With nationwide concern for childhood obesity and an emphasis on the need for healthier lifestyles, food marketing has surfaced as a central environmental factor that shapes children's dietary behavior (Seiders and Petty 2007). Food marketers have increasingly targeted children with web-based approaches designed specifically to promote their branded food products. Free online games specifically designed to promote branded products, also known as advergames, integrate food brand identifiers (brand names, pictures of food and its packaging) into the games as key game play components (Lee et al. 2009, Moore and Rideout 2007). Food advergames most often promote non-nutritious food products (83.8%, Lee et al. 2009) and blur the line between advertising and entertainment, challenging the ability of children to notice and resist their persuasive intent and coming in under the radar of regulators and policy makers. The overall objective of this proposal is to identify the role of food advergames in determining children's dietary behaviors and health status. To achieve this objective, this project employs a multi-method approach that combines marketing research data establishing the prevalence of food advergame usage and user characteristics (e.g, SES) and experiments examining the causal, mediating, and moderating mechanisms of food advergames'influence on children. Linking the two data will allow us to explore multi-level factors associated with children's dietary behaviors. Three theoretical approaches will be integrated to create a unified approach: Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM), Parental Socialization Styles, and Social-Cognitive Theory (specifically participatory vs. observational learning). The overall objective will be achieved through research addressing the following specific aims:
Specific aim 1 : To identify the pervasiveness of food advergame play among different socio-demographic groups of children.
Specific aim 2 : To determine the mechanisms of influence that food advergames use to attract children to their brands and other outcomes of health status, dietary behaviors, and food and brand preferences as measured through self report, observational measures, and [parental reports of children's health status and diet-related behaviors]. By understanding and integrating the multi-level factors, including food advergame tactics, children's responses, parental characteristics, and dietary outcomes, we will contribute to work in this field in the following three ways. We will identify factors that can contribute to improved childhood dietary behavior, learn from commercial marketing techniques and apply those lessons to the development of positive communication strategies and modalities leading to healthy dietary behaviors. We will utilize a novel approach to address the problem of childhood obesity, that is to examine how effective the new marketing tactics are, how those tactics can be modified for positive outcomes, and contribute to public policy discussions of food marketing to children.
We will utilize a novel approach to address the problem of childhood obesity, examining the effectiveness of new online marketing tactics and how those tactics can be modified for positive outcomes. Our findings on the pervasiveness and effects of food advergames on children will contribute to ongoing public policy discussions regarding optimal approaches to improving children's dietary behavior by providing better understanding of the current and potential contributions of commercial marketing activities.
| Weatherspoon, Lorraine J; Quilliam, Elizabeth Taylor; Paek, Hye-Jin et al. (2013) Consistency of nutrition recommendations for foods marketed to children in the United States, 2009-2010. Prev Chronic Dis 10:E165 |
