Contemporary Approaches for Monitoring Food Marketing to Children to Progress Policy Actions

Abstract

Purpose of Review Protecting children from unhealthful food marketing is a global priority policy for improving population diets. Monitoring the nature and extent of children’s exposure to this marketing is critical in policy development and implementation. This review summarises contemporary approaches to monitor the nature and extent of food marketing to support policy reform. Recent Findings Monitoring approaches vary depending on the stage of progress of related policy implementation, with resource implications and opportunity costs. Considerations include priority media/settings. marketing techniques assessed, approach to classifying foods, study design and if exposure assessments are based on media content analyses or are estimated or observed based on children’s media use. Summary Current evidence is largely limited to high-income countries and focuses on content analyses of TV advertising. Ongoing efforts are needed to support monitoring in low-resource settings and to progress monitoring to better capture children’s actual exposures across media and settings.

Associations between social media, adolescent mental health, and diet: A systematic review

“…The CLICK framework by the WHO Regional Office for Europe also outlines a guide for the evaluation of actual social media exposure (focused on digital marketing of ultra-processed foods) through a focus on its specific features and recommends screen captures as the best way to document them. 8,61 However, to date only a small number of published studies have done so as per the CLICK methodology. 62,63 4.3 | Review strengths, limitations, and future research…”

“…Identifying the features that are the most informative based on consultations with adolescents and research evidence would help make both research and policy recommendations more useful and efficient. The CLICK framework by the WHO Regional Office for Europe also outlines a guide for the evaluation of actual social media exposure (focused on digital marketing of ultra‐processed foods) through a focus on its specific features and recommends screen captures as the best way to document them 8,61 . However, to date only a small number of published studies have done so as per the CLICK methodology 62,63 …”

Development and testing of two tools to assess point-of-sale food and beverage marketing to children in restaurants

“…As noted, relevant tobacco industry history demonstrates that as different promotional activities were banned, tobacco companies shifted to different marketing strategies to continue communicating brand imagery (12)(13)(14) . Indeed, monitoring M2K is critical for both policy development and implementation across settings (10) .…”

“…Both showed high inter-rater reliability and can be adapted to better suit other national contexts. Ongoing M2K monitoring is necessary during policy implementation to ensure compliance and policy enforcement (10) . Given the current policy context in Canada, monitoring marketing in restaurants will be an especially important undertaking given the likelihood that point-of-sale restaurant M2K will likely evolve, which has implications for youths' dietary intake.…”

Revolutionising food advertising monitoring: a machine learning-based method for automated classification of food videos

“…The relevance of our study’s approach to automating the monitoring process of food marketing can address the challenges posed by collecting and analysing large volumes of data. Traditionally, studies have been limited to small samples due to the resource-intensive nature of the data collection and analysis process (21) . This limitation makes it difficult to monitor ads systematically across different media, time periods and population groups, hindering the ability to compare findings across countries.…”