
(as opposed to food purchase requests), there is a general belief that advertising influences
children’s food choice and preference. In one study by Crawford et al. (1978) the majority of
mothers interviewed believed that their children’s food choices were influenced by television
commercials.
It would appear from the review of studies in this area that, for children, there is a relationship
between watching television advertising for food and
insert table 3 here
various measures of food-related behaviour (notwithstanding the null result of Heslop and Ryans).
There are various ways of measuring food-related behaviour, such as selection from a range of food
alternatives, forced choice between a food and another attractive activity, or assessing resistance to
temptation. The methodology used, however, is predominantly one which is laboratory based
where typically the child watches then chooses. Such studies demonstrate that, in the short term,
children will prefer and choose what they’ve just seen but this doesn’t adequately simulate the role
of advertising in real life. Children are surrounded by advertising for different products and brands
and will utilise mental representations of this information, together with other information from
peers, and past experience with foods in order to negotiate food choice within the family. The
quasi-experiment by Goldberg (1990) described above, is outside the laboratory tradition, and is
methodologically sophisticated. The results do seem to demonstrate that there is a relationship
between advertising of cereals to children and the likelihood of these cereals being found in the
family home. What has not been established from these studies is whether advertising a particular
brand of a food category has an influence or effect on consumption of that category. The
distinction between brand (e.g. Smarties) and product (e.g. sweets) is one that should always be
made in any discussion of advertising’s influence, a point made forcefully by Barwise (1994) in his
critique of Dibb’s (1993) review of the role of advertising in children’s diet. Indeed it would be
difficult to establish whether brand advertising influences product consumption in the medium- to
long-term as commercial and cultural trends will always be present so that any increase or decrease
in consumption of categories of food could be attributed to cultural shifts or to promotional
campaigns. One could argue that any model of advertising influence that conceptualises
advertising as a separate and discrete entity aimed at individual people is an inadequate model and
advertising needs to be considered as inextricably linked with cultural and economic life.
Whereas it is unlikely that laboratory based studies will ever mimic real life situations of
advertising and food selection, they should not be discounted in their entirety. The strengths of
laboratory studies lie in their very systematicity and there is more work that can still be done
looking at both stimulus variables (what the child watches to and listens to) and subject variables
(the various individual characteristics of children) together with their interaction. The dependent
variable (food choice) can then be built in to a multivariate model and statistical analysis will
determine the relative effects of stimulus and subject variables and combinations of them. In this
way the relative effects of different advertising of different foods on different types of children can
be estimated. Results from food choice studies, where the child chooses from a range of
alternatives, are sensitive to the alternatives available. Whether the child chooses the brand or not
will depend on the relative attractiveness of the other offerings which depend in turn on a host of
other variables such as the child’s experience with them. Research exploring how brand choice is
influenced by alternatives would improve the methodology of these studies.
One way of researching the question of whether brand advertising influences product
consumption (as opposed to brand consumption) would be to investigate children’s categorisation
of foods at different ages. If advertising has an effect at the level of the brand then, according to
basic psychological principles, this influence should generalise to some effect across the hierarchy
of product categories. So, if advertising Smarties for example has an effect on the child to the
extent this brand is more mentally salient, is viewed in a more attractive light and the child is more
likely to buy it - this effect should influence other brands that are related to Smarties. It is well-
known from the general psychology of learning that generalisation occurs. It is also well-known
that generalisation depends on how one mentally organises one’s world and that mental categories
which are psychologically remote are less influenced that ones that are more closely associated
with the original stimulus. But if we don’t know the nature of this hierarchy, how the child
mentally represents foods, we cannot predict how this generalisation will work. To take one
example, will advertising Smarties influence other chocolate products such as Snickers or will it
also influence snack products such as crisps? This depends on how the child mentally categorises
foods and there are many ways of investigating mental categorisation. It is therefore proposed that
a pilot study with a sample of 50 children be initiated with a view to establishing relevant and
appropriate methods of investigating how children categorise food products. There are various
techniques that are available in the area of mental categorisation such as hierarchical sorting, asking
questions of similarity and difference within groups of three items, sorting into groups, and so on
and it is important to establish which methods work at different ages.
ADVERTISING’S INUENCE ON ATTITUDES AND VALUES.
Introduction.
So far we have discussed the role of advertising in influencing the behaviour of the child, whether
s(he) makes requests for advertised brands or chooses a product that has just been advertised.
Advertising has a role to play, as does any feature of cultural life, in influencing the feelings,
attitudes, and values of the members of that culture and indeed one would not expect otherwise.
The problem is - how to determine this effect? It is possible to argue theoretically that advertising
cultivates a materialistic view of life, that advertising elevates branded goods and services to the
level of sacred objects and has replaced religion, that advertising creates problems where none
existed before but it is difficult if not impossible to establish this using the scientific paradigm.
Research on the effect of television advertising on the knowledge, attitudes and values of children
centres round several issues. One of these is the attitude held by children towards television
advertising in general. Do they find it enjoyable and interesting? Or are they bored and sceptical
about the claims of advertisers? One of the earliest reviews of the literature on children and
television advertising by Sheikh, Prasad, and Rao (1974) concluded that research on this topic
demonstrated that, in general, attitudes of children toward TV ads tend to become more negative as
they grow older. In other words, older children tend to distrust commercials and find them ‘silly’.
Most of the evidence on the relationship in children between television viewing and attitudes
toward commercials is correlational and has established that heavy viewers respond more
favourably to commercials than their light viewing peers. Heavy viewers tend to like commercials
more, trust commercials more and express stronger behavioural intentions towards products
advertised on television.
Bearden, Teel, and Wright (1979) used a test devised by Rossiter (1977) with two samples
of 76 nine- to 12-year-old children from medium-to-high income families and 62 nine- to 12-year-
old children from low-income families. Rossiter’s original attitude questionnaire consisted of
seven items such as “television commercials tell the truth” and “television commercials try to make
people buy things they don’t really need” with children responding on a four-point agree-disagree
scale. Bearden, Teel, and Wright (op. cit.) found that there was no significant difference between
groups on favourableness of attitude toward television advertising.
Barling and Fullager (1983) sampled 545 10-11-year-old children using a more extensive
attitude questionnaire devised by Schlinger (1979) which was originally designed to measure the
attitudes of adults to specific advertisements. This was modified by removing some items that were
regarded as inappropriate for children. When the results were statistically analysed using factor
analysis, it was found that two main factors emerged which the authors labelled Entertainment and
Irritation-Boredom. This means that children’s responses on the attitude questionnaire are
structured around these components and that the emotional evaluation of television commercials
(for example, that ‘they’re boring’ or ‘lots of fun to watch’) predominates in children’s responses to
individual television commercials.
Concerning the mother’s attitude to television advertising to children, Ward, Wackman and
Wartella (1975) asked 615 mothers with children how strongly they agreed or disagreed with
statements concerning television commercials to children and created a composite attitude score
from their responses. Almost three quarters of the sample had a negative opinion of such
commercials and these negative attitudes were most pronounced among parents of younger,
kindergarten-age children but did not seem to be associated with social class.
A hundred and twenty two pairs of mothers and children were interviewed by Wiman
(1980). The children were aged between nine and 10 years. Both mother and child were assessed
on their attitudes toward children’s television commercials using Rossiter’s test with slight
modifications being made to obtain the version used with the adults. The attitude of parent and
child were significantly related. Even with the restricted age band used, the older children’s
attitudes were significantly less favourable toward television commercials for children than the
younger group. Boys held significantly less favourable attitudes toward such commercials than
girls. When the question of banning such commercials was raised during the interview, parents
favoured a ban by 58 per cent to 22 per cent whereas children opposed it by 46 per cent to 31 per
cent.
Attitudes of parents towards television commercials appears to depend on the way parents
bring up their children. Parents differ in styles of socialisation, the way they bring up children and
instill cultural values and approved habits into the child. The varieties of parental influence on
children is a large area of research with different practitioners working within different theoretical
traditions. Baumrind (1971) has found three patterns or styles of parental authority in the United
States which can be called authoritative, authoritarian and permissive. The authoritative mode is
one that encourages communication with the child and considers the child’s views and interests.
The parent does exert control over the child and monitors the child’s environment but restrictions
imposed serve as boundaries within which the child can operate with considerable autonomy. For
example, authoritative parents would monitor and control the amount of television viewing the
child does, but this would be conducted by parents discussing the matter with the child and the
child expressing his or her opinion. Once the restrictions had been imposed the child would be
permitted to watch freely within these constraints. An authoritarian parent, on the other hand
would limit the child’s psychological independence. Any rules on the child’s behaviour are
imposed without discussion by the parent. These kind of parents are in general aloof from the child
and insist on conformity with their views. These parents would set controls on the child’s
television viewing, controls that are not negotiated or negotiable and that have to be obeyed.
Permissive parents impose minimum behavioural restrictions, communicate and discuss extensively
with their children and, in general, permit the child extensive rights and demand few
responsibilities. It’s up to the child to regulate his or her own actions. Consequently, one would
expect little control or interference from the parent on television viewing by the child although
there may be much discussion about what’s on and what’s being watched.
Crosby and Grossbart (1984) sampled over 500 mothers of children in a Midwestern state of
the United States and, using self-administered questionnaires, found that parents who claimed
authoritative characteristics also displayed most concern about television advertising to children.
This would be expected. Given the authoritative parental style, much television advertising to
children would be seen as potentially subversive to this control by parental authority. Crosby and
Grossbart, in a message to advertising managers, suggest that parental style might serve as a
suitable market segmentation criterion. What this means is that the advertiser may have to pitch
differently if the audience consists predominantly of families who are authoritative and
consequently concerned about television advertising to children. Permissive families, on the other
hand, will not bother so much and a different message can be delivered without the risk of
rejection.
The question as to whether advertising has an effect on children’s attitudes and values is a
more difficult, if not impossible question to answer. For example, in a recent review Bjurtsr”m
(1994) cites practically no evidence and admits that it is methodologically impossible to establish
whether exposure to advertising leads to the cultivation of certain general values such as
materialism. The fundamental weakness is the weakness inherent in any correlational study which
is that it not possible to establish causality from correlation. So, even if a study was conducted that
established a significant correlation between amount of exposure to television advertising
(measured by television viewing) and attitudes toward materialism (via some self-report
questionnaire) then it would not be possible to argue that watching television cultivates or causes
materialism as one could easily argue that a family where materialism is encouraged would watch
more television than one where materialism is discouraged.
It would appear from the studies described that a negative attitude towards television commercials
develops as the child gets older. The results, however, should be interpreted with caution. It is to
be expected that a growing understanding of the advertiser’s commercial intent will breed a certain
cynicism with advertising as the child gets older. Negative attitudes toward advertising, however,
will be affected by the sample of TV commercials the child actually sees and the quality of the pool
of advertisements that are shown on television. Older children in an attempt to distance themselves
from younger children may scoff at ads designed for younger children as ‘childish’ or ‘for babies’
but identify with commercials aimed at adolescents. In addition the general quality of television
advertising in Britain in the 1990s was quite high using humorous situations and visually exciting
and fashionable scenarios. The discussion on cultural differences between North America and the
UK is relevant here. It is not possible to come to the universal conclusion that older children have
more negative attitudes toward television advertising than younger children as these attitudes will
depend on what television commercials are watched and the quality of advertising in the culture in
general. In the United States, however, older children have less favourable attitudes towards
television commercials than younger children.
Summary and conclusions of Part 2.
Frequency and content of TV food advertising to children.

We first looked at the issue of ‘what’s on’ - studies that had examined the frequency and content of
television advertising of foods to children. The majority of these studies were North American and
many of them were done in the 1970s. Concerning frequency, i.e. the amount of food advertising
to children relative to other advertising, some of the studies are flawed. Sampling strategies often
do not take into account seasonal variations by limiting sampling to one week in the year (for
example, Choate, 1972; Gussow, 1972, 1973) or Saturday mornings (Atkin and Heald, 1977;
Doolittle and Pepper, 1975; Cotugna, 1988). The Barcus studies described in the text are an
improvement with a wider sampling range and the results from these can be taken with more
confidence although they are certainly historically (1970s) and culturally (USA) specific. They
claimed that one third of all children’s television advertising is for sugared food products, food
products comprising one half of all television advertising for children. Young (1985) found that
one third of his sample of television commercials for children were for food products and one third
of those food products advertised for children were foods containing more than ten per cent sugar.
No other food constituent was examined in this study, which employed a wide sampling base and
was carried out in the UK in the 1980s. Young also found that, in the period before Christmas, toy
advertising to children dominated the screen on Saturday mornings. However, outside the pre-
Christmas period there was less toy advertising, more advertising of foods for children and,
importantly, advertising of adult products. Condry et al. (1988) found that, in the USA, there was a
drop in the percentage of commercials that advertised food products over a period of three years
(1983 to 1987) and an increase in advertising for toys and games. His sampling strategy took into
account weekly and seasonal variations in advertising.
In conclusion, there have been no systematic and recent studies of the frequency and
content of advertising directed at children in the UK.
Purchase request behaviour.
There were two predominant methodologies used in studying how children requested advertised
products from parents. Questionnaire/interview studies asked parents or children about their
purchase requests and supermarket observation studies looked at parent-child interaction in vivo.
Questionnaire and interview studies are limited in their validity because of the retrospective
nature of the procedure. However, it is argued in the text that spurious relationships will emerge
where perhaps none exist and consequently detecting the lack of a relation between variables
should be regarded as valid. The studies of Ward are methodologically sound (within the
limitations of this type of research per se) and the conclusion of Ward, that the data consistently
show that television advertising as a perceived influence on children’s requests has little impact on
mothers’ responses, should be regarded as accurate. Research conducted in the UK by Donkin et
al. (1992, 1993) and Taras et al. (1989) is methodologically suspect and Donkins’s conclusion that
39 per cent of the products requested by the children had been advertised in the six-month period
prior to the survey and that “in some cases” the frequency of requests for types of products was
significantly related to the intensity of the advertising campaigns should not be taken as evidence
for the case that television advertising influences children to ask for products in the UK. A study
by Wiman (1983) used face-to-face interviews and a large sample of US children and their
conclusions that children who come from a higher socioeconomic level and have better educated
parents make fewer purchase requests to their parents and understand the purpose and nature of
advertising better is valid for the USA at that time.
Supermarket observation studies are an improvement as actual behaviour is recorded
although the possibility that the samples observed are not representative of the population of
children as a whole cannot be excluded. Atkin’s studies recorded conflict in 65 per cent of the
cases where the request was denied by the parent and unhappiness in 48 per cent of them. There is
some tendency for conflict and unhappiness to be highest among six- to eight-year-olds. However,
Atkin noted that conflict was seldom intense or persistent and that displays of child anger or
sadness were also short-lived. This statement should be taken as an accurate reflection of the
situation in the USA in the 1970s. Galst and White’s (1976) study is methodologically
sophisticated and demonstrated that if the child is interested and enjoys commercials more
supermarket purchase requests will be made. Also, the more commercial television watched by the
child the greater the number of purchase requests although, interestingly, there is no relationship
between total television viewed (including television with no commercials) and purchase requests.
In conclusion, there is evidence from the US studies that purchase request behaviour by
children occurs in supermarkets and that this can produce short-lived conflict between parent and
child. Children who are interested in and watch television commercials tend to make more
purchase requests.
Advertising’s influence on food-related behaviour.
The methodology used in these studies is predominantly of the ‘watching then choosing’ type.
Children are allocated to various experimental and control conditions and allowed to watch a
videotape with commercials embedded in it in the experimental condition. They are then asked to
choose a gift from a range of alternatives and the advertised product is in that range. Within the
paradigm there appears to be evidence that watching a product in a commercial will increase the
probability that that product will be chosen afterwards. The research cited by Gorn and Goldberg
and the work associated with Jeffrey at the University of Montana provide support for this view.
However the effect is a short-term one and Gorn and Goldberg (1987) claim that it is likely that a
single commercial exposure can make a product salient for half an hour and needs no repetition but
that over a two-week period daily exposure is likely to be useful in maintaining the salience of the
product. More importantly, this work does not simulate children’s consumer behaviour in real-life.
It should be emphasised that advertising and marketing in general is a continual presence in the life
of the child and buying a product or negotiating its purchase within the family is subject to many
other influences such as peer preference, the child’s own experience, and family consumer
preferences. Goldberg’s (1990) study in Quebec used a naturalistic setting and provides reliable
evidence that the more television commercials a child sees for cereals marketed for children, the
more likely it is that that product will be found in the household. Although this experiment tells us
nothing about the processes occurring between watching and purchase, it demonstrates that a link
does exist although the power of advertising’s influence relative to other sources of influence
cannot be determined with this study. A study by Galst in 1980 showed that the presence of an
adult commenting positively about the nutritional implications of products without added sugar
significantly reduced the choice of sugared products, demonstrating the importance of the role of
other adults in food choice. In a similar vein, Stoneman and Brody (1981) showed that peer choice
would significantly influence the child’s food choice. Both these studies show that influences
emanating from other people have a role to play in food choice in situations where the child has just
seen a television commercial. Bolton (1983) used a mathematical model based on multivariate
analysis to estimate the power of television food advertising relative to other variables such as the
kind of supervision and behaviour of the parents and the prevailing patterns of diet and other
characteristics of the child. She concluded, and the methodology and analysis justifies this
conclusion that such advertising had a small and relatively insignificant effect on nutritional and
physical well-being.
In conclusion, there is evidence that the advertising of food products, such as cereals, to
children will produce a short-term effect so that children will tend to want that brand and choose
that brand. There is also evidence for linkage between the presence of brands of cereals in the
household and the extent to which the child has viewed commercials for these brands. All of these
studies are from North America.
Advertising’s influence on attitudes and values.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to establish empirically that advertising to children encourages a
change in basic values such as encouraging materialism. There is a body of work on children’s
attitudes toward commercials, most of which was done in the United States and which has to be
considered as relevant only to the stock of television commercials available at that time in that
place. In other words, results are culturally specific and generalisations across time and place
cannot be made. Indeed one would expect attitudes toward food advertising in the UK in the 1990s
would be different from, for example, the results reported by Sheikh, Prasad, and Rao in 1974 and
Wiman (1980) in the United States where attitudes of children toward TV ads tend to become more
negative as they grow older. The use of humour and target marketing for older children and
adolescents would suggest otherwise. Wiman also found that boys held significantly less
favourable attitudes toward such commercials than girls and that they did not by a small majority
favour a ban of such advertising while their parents did. Crosby and Grossbart (1984) found that
parents who claimed authoritative characteristics also displayed most concern about television
advertising to children. However, Sheikh, Prasad, and Rao (1974) found that heavy viewers
respond more favourably to commercials than their light viewing peers and Bearden, Teel, and
Wright (1979) found no difference between children of families from different income groups in
their attitude toward advertising. Barling and Fullager (1983) found that older children’s attitude
structure toward television commercials was structured around whether they thought them
entertaining or boring/irritating.
OVERALL CONCLUSIONS.
1. Food acceptance patterns emerge early in the child’s development and predate outside
influences such as parents, peers, and the media.
2. By three years of age children are following adult cultural rules for eating patterns.
3. Consequently, by the time the child is old enough to be influenced by advertising the extent
of this influence should be considered against these established regularities in eating.
4. Advertising cannot be regarded as an isolated source of influence and should be seen as

functioning in the context of other important variables such as family and peer group
influences.
5. Advertising is an integral part of culture and any examination of the role of advertising in
the life of the child should take into account how children use advertising both in play and
talk and as part of their socialisation into the economic world.
6. Children acquire different kinds of understanding of advertising at different ages. Current

theories and findings in advertising literacy should inform any examination of the influence
of food advertising to children.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH.
We have divided these into major projects and minor studies. The former are priority issues that
we have identified as unresearched areas in the UK in the 1990s or as having been researched with
a limited methodology. The latter are modifications and improvements to already existing studies.
Reference is made to the pages where more background to the proposals can be found.
Major projects.
C2. Research into the frequency and content of food advertising to children. (pps.52, 56, 57).
We would suggest a viable, cost-effective and valuable study would be an audit of the
frequency and content of food advertising to children in the UK in the 1990s. The review of
‘what’s on’ was critical of the research done in terms of sampling procedures and the cultural
specificity of results. A standard set of procedures should be adopted with a sampling frame that
takes into account seasonal, weekly and daily variations in the frequency of such advertising. A
definition of ‘advertising to children’ should be made. An acceptable model of the content of such
advertising should be put forward and reliability measures published.
C2. Negotiation within the family and the role of advertising. (p.71).
When examining purchase-request behaviour, the research agenda should be extended to

consider the whole process of negotiation within the family. A combination of methodologies
would be appropriate here ranging from self-report procedures using diaries and questionnaires to
observation within the family using qualitative methods. In this way one could triangulate results
in order to establish conclusions that emerge with all methodologies. We would propose that
different styles of family life are taken into account and that the research covers the totality of
information about foods (including advertising) that is available within the family and how this
information is evaluated, discussed and taken into account. Such an analysis, within the context of
economic socialisation and family decision-making about goods and services, would do justice to a
complex situation. A preliminary study using up to 50 families with extensive interviews would be
a useful and viable project.
C2. Categorisation of foods and food-related services by children. (pps.87, 88).
Laboratory studies on the role of advertising in children’s food choice have limited external
validity but can produce valuable information on the relative effects of different advertising of
different foods on different types of children. One way of researching the question of whether
brand advertising influences product consumption (as opposed to brand consumption) would be to
investigate children’s categorisation of foods at different ages. If advertising has an effect at the
level of the brand then, according to basic psychological principles, this influence should generalise
to some effect across the hierarchy of product categories. For example, would advertising Smarties
have an influence only on other chocolate products such as Mars Bar or will there be an effect on
other snack products such as crisps? This depends on how the child mentally categorises foods and
there are many ways of investigating mental categorisation. It is therefore proposed that a pilot
study with a sample of 50 children be initiated with a view to establishing relevant and appropriate
methods of investigating how children categorise food products. There are various techniques that
are available in the area of mental categorisation such as hierarchical sorting, asking questions of
similarity and difference within groups of three items, sorting into groups, and so on and it is
important to establish which methods work at different ages. In addition it is important to establish
what measures of the dependent variable are most appropriate. To pursue the example cited, if
advertising Smarties is effective on a range of measures such as brand recognition and recall,
attitudes toward the ad and attitudes toward the brand, and intention to purchase and purchase-
request behaviour then to what extent are these effect(s) generalisable to other brands?
C2. Shift in eating habits. (pps.15-19).
Children are able to compensate for the loss of calories in a food which is sweetened by
intense sweeteners rather than sucrose. Thus young children demonstrate a sophisticated ability to
regulate their food intake using internal, physiological cues. However, the National Diet and
Nutrition Survey (Gregory et al., 1995) found that the majority of children aged four to five years
were consuming a high proportion of their diet such as soft drinks, biscuits, white bread, and
savoury snacks. Overall, children were consuming significantly more salt and sugar than is
recommended. There seems, therefore, to be a shift from regulating intake using internal controls
to a greater reliance on cues derived from external features of the diet such as palatability,
availability, and social factors. To study the critical time in the child’s development when internal
mechanisms of nutritional wisdom become less important than externally driven processes of
dietary choice, experimental work must focus on a longitudinal assessment of change from two
years to five years and a cross-sectional comparison of eating behaviour from infancy to early
adolescence. Such experimental work will address the stage when children might disregard internal
controls in favour of more externally mediated factors. The methodology proposed includes an
examination of caloric compensation across different age groups and within the same age group
over time. In this way competence of using internal controls will be mapped for individuals and
this can be monitored over time, when other factors competing for the child’s dietary habits might
influence intake. Secondly, by comparing across age groups, competence in using internal controls
can be evaluated as a function of age. We know, for example, that elderly people are much worse
than young adults at compensating for water loss and the question here is to identify changes in
compensatory behaviour over time.
Minor studies.
C2. The child’s understanding of advocatory communication. (pps.25, 33, 38).
Although much is already known about how the child understands the economic and
persuasive functions of advertising, there has been no work done on how children understand the
advocatory function of advertising. Advocatory communication occurs when an interested party
only communicates information that is supportive of a particular topic and avoids giving any
information about the negative aspects of that topic. Such communication occurs in an
interpersonal role, when an individual attempts to create a favourable impression in an interview
for example and occurs in promotional activity such as advertising. It is proposed that the
methodology already available on the child’s understanding of advertising intent, using both verbal
and non-verbal techniques, be modified to research this issue. There are several advantages in
investigating advocatory understanding in children. The research issue is framed in a general
theory of children’s understanding of a particular form of communicative intent that is found in
interpersonal and institutional forms. It is a neglected area. In addition it is of practical benefit as
information from this research will help us understand how children evaluate the various sources of
information and communications available on foods - informative and dispassionate as well as
advocatory and rhetorical.
C2. The influence of adjacent programme context on the effectiveness of food advertising.
(pps.73, 74).
This suggested study is an extension of work done in Canada by Goldberg et al. (1978).
Their methodology is well-established and involves presenting food advertisements in different
programme contexts, some of which are pro-nutritional. The different experimental conditions
have food choice after the experiment as the dependent variable. It is proposed to extend this to
include the dependent variable of food preference as well as food choice and see if the main result,
that a pro-nutrition programme containing commercials for sugared foods is more effective in
reducing the number of sugared foods selected than pro-nutrition public service announcements
embedded in a neutral programme, is valid in the UK in the 1990s. This research should contribute
to the debate concerning health communication strategies i.e. whether to press for a reduction
promotional activity for certain foods or increase health promotional activity.
C2. The role of other forms of promotional activity (for example, package designs and point-of-
sale displays) in influencing food preference and choice. (p.24).
Most of the research in the area of children and advertising has focussed on television
advertising to the exclusion of other kinds of promotional display. Research into these other forms
and the role they might play in influencing the child’s food consumer behaviour and food
preferences should be initiated. We would suggest that a preliminary survey of the range and types
of non-television advertising promotional activity be conducted and that some judgement of the
likelihood of influence is made before an assessment of the viability of any programme of research
in this area.
C2. Reasons for food shopping by children with parents and the role of the child in food
purchase decisions. (p.64).
We identified a confounding variable in the supermarket observation studies on purchase-
request behaviour which was the role of the child in family food shopping. Does the child, for
example, enter into supermarket decision-making or is the child taken along as an unwilling
partner? To what extent is the portfolio of family food purchases influenced by the child’s wants
and preferences? We would anticipate that research in this area would follow the procedures used
in market research with a preliminary qualitative stage using in-depth, focussed family interviews
to identify the range of questions to be asked in the consequent, quantitative stage of research
where structured interviews within a representative sampling frame would be employed.
C2. Private and public choice of food snacks. (p.79).
Galst (1980) used the ‘view-then-choose’ paradigm with children watching commercials or
pro-nutritional public service announcements then choosing a food in groups. A methodological
flaw here (choice was subject to peer group pressure) could be built into a design feature by
contrasting a public with peers choice condition against a private condition to obtain a measure of
peer group influence.
C2. Choice alternatives and brand choice in the ‘view-then-choose’ paradigm. (p.87).
An examination of this paradigm let us to the conclusion that results using this methodology
were sensitive to the range of alternatives that were presented at the time of choice. Whether the
child chooses the advertised brand or not will depend on the relative attractiveness of the other
offerings (a similar criticism of the Davis studies based on the range of alternatives was made). We
would recommend a systematic investigation of food selection as a function of different foods
offered, taking into account the relative attractiveness of alternatives.
C2. Children’s use of advertising as a cultural resource. (p.25).
We have argued that a dominant model in research into the role of food advertising in the
life of the child is one where advertising is seen as an external source of influence on the consumer
decisions of the individual child or her family. This model has limitations and we would advocate
an alternative approach which is not uncommon in other areas of media research. Children use
advertising as a cultural resource and, as such, it penetrates and is assimilated into their culture in
forms such as jokes, street games, and everyday talk. We would recommend a preliminary
investigation into the extent to which children use food advertising in this way. Focus group
interviews would appear to be the most appropriate methodology.
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APPENDICES.
Appendix 1.
Details on search strategy.
The principles of the search strategy are laid out at the beginning of this Report and more detail is
given here. We decided to limit our search to material that was published in academic journals and
available in the public domain. The justification for this in terms of peer group review is given in
the main text. We excluded theses. The reason for this is that PhD and MSc theses, although
examined, are not subject to peer review. Given the ethos which is now almost universal in the
academic community, it is highly likely that PhD candidates and graduates will have either
published aspects of their work in journals during their research or have published afterwards. For
example, Donkin’s work can be found in PhD form and also in two journals cited in the references
to this Report and it is the latter that we have taken as evidence. Some material from commercial
sources was made available to us. For example, a Report from The Qualitative Consultancy
entitled Children, Food and Advertising Qualitative Research presented to the Independent
Television Commission was examined. In our opinion, the quality of this work would not be
acceptable in an academic journal and consisted largely of common sense observations
substantiated with extensive quotations from transcripts of interviews. Consequently we did not
pursue the path of commercially funded research by independent consultants.
The academic field of ‘children and television advertising’ was reviewed in various Reports
emanating from work in the United States in the 1970s. The most well-known was by Adler and
others (Adler et al., 1977; 1980) although there are others such as a Report on the Federal Trade
Commission investigations (Elliott et al., 1981). This formed a basis for a subset of the literature
which dealt with the advertising of food products to children. Later reviews such as Young (1985,
1990) added to that base. So before any literature search was instigated there was a foundation on
which to build.
The literature search was based primarily on PsycLit which is a data base derived from
Psychological Abstracts. Keywords and combinations of keywords using CHI(REN),
TELEVISION, ADVERTISING, COMMERCIALS, FOOD, DIET were used exhaustively to
obtain relevant abstracts. A citation index called BIDS, covering scientific, medical, social science
and humanities, was used to trace other authors in the field who could be identified by name and
papers were obtained from Libraries and through InterLibrary Loans. On occasions the University
Library used DIALOG to obtain abstracts of papers and, if the content was relevant, the paper itself
was obtained. The references in this Report comprise a comprehensive list of papers in the field.
ADDENDUM
A Report by the National Food Alliance was published in December 1995. As much of the
substance of the NFA’s research dealt with the frequency and nutritional content of television
advertising in the UK to children and compared it with advertising directed to adult audiences, it
was felt appropriate to include a summary of their findings in our Report. It was only possible,
however, to include this summary as an addendum to the main body of the Report to MAFF rather
than incorporating it.
Dibb and Castell (1995) reported on the results of a survey of the frequency and nutritional
content of television advertising directed to children. They sampled advertising during one week in
June 1994 and one week in May 1995, looking at television commercials broadcast during after
school hours and on Saturday mornings on the main UK commercial channel (ITV). In addition
they sampled television commercials from The Big Breakfast, a UK Channel 4 early morning
programme that is watched across the age range and has a large child and teenage audience, and
late evening television when the child audience is negligible.
Results on frequency of food advertising during children’s programmes showed that about
70 per cent of all advertising during after school hours (op. cit.; Table 5) and about 55 per cent on
Saturday morning were for food products and services (op. cit.; Table 6). Fifty per cent of all
advertising during the Big Breakfast was similarly food-related (op. cit.; Table 7) whereas this
figure had fallen to about 20 per cent in the late evening period (op. cit.; Table 8).
Results on the content of food advertising by product category demonstrate the
predominance of breakfast cereals and confectionery as each category accounts for on average
approximately 20 per cent of advertised products.
Results on the nutritional content of such advertising were obtained by classifying food
products advertised as ‘high in fat, sugar or salt’ using the Coronary Prevention Group Banding
Scheme for foods with the criteria that “products that contained more than 49.5 per cent of calories
from fat were classified as ‘high in fat’, products with more than 25.5 per cent of calories from
sugar were classified as ‘high in sugar’ and products with more than 2.36g/10MJ sodium were
classified as high in salt” (op. cit.; p.10). Those products that were high in fat or sugar or salt
constituted the vast majority of foods advertised ranging from about 90 per cent in late evening to
100 per cent on ITV after schools in 1994 and Big Breakfast in 1995 (op. cit.; Table 11).
The results obtained by Dibb and Castell provide useful data on the content of television
food advertising to children and television food advertising in general in the context of the UK in
the mid-1990s. Sampling strategy is representative of weekly and daily variations but does not take
into account seasonal variations. The authors appear to implicitly recognise this when they state
that “the relatively high level of advertising for ice cream and lollies no doubt reflect the timing of
both surveys (early summer)” (op. cit.; p.18). Also it is based on the advertising output of one
region of the ITV network based on London and the South East of England and the output is not the
same nationwide. Nevertheless it is a valuable contribution to the body of data already available on
the frequency and content of television advertising to children.
Dibb, S. and Castell, A. (1995). Easy to Swallow, Hard to Stomach: The Results of a Survey of
Food Advertising on Television. London: The National Food Alliance.

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The Role of Television Advertising in Children’s Food Choice

Brian Young and Paul Webley

Marion Hetherington and Suzanne Zeedyk

The origins of eating behaviour in children 10

physiological requirements wants requests parental decision further requests

previous eating experiences

Who we looked at.

Eating behaviour occurs within physiological, psychological and sociocultural constraints. We

insert figure 1 here

insert figure 2 here

Early feeding experiences.

Social influences on food selection.

Evidence of cultural wisdom in food choice.

Young children’s exposure to foods is principally determined by caregivers (including parents,

The scope of advertising.

Advertising in its cultural context.

ADVERTISING LITERACY: HOW CHIREN DEVELOP AN UNDERSTANDING OF

Attention to television commercials.

Understanding the intent behind advertising.

Models of child development.

Understanding of pictorial representation.

Understanding others’ intentions.

WHAT’S ON? - THE FREQUENCY AND CONTENT OF TV FOOD ADVERTISEMENTS.

Review of research studies.

Analysis of research findings.

Recommendations for future research.

PURCHASE REQUESTS RESULTING FROM TV FOOD ADVERTISING.

Review of research studies.

Questionnaire and interview studies.

Supermarket observation studies.

Insert table 2 here

Analysis of research findings.

Recommendations for future research.

Review of research studies.

Analysis of research findings.

insert table 3 here

Recommendations for future research.

ADVERTISING’S INUENCE ON ATTITUDES AND VALUES.

Review of research studies.

Analysis of research findings.

Summary and conclusions of Part 2.

Frequency and content of TV food advertising to children.

Purchase request behaviour.

Advertising’s influence on food-related behaviour.

Advertising’s influence on attitudes and values.

4. Advertising cannot be regarded as an isolated source of influence and should be seen as

6. Children acquire different kinds of understanding of advertising at different ages. Current

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH.

When examining purchase-request behaviour, the research agenda should be extended to

C2. Categorisation of foods and food-related services by children. (pps.87, 88).

C2. Shift in eating habits. (pps.15-19).

C2. The child’s understanding of advocatory communication. (pps.25, 33, 38).

C2. Private and public choice of food snacks. (p.79).

C2. Children’s use of advertising as a cultural resource. (p.25).

Details on search strategy.

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