In short
With the massive increase in online advertising, young people are increasingly targeted by marketing content that influences their food preferences and eating behaviors. This exposure represents a significant risk factor for their health, notably contributing to the development of diet-related diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.
The objective of this study is to assess adolescents’ exposure — either directly or through their parents — to such content via a secure and automated screen capture application developed by the WHO, and to better understand the strategies used by food companies to attract young consumers.
Project description
The rapid growth of advertising on social media is a growing public health concern, particularly in relation to adolescents. By influencing their preferences and eating behaviors, this type of marketing contributes to the rise of diet-related non-communicable diseases. Advertising content is now disseminated across a wide variety of platforms and personalized based on users’ sociodemographic profiles (profiling), making digital marketing both ubiquitous and difficult to regulate. Therefore, the development of new methodological approaches to analyze advertising exposure on social media is essential. Among these, direct observation through screen captures appears to be a promising method to more accurately document the food-related advertising content to which adolescents and their families are exposed.
The aim is to demonstrate the extent of direct or indirect exposure of adolescents to advertising for unhealthy foods and beverages, as well as the ‘power’ of the ads to which adolescents and parents are exposed, with the goal of advocating for effective restrictions on such marketing practices in Belgium. Furthermore, the study seeks to measure the potential (in)effectiveness of the current self-regulation by the industry.
The KidAd study will help improve our understanding of the impact and influence of harmful food and beverage marketing on adolescents, in order to support the development of evidence-based policy.
Researchers expect that adolescents and parents are heavily exposed to unhealthy foods and beverages. They assume that companies use targeted marketing strategies to make products appealing to adolescents or to persuade parents to purchase them. Considerations on the use of various classification systems to reduce this type of marketing are also proposed.
