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1

2 FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION

3 DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES

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5

6 PERSPECTIVES ON MARKETING, SELF-REGULATION 

7 AND CHILDHOOD OBESITY

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12 Friday, July 15, 2005

13 8:34 a.m.

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17

18 Federal Trade Commission

19 FTC Conference Center

20 601 New Jersey Avenue, N.W.

21 Washington, D.C.

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1 FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION

2 DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES

3

4 I N D E X

5

6 Welcome by Lesley Fair, Federal Trade Commission -- 3

7

8 Remarks by Commissioner Thomas B. Leary -- 5

9

10 Remarks by Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona -- 6

11

12 Panel 4: Current Self-Regulatory and Other Standards for

13 Marketing Food to Children -- 31

14

15 Panel 5: What Should the Government and the Private

16 Sector do to Help Make Children’s Diets Healthier and

17 Encourage Responsible Marketing -- 101

18

19 Remarks by Dr. Michael O’Grady -- 170

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21 Remarks by Lydia B. Parnes -- 173

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1 P R O C E E D I N G S

2 - - - - -

3 MS. FAIR: Good morning. And on behalf of the

4 Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal

5 Trade Commission, welcome back to the second day of our

6 two-day workshop, Perspectives on Marketing, Self7 Regulation and Childhood Obesity.

8 My name is Lesley Fair from the Bureau of

9 Consumer Protection. I think most of you are returning

10 from yesterday, but just in case we have some newcomers,

11 let me briefly remind you of a few of our security

12 guidelines. First and foremost, you must wear your

13 nametag at all times in order to remain here. If you

14 leave the building for any reason, you will need to have

15 to go back through the security screening process.

16 Also, as a number of you realized yesterday,

17 our microphones are very, very sensitive, even in that

18 back soundboard hallway where the sound staff is located,

19 and unless you wish your phone conversations to be on the

20 public record in this event, please step over to the

21 lobby or step outside if you need to make a call.

22 We will have another open forum session from

23 10:30 to 11:00 today. If you are interested in signing

24 up, the sign-up period at the registration desk will be

25 from 9:00 to 10:00 this morning. Remember, the three-
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1 minute limitation. We ask only one person from an

2 organization to speak. And that will take place

3 immediately after the first panel of the morning. So, we

4 would ask you to sign up between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. 

5 Operators will be standing by at the registration desk to

6 take care of you.

7 Finally, I don't know about you, but I was

8 pretty impressed with the research that the Sesame Street

9 workshop presented yesterday. They showed some slides

10 and showed that preschool children ate broccoli at only

11 about a 20 percent level, but when accompanied by an

12 endorsement from Elmo, their preference shot up. I think

13 you all remember that.

14 We did some of our own market research last

15 night. And we found out that in adults over 21, over 37

16 percent complied with the moderator’s request to turn off

17 their cell phones. But when that same request was made

18 with an endorsement by Elmo, compliance skyrocketed. So

19 thank you very much for complying with that right now.

20 On this second day of this very important

21 workshop, it is my particular honor to welcome

22 Commissioner Thomas Leary of the Federal Trade

23 Commission.

24 (Applause).

25 COMMISSIONER LEARY: We're going to have
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1 welcomes and welcomes here because the first thing I'm

2 supposed to do is welcome you all to the Federal Trade

3 Commission. And my second delightful chore of the

4 morning is to introduce our first speaker, the Surgeon

5 General, Richard Carmona. And I don't know how many of

6 you know the biography of this guy. In one minute, I'm

7 not going to be able to give you a flavor. Go to the

8 website.

9 Here's somebody who apparently was too bored to

10 even finish high school, so he drops out of high school

11 and he joins the Army and he goes to Vietnam in the

12 Special Forces and wins a bunch of medals over there and

13 then decides he wants to become a doctor. So, he comes

14 back and he gets a B.S. and a medical degree within two

15 years of each other. I don't know how you do that, quite

16 frankly.

17 But he not only gets a medical degree but he

18 winds up first in his class, okay? The next thing you

19 know, why, I see he's in some county sheriff's department

20 in Arizona and he's not only a surgeon in the county

21 sheriff's department but also apparently a member of the

22 SWAT team, which is kind of an odd combination. I guess

23 you kind of control your intake. It's very strange.

24 (Laughter).

25 COMMISSIONER LEARY: And then he does a lot of
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1 other interesting stuff and winds up the Surgeon General

2 of the United States. For me, the intriguing thing is I

3 don't know what to call him. Of course he's a doctor,

4 been a doctor for 35 years, so we could call him doctor. 

5 If he stayed in the Special Forces, I assume he would

6 have been a general.

7 And a Surgeon General, probably some of your

8 friends in social settings call you general and, I don't

9 know, I kind of like to call you Sheriff. That's really

10 not -- I had a great-grandfather who was a sheriff, and

11 it's got kind of a frontier ring to it. I like that

12 title sheriff. And then as you can see, he wears sort of

13 -- wears the uniform of a Vice Admiral in the United

14 States Navy. So, I guess you'd be called Admiral.

15 I think probably the only thing to do really is

16 I'll call you sir, if you don't mind. And, so, sir, I

17 want to welcome you to the Federal Trade Commission. And

18 I know we want to hear what you have to say. Thank you.

19 (Applause.)

20 SURGEON GENERAL CARMONA: Well, thank you for

21 that introduction. I feel like I should go home now. I

22 guess when you find out your Surgeon General was a high

23 school dropout, that doesn't engender a lot of

24 confidence. So, you know, if I had the time, I'd like to

25 explain away a lot of those things, but rest assured that
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1 my high school, 37 years ago I left and I didn't

2 graduate, but last year, they invited me back and I did

3 get my high school diploma, so I am a high school

4 graduate now.

5 (Applause.)

6 SURGEON GENERAL CARMONA: And of course I have

7 had many jobs, as you heard. All of them have helped me

8 to be a better Surgeon General, however, generally when

9 those things come out people wonder -- half the people

10 probably think, well, that's pretty cool, this is a very

11 successful person; and the other half wonder if this is

12 just a person that couldn't keep a job. And I think

13 there's probably some truth on both sides.

14 Well, good morning, and thank you for allowing

15 me to visit with you this morning to deal with some of

16 these very big problems of childhood obesity. As you

17 know, as the Surgeon General of the United States, my job

18 is to protect and advance the health of the nation. I do

19 that through the best science in the world, through all

20 of our operating divisions, many of my colleagues you've

21 heard from, National Institutes of Health, CDC and many

22 other of the 68,000 or so employees within the Department

23 of Health and Human Services who help to move this agenda

24 forward.

25 But what we know today is that 16 percent of
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1 our children, almost 9 million children in this country

2 are overweight or obese. Two out of three Americans are

3 overweight or obese. The clock is ticking as these risk

4 factors accumulate in this population that continues to

5 get heavier, risk factors for cardiovascular disease, for

6 cancer. Now, we can track these trends over the last

7 several decades. This didn't just happen in a year or

8 two years or even a decade. But you can go back and look

9 at epidemiologic trends really beginning around the

10 second World War and after and see the culture change,

11 the American culture change, to becoming a little bit

12 more sedentary, a little less physical activity, a little

13 bit more indiscriminate eating.

14 So, when you look back, of course,

15 retrospectoscope is always 20/20. You can say, gee, we

16 should have anticipated this. Well, the fact is that

17 many people spoke about it, but as they say in

18 Washington, it didn't get a lot of traction for a while. 

19 And now it's an epidemic, and it really has caught on and

20 is a significant problem.

21 When we look at the variables that contribute

22 to this problem, there are many, but what we do know is

23 that the average kid is watching TV several hours a day. 

24 We know that the average kid spends far more time on

25 Playstations than they do on playgrounds; and physical
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1 activity is a big part -- or lack of physical activity is

2 a big part of this.

3 What we're seeing is Generation Y is quickly

4 becoming Generation XL.

5 (Laughter.)

6 SURGEON GENERAL CARMONA: We must remember that

7 the best role models that a child has are the parents. 

8 And I recognize the difficulty in parenting today; and I

9 recognize that almost half the families in this country

10 may have only one parent, but nevertheless, that parent

11 or parents play a very significant role in the life of

12 that child, because even without stating anything,

13 children often model their behavior eventually after

14 their parents. And if parents are inactive, if parents

15 are snacking, if parents are not practicing good health

16 habits, children will inevitably do the same.

17 I often jokingly say to my colleagues, when we

18 speak about these issues, well, it's pretty easy, if you

19 want to see what this child will look like in 20 years,

20 look across the couch in the living room every night and

21 see what those parents are doing. And if the parent is

22 overweight, if the parent is snacking, if the parent is

23 not practicing good health habits, why would you think

24 the child would do otherwise? So, let's not forget the

25 importance of parenting and role models and mentors with
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1 our children.

2 Children need to get at least an hour of

3 physical activity a day; and adults we suggest 30

4 minutes. Yet we are plagued with a rash of school

5 districts that are eliminating physical activity. Much

6 of what I do every day is to try and convince health

7 districts, health administrators, principals, large

8 organizations that represent all of the stakeholders that

9 you must think about the untoward consequences of your

10 policies when you decrease physical activities in

11 schools. And children who then spend hours on TV,

12 children who eat indiscriminately, children who don't get

13 any physical activity, which could go on for years at a

14 time, don't be surprised that they may be overweight.

15 When I became Surgeon General about three years

16 ago, the President, President Bush, challenged me with a

17 portfolio that was fairly wide, diverse, but very

18 strongly evidence-based. The first thing in that

19 portfolio that he passionately spoke to me about was

20 prevention, that we needed to become a nation that

21 embraces prevention as much as or more than we embrace

22 care.

23 In my own experience, I understand that because

24 before being Surgeon General, as I jokingly say to my

25 colleagues also, I used to be a real doctor, now I just
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1 play one on TV. But when I was a real doctor taking care

2 of individuals and not populations that I have the

3 responsibility for as today, I was a trauma surgeon, an

4 emergency physician. And every day, I would see the

5 gurneys roll into the hospital and two or three out of

6 every four patients that I admitted didn't have to be in

7 that hospital.

8 It creates a huge disease burden and an

9 economic burden on our society. And it's about people

10 who made bad decisions that day, if you look at the list

11 of reasons why they came in: drunk driving, domestic

12 violence, all of the acute things, crime, drugs, alcohol. 

13 But then there were chronic things, people who didn't

14 value physical activity; people who didn't take care of

15 their health over the years; people who engaged in high16 risk activities. But the sum total of that was that body

17 shows up in front of you and we're expected to take the

18 most extraordinary science that this country has ever

19 known, apply it to that individual, to save their life at

20 a huge cost, and of course we pride ourselves on saving

21 someone. You come into that emergency room with a pulse,

22 we're going to save you, maybe in spite of yourself.

23 And of course, as surgeons, our discharge

24 criteria was rather simple: the patient was upright, the

25 patient was afebrile, patient ate, patient had a bowel
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1 movement, we sent them home. But what did we do to

2 change their behavior? Not much. Chances are they're

3 going to cycle back through the system and come back with

4 the same heart attack, congestive failure, co-morbidity

5 of obesity, and that disease burden continues to mount

6 and that economic burden continues to mount, and yet most

7 of it is preventable.

8 So, from a personal standpoint, I understand

9 it, having been in those trenches. In fact, that's what

10 drove me into public health over a decade ago, seeing how

11 much of what I was caring for was preventable. So,

12 prevention is first on our agenda.

13 Second is preparedness, and I won't spend a lot

14 of time on that, but suffice it to say that the new world

15 order dictates that we all have to learn, citizens and

16 professionals, that planes can now be weapons; that

17 pathogens are weapons; that the world has changed; that

18 the sense of security and maybe complacency that we had

19 throughout our lives is gone. And, so, the President has

20 directed us to get our citizens ready, train our firemen,

21 train our police, train our soldiers, our sailors, our

22 Coast Guardmen, our airmen, to be better prepared, to

23 prevent, to mitigate, to respond to all hazards and

24 emergencies.

25 The third area the President was passionate
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1 about that I am so happy he felt as I did was the issue

2 of health disparities. Health disparities, as you know,

3 simply represented, are the fact that generally people of

4 color in this country, what we might call minorities,

5 have less access to healthcare and when they do have that

6 access, typically they have poorer outcomes. But when we

7 look at certain diseases, when we look at obesity, which

8 is what we're speaking of today, we see disproportionate

9 representation, often in the minority populations. And

10 with that obesity comes more cardiovascular disease,

11 comes more loss of quality of life, comes increased cost

12 of care, and the list just goes on and on and on,

13 disproportionately represented.

14 Now, why am I so passionate about that? Well,

15 I was one of those poor Latino kids. As you heard, I

16 dropped out of high school. I was first-generation born

17 in this country. My grandmother came here with 27

18 children and no money and settled in a tenement in New

19 York City. And I am her grandson. So, one generation

20 removed, we go from a whole family with no education who

21 are laborers to producing a Surgeon General. It's a

22 pretty extraordinary country.

23 But yet I understand first-hand the inequities

24 of disparities, having had to go to public hospitals

25 myself, having had to struggle with a mother who was too
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1 proud to take welfare but yet wanted her kids to prosper

2 in this country but she struggled every single day,

3 including her substance problems. So, those issues are

4 really real to me because I lived them and now I feel I

5 have an obligation socially, morally and ethically to try

6 and change that.

7 As the President has said to me, we really

8 don't want to reduce health disparities, we really should

9 be shooting to eliminate health disparities. We need to

10 level the playing field in this country.

11 Prevention, preparedness, health disparities,

12 those are probably the three things that take up most of

13 my time, on behalf of the President and Secretary

14 Leavitt, but there's a common currency that we need to

15 use to be successful in all of those endeavors, and that

16 is health literacy, because we are largely a health17 illiterate country. The fact of the matter is is that

18 the average person doesn't understand the health messages

19 we give them. We tell them to eat healthy, yet how many

20 people can go to the store and look at the food label and

21 understand and know the difference between a gram of

22 protein or a gram of fat or how much of this or how much

23 of that I should eat?

24 Yet my challenge every day is not enough

25 science, because I have an enviable Rolodex. I have the
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1 best consultants in the world in everything. And I have

2 a lot of questions every day, as the Surgeon General of

3 the United States. But I can call the world's expert on

4 almost every subject and within minutes be schooled up on

5 whatever the issue is. What I lack is the translational

6 element, how to deliver the best science in a culturally

7 competent manner to the diverse populations that I have

8 the privilege of serving. That's the bottom line.

9 And I go back to my own childhood and remember

10 those lessons, because as a little kid going to doctors,

11 going to the Social Security office with my grandmother

12 who spoke no English, with my aunts and uncles who spoke

13 no English, yet as a seven, eight, nine, ten-year-old

14 boy, I was their interpreter. How much could I really

15 understand and interpret to adults who are trying to

16 convey complex social and medical and economic problems? 

17 Not likely.

18 So, I understand those things very well, but we

19 have to figure out a way to better engage the populations

20 that we serve. And paradoxically, what I see every day,

21 the very strength that we have in this country, as the

22 United States of America, which is founded on diversity,

23 is often what separates us and makes it even more

24 difficult for all of us to do our job. That's why we're

25 all here, to come together and figure out what are the
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1 best things to do to make this country healthier, to make

2 this country safer, to reduce the cost of care, to

3 improve the quality, all of those things. And, again,

4 many of those lessons I will tell you as it relates to

5 disparity and cultural competence, I learned from a lady

6 we called our Aleta, who was my grandmother, who had no

7 education, but thinking back to how she purchased her

8 food, how she cooked her food, the best cook in the

9 world, but it probably wasn't healthy, because one of the

10 first things I remember to this day, when she started

11 cooking, it was a big thing of lard in the back of the

12 refrigerator that got thrown into the frying pan.

13 (Laughter).

14 SURGEON GENERAL CARMONA: Yet it was great. 

15 So, we must not forget the culture that brings us all

16 together often divides us, because what grandmother

17 taught you, you teach to your children, and that cultural

18 norm continues, from purchasing the food, to cooking the

19 food, to eating the food, and it's a very sensitive issue

20 to go to somebody's culture and say don't do it that way

21 anymore. In fact, there's pushback often. So, we have

22 to be very sensitive in how we do that.

23 This year, the Department of Agriculture and

24 the Department of Health & Human Services released the

25 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. It's on-line and
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1 it's in a brochure. Hopefully, this will help to

2 increase health literacy. We are doing all we can. I

3 know in every report I do now is a Surgeon General Call4 to-Action, Surgeon General reports, there is a people's

5 piece that is written at a sixth or seventh-grade level,

6 because my goal is to communicate with the biggest

7 medical population in the world. My practice, 300

8 million people. And I have to get it to them in the

9 right way so that they understand it. My messages will

10 fail, the science that my colleagues give me to give to

11 my citizens will fail, unless I can engage that public,

12 unless they see this information and feel it and make the

13 changes that are necessary to improve their health.

14 We have to think out of the box. We have to

15 start using community health workers; we have to use

16 promoters. People with credibility in the community

17 sometimes do far better than advanced-degree health

18 professionals who have no credibility in that community. 

19 So, reaching out to the faith-based community, getting

20 the promoters, getting the community health workers. And

21 the literature is very strong in this area that shows you

22 can really change the health and status of a community

23 using community health workers if you do it wisely and

24 apply the science in a culturally competent manner. And

25 this issue of obesity lends itself to that type of a
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1 thought process.

2 This year, we proclaimed it to be the year of

3 the healthy child. Eighty-two percent of our 70 or so

4 million children are pretty healthy, but we shouldn't be

5 complacent, because as you do a gap analysis across the

6 board, you find holes where we still have pockets of

7 increased morbidity and mortality, cost of health care,

8 that need to be addressed.

9 We're looking at all aspects of a child's life,

10 from body, mind, spirit. We're looking at breastfeeding,

11 we're looking at immunizations, oral health, prevention

12 of drug, alcohol, smoking, injury prevention, which is a

13 big one. If you're a baby and you make it through

14 infections and genetic problems, chances are if you don't

15 make it to your adolescent or teen years, it's trauma

16 that's going to kill you, and almost all of it's

17 preventable.

18 We started a 50/50 program, where I

19 symbolically go into every state. We pick a school; I

20 try and pick a school in generally the lowest

21 socioeconomic area, the ones with the worst metrics for

22 quality of life; and spend hours, if not a day, there;

23 get on the lunch line with the kids; see what they're

24 thinking; why are they buying this food; speak to the

25 teachers, the school administrators; why do you do things
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1 this way, get a better understanding.

2 And I wish I could go to every school in the

3 country, but we symbolically pick one. We hope to get

4 enough press and coverage to raise the issue in that

5 state, and a lot of it has to do with obesity and healthy

6 habits and physical activity, engaging the children,

7 engaging the parents and the schools. The 50/50 program

8 has been very successful.

9 We talk about staying in school, because the

10 fact of the matter is a third of our minority kids drop

11 out of high school -- in some places up to half,

12 depending on which 'hood you're looking at. And yet we

13 want a diversified workforce. The best chance for us to

14 be successful in the future is to have that diversified

15 workforce with culturally diverse people who represent

16 all disciplines, because that's the people that will get

17 into those communities and understand that culture and

18 really shake it up and change it.

19 Some guy showing up with a couple of degrees

20 who doesn't understand the culture is probably not going

21 to have a lot of effect. So, it's extraordinarily

22 important we keep our kids in school, we get them out of

23 high school and graduate. We have no change of having a

24 diverse workforce, especially in the sciences. Right

25 now, we're graduating about -- about a third of our
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1 doctoral students in this country come from foreign

2 countries. We are certainly helping a lot of people, but

3 not helping ourselves. We've got to keep our own kids in

4 school.

5 We are supporting the First Lady's efforts to

6 make a difference in youth by bringing together parents,

7 child advocacy groups, policy makers and everybody who

8 has an impact on a child's life. We've created

9 partnerships with the American Academy of Pediatrics,

10 Campbell's Soups, others, and the SAY program, the

11 Shaping America's Youth. My friend and colleague, former

12 Surgeon General David Satcher, has a program with the

13 National Football League, which we've partnered with to

14 promote school-based solutions to obesity.

15 Nike, LeBron James, Mia Hamm, Freddie Adoo and

16 the Nike P.E. to Go Program provides equipment and

17 expertise to schools, many schools who otherwise wouldn't

18 have P.E. teachers for their children to stay physically

19 active. ESPN and girls and boys clubs, Play your Way

20 program, and focusing on physical activity and health

21 today and for the future. All of these programs have

22 that in common. Teaching our children to make healthy

23 choices, stay physically active and eat a balanced diet.

24 We must be careful not to stigmatize the

25 overweight or obese youth. Don't blame them; encourage
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1 them to make healthier choices. Set the example

2 yourself. Remember that there are significant mental

3 health consequences. There's loss of self-confidence,

4 self-esteem for those children who are struggling. We

5 see the problem, one epidemiologically, as a number, but

6 this kid has to live that every day and typically they're

7 ostracized, they don't play in the games, they're not the

8 first one chosen, if they get chosen at all, when games

9 are being played. It's a tough life for a kid who is

10 overweight or obese, because they don't fit into this

11 streamlined society that we have today.

12 So, be sensitive. Help them along, because

13 they are struggling also. They don't want to be that

14 way. The President has given all of us who work for him

15 a charge: Help Americans live longer, healthier lives

16 and do it in a way that maintains our economic

17 competitiveness as a nation.

18 On behalf of President Bush and Secretary

19 Leavitt, I want to thank you for coming together to

20 discuss the best practices and the approaches we should

21 take as a nation to eliminate this epidemic of obesity. 

22 Together with your help, we can ensure the best possible

23 health and the greatest productivity and independence for

24 all of our children. Thank you very much.

25 (Applause.)
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1 COMMISSIONER LEARY: Well, that's a wake-up,

2 isn't it? I just want to take a few minutes to give you

3 some purely personal perspective on what I see the role

4 of the Federal Trade Commission in this battle, number

5 one, as a law enforcer; and number two, as an agency that

6 encourages private initiatives to help cope with this

7 problem, among many others. And I think maybe the best

8 way to do that would be to give you some basic scenarios.

9 The first basic scenario addresses deceptive

10 advertising of any product, whether it's a healthy

11 product or an unhealthy product, or whether it is

12 advertised to young people or the population at large. 

13 In general, the Federal Trade Commission has the

14 authority to prosecute cases of deceptive advertising,

15 across the board.

16 And it doesn't matter as far as the basic

17 authority is concerned whether the advertising is to

18 youth or to the general population. Where the

19 advertising to youth is concerned, there may be some

20 difference in the definition of what is deceptive,

21 because something that to an adult may merely be harmless

22 exaggeration or what we'd say in the advertising

23 community "puffing," to a child may be real. So, the

24 standard for deception can be a little bit different, but

25 the authority is there across the board.
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1 What about private self-regulation targeted at

2 deception? The issue here is a competition/anti-trust

3 issue and it invokes -- what we’re talking about now when

4 we’re talking about private activity, we’re talking about

5 essentially the two wings of the Federal Trade

6 Commission’s authority and the reason why I personally

7 have always believed the Federal Trade Commission is

8 uniquely qualified to deal with some of these issues.

9 The anti-trust/competition issue reflects a

10 broad suspicion of private law-making because private

11 law-making has been too often historically associated

12 with efforts to repress competition that is disruptive,

13 and the best example I could cite for an audience here

14 would be the codes of ethics of our own legal profession,

15 which finally were addressed by the Supreme Court a

16 little over 30 years ago.

17 So, that’s the source of the suspicion, that

18 private activity, while ostensibly directed at deception,

19 is really directed at aggressive competitive activity,

20 and that was the basis for the California Dental case,

21 which the Supreme Court held against the Commission a few

22 years ago. The Commission brought a case against an

23 ethical code of the California dentists, which was aimed

24 at restricting facially false and deceptive advertising,

25 but which, in its actual application, was much more
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1 broadly directed at disruptive price advertising and

2 quality advertising of all kinds.

3 So, the lesson from the California Dental case

4 is not that the Federal Trade Commission is going to jump

5 on you if you have an advertising code and enforce it,

6 directed at deception; the lesson from it is that you

7 ought to enforce your code as written and not more

8 broadly to suppress unwanted competition, and as you all

9 know, there are many advertising codes in existence out

10 there that we affirmatively support that address

11 deception, among other things. The Better Business

12 Bureau, the Direct Marketing Association. 

13 A good very recent example close to home are

14 the initiatives that the Federal Trade Commission

15 undertook beginning about two years ago to address phony

16 weight loss products with appeals to the media, through

17 private initiatives, not to run ads that are patently

18 false. And we weren’t asking them to apply any high

19 science, we were simply asking them to refuse to run

20 advertising that was so obviously false that anybody

21 ought to know it and be able to recognize it, and they

22 published the booklet on the so-called red flag claims,

23 and we have encouraged them to do it in talks to groups

24 of them. And if they want to do it collectively and if

25 that’s the only way to do it, I promise you, they’re not
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1 going to get any trouble from the Federal Trade

2 Commission, provided it’s done, as I said, focusing on

3 the problem at hand and not more broadly.

4 I remember one time I was talking at a meeting

5 in New York and they were saying -- people in the

6 publishing community, they were saying, well, you’re

7 asking us to apply technical science and that’s not our

8 job in reviewing ads. I said, it’s not technical

9 science. I said, would you run in a responsible

10 publication an advertisement for some kind of a belt that

11 would offset the law of gravity and enable people to

12 commute to work over the bottleneck, you see. You

13 wouldn’t run an ad like that, would you? No, of course

14 we wouldn’t. Why not? It violates fundamental physics. 

15 Ah-ha. Same thing is true for ads that you promise you

16 can lose weight without diet or exercise. It violates

17 the fundamental laws of physics. Think of it in the same

18 way and apply the same standards.

19 Now, scenario number two, a little bit more

20 complicated. Non-deceptive advertising of an unhealthy

21 product, assuming we can define what an unhealthy product

22 is. Generally, the Federal Trade Commission today does

23 not have the authority to bar the advertising, the non24 deceptive advertising of a product that may be unhealthy. 

25 Now, there’s a caveat there again. In some areas, an
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1 advertisement that is literally true can be deceptive if

2 it impliedly makes a health claim. In other words, if

3 you literally state whatever the content of a particular

4 food may be so that you imply in the ad that this is

5 healthy food because it’s only got X grams of whatever,

6 but if it has some other unhealthy attribute and you are

7 impliedly claiming it is a healthy food, even through a

8 literally true statement, we may charge you with

9 deception.

10 Now, what about non-deceptive ads directed at

11 minors? The outcome there may depend on whether or not

12 it is legal to sell the product to a minor or not. If it

13 is clearly illegal to sell a product to a minor, the FTC

14 can and has acted under its unfairness authority. I

15 think of the Camel Cigarette case, for example. Ads

16 obviously targeted at minors, no deception involved. 

17 Actually, there was really no content to the ads at all,

18 they were just funny cartoons, but they were aimed at

19 minors or the theory of the complaint was that they were

20 aimed at minors. There was no deception, but it was

21 unfair to advertise an illegal product to minors.

22 If the product is legal, if it’s legal to sell

23 the product to minors, the FTC will act only in

24 extraordinary circumstances. As a general proposition,

25 that is outside the scope of our authority. We did have
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1 a case a number of years ago of non-deceptive advertising

2 encouraging kids to make 900 calls at home without

3 parental supervision and there was nothing illegal about

4 the products that were being advertised. The unfairness

5 was encouraging kids to incur telephone charges at home

6 without the parents knowing about it. It was ultimately

7 folded into -- the principle to that case became part of

8 the 900 number rule, which is now a rule. And so, you do

9 have some regulation there of non-deceptive advertising

10 of products that are perfectly legal with lack of

11 parental supervision. But, in general, we’re not in that

12 business.

13 You may remember -- some of you with long

14 memories may remember the famous KidVid controversy going

15 back about 25 years where the Federal Trade Commission

16 took it upon itself to consider whether or not it would

17 ban as unfair non-deceptive advertisements to kids of

18 unhealthy food like sweet cereals and things like that,

19 and it’s a long, painful history. I’ll just summarize

20 it. We got our head handed to us and we’re not likely to

21 do that again in the near future.

22 What about self-regulation aimed at non23 deceptive advertising or promotion or sale of unhealthy

24 stuff? And, again, if the sales would be illegal, it’s

25 an easier case. It is done today -- for example, you
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1 have industry codes. A good example is the liquor

2 industry, which has an industry code directed at limiting

3 the exposure of minors to advertising of alcohol, which,

4 of course, is illegal for them to buy. If the sales to

5 minors would be legal, it’s a harder case, but my

6 personal view is that private restrictions are possible

7 if they are carefully tailored to address the problem at

8 hand and there is no obvious commercial motivation.

9 Now, let me give you an example that will

10 illustrate the difference. We do have advertising codes

11 right now dealing with the promotion of adult video games

12 or R-rated films to children. It’s non-deceptive. It’s

13 not illegal to sell children adult video games or not

14 illegal to admit children to R-rated movies, but there

15 are nevertheless codes that are aimed at restricting

16 promotion of those products to children and we’re not

17 about to challenge them as anti-trust offenses.

18 But let me give you an example -- even, by the

19 way, we’re not going to challenge them even if a

20 spillover effect of self-regulation of that kind might be

21 somewhat higher prices. However, assume hypothetically

22 that a group of sellers got together and said, well, one

23 way to restrict children’s access to these legal products

24 is to engage in a price-fixing conspiracy and price the

25 kids out of the market. It might be very effective. We
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1 would attack that as an anti-trust violation. Why? 

2 Because it’s not targeted to the problem at hand and

3 there’s an obvious commercial motivation.

4 So, what’s the conclusion? The conclusion I

5 want to leave with you is that there is a greater scope

6 for self-regulation than you might think and there are

7 many examples out there of self-regulation engaged in

8 with the acquiescence and encouragement of the Federal

9 Trade Commission. And if you’re getting overly cautious

10 anti-trust advice, come to us and we’ll give you an

11 advisory opinion that may surprise you.

12 The second lesson I want to -- my personal --

13 my purely personal view is, and I haven’t discussed this

14 with my colleagues, is I am not all that enthusiastic

15 about the idea of giving the Federal Trade Commission

16 greater authority than it has today to regulate in the

17 area of non-deceptive promotion of unhealthy food to

18 kids. And maybe that reflects the Libertarian in me, but

19 I simply am not comfortable with that reach of federal

20 authority and I really don’t want to be part of a nanny

21 agency or a nanny state. And that’s all I have to say to

22 you this morning. I thank you, again, for being here for

23 this lively discussion.

24 (Applause.)

25 MS. FAIR: Thank you very much, Commissioner
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1 Leary, and thank you to Admiral Carmona for putting

2 things into perspective for us this morning. 

3 I’d like to ask the members of the first panel

4 to approach so we can get started. I would also remind

5 them again to speak directly into the mic, since that’s

6 the only way we have to create our public record. The

7 other usual disclaimer, the same reminder of yesterday,

8 that statements of HHS and FTC staff reflect their

9 opinions and are not necessarily the official positions

10 of their agency. 

11 I’d like to remind you that we’ll use the same

12 question procedure that we used yesterday. Staff will be

13 coming through with an array of question cards. If you

14 have questions for this panel, please fill one out and

15 we’ll do our best to address that. 

16 The final issue is just to remind you that you

17 have until 10:00 a.m. to sign up at the registration desk

18 to participate in the open forum that will happen

19 immediately after this panel.

20 Let me introduce our two moderators for this

21 panel. First is Dick Kelly, a senior attorney with the

22 FTC’s Division of Advertising Practices. Next to him is

23 Dr. Barbara Schneeman, Director of the Office of

24 Nutritional Products, Labeling and Dietary Supplements in

25 the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the
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1 Food and Drug Administration. They have way better

2 titles than we do, I got to say.

3 Let me turn things over to Mr. Kelly and Dr.

4 Schneeman.

5 PANEL 4: SELF-REGULATORY AND OTHER STANDARDS FOR 

6 MARKETING FOOD TO CHILDREN

7 MR. KELLY: Good morning. We’re reminded again

8 by the Surgeon General’s comments about the scope of this

9 problem that we all are here today to try to at least

10 partially address and the many and varied solutions that

11 there are out there to find a way to solve this problem.

12 Commissioner Leary was wonderful. He helped

13 set up this panel. It’s called Self-Regulatory and Other

14 Standards for the Marketing of Foods to Children. He

15 gave us a great overview of FTC’s jurisdiction, his own

16 personal comments on what those limits should be or are,

17 and also reminded us of the potential value and reach of

18 self-regulatory programs to do things to solve this

19 problem. We also had a little bit of discussion about

20 limits and there are limits of course to what self21 regulation can do and I’m sure we’ll get into that as we

22 have our discussion for this panel.

23 But, you know, three days ago all of us awoke

24 to this headline in the Wall Street Journal, Food

25 Marketers Propose Tougher Guidelines for Children’s Ads. 
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1 Among the proposals being offered to the Children’s

2 Advertising Review Unit by the Grocery Manufacturers of

3 America, we read, were ways to crack down on product

4 placement in TV shows, the use of licensed characters in

5 ads and food packaging and advergaming. GMA was also

6 proposing to boost CARU’s resources and staffing and make

7 its monitoring process both public and more transparent.

8 As Barbara and I considered how this proposal

9 would impact on our panel, it seemed there were at least

10 two possible ways to view this. One as an end to a

11 process, or, two as one company official said yesterday,

12 a good start. And yesterday, we listened to the steps

13 individual companies are taking to adjust their marketing

14 efforts and product lines to deal with the problem of

15 childhood obesity. We also heard about ongoing efforts

16 by media groups and the advertising community to educate

17 children about nutrition and exercise. Those efforts,

18 taken together, present a part, a rather important part

19 of industry’s response to the problem of childhood

20 obesity. 

21 But, today, we want to focus on another part of

22 that response, a more than 30-year effort by industry to

23 police itself by setting general principles and specific

24 guidelines that apply to all companies advertising food

25 and beverages to children and that seek to prevent
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1 advertising that is misleading or inappropriate for a

2 child.

3 DR. SCHNEEMAN: As we’ve heard from Richard’s

4 comments about the panels yesterday and our opening this

5 morning, I think we can compliment the panels yesterday

6 for doing an excellent job in laying out the issues,

7 showing us where the challenges are, the breadth of these

8 issues, and as we move through this morning’s

9 presentations, I think we’re going to start talking about

10 how can we address those challenges, what are some of the

11 solutions that can help us get to a better place.

12 Now, at the start of our panel this morning, we

13 will hear from the Children’s Advertising Review Unit

14 about those guides and how they are enforced. So, we’ll

15 hear it first-hand. We’ll then hear two presentations,

16 the first about efforts in Europe and elsewhere to

17 respond to the problem of childhood obesity and the

18 second about a proposal offered by the Center for Science

19 and the Public Interest for a different and perhaps more

20 expansive approach to self-regulation.

21 And after brief comments from our other

22 panelists, we’ll begin what hopefully will be a wide23 ranging discussion of not only the strengths and

24 limitations of what is already in place, but also the

25 pros and cons of expanding that base to issues that go
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1 beyond the current guides and even beyond the proposals

2 that we read about in the Wall Street Journal article.

3 I’m going to start by doing the introduction of

4 our panel for this morning. First, we will have

5 Elizabeth Lascoutx who is Director of the Children’s

6 Advertising Review Unit and a Vice President of the

7 Council for Better Business Bureaus. CARU enforces the

8 self-regulatory guidelines for children’s advertising

9 that applies to all food and beverage advertising

10 directed to children under the age of 12. Ms. Lascoutx

11 has been with CARU for nearly 25 years, serving as its

12 Director for the last decade.

13 Next, we will hear from Charlotte Hebebrand who

14 is from the Food Safety, Health and Consumer Affairs

15 Section of the European Commission Delegation where she

16 serves as Special Advisor for Agriculture and Consumer

17 Affairs. Charlotte stepped in at the last second to take

18 John Bell’s spot on our panel. Mr. Bell, unfortunately,

19 was called away on Wednesday, called back to Brussels

20 because of a family emergency, and Charlotte, we

21 appreciate your being here and stepping in at the last

22 minute.

23 Then we will hear from Margo Wootan, who is the

24 Director of Nutrition Policy at the Center for Science

25 and the Public Interest, a health advocacy organization
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1 that specializes in issues related to nutrition and

2 obesity. CSPI has proposed a nutrition-based set of

3 guidelines that would apply to food and beverage

4 advertising directed to children under 18. Dr. Wootan

5 co-founded and coordinates the activities of the National

6 Alliance for Nutrition and Activity.

7 Then our shorter presentations will begin with

8 Patti Miller, who is Vice President and Director of the

9 Children and Media Program at Children Now. Children Now

10 is a national advocacy organization seeking to ensure

11 that children are a top public policy priority. Ms.

12 Miller has testified before the FCC on media

13 consolidation and children’s programming, as well as the

14 potential impacts of digital television on youth.

15 Then we will hear from Kathryn Montgomery who

16 is Professor of Communications at American University. 

17 Dr. Montgomery currently directs the project on youth,

18 media and democracy through American University’s Center

19 for Social Media. She was the co-founder and former

20 President of the Center for Media Education.

21 And, finally, we’ll hear from Wally Snyder, who

22 is President and CEO of the AAF, the American Advertising

23 Federation, the trade association that represents

24 professionals in the advertising industry. Before

25 joining AAF in 1985, he was an FTC staff member and
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1 former Director of the Division of Advertising Practices. 

2 Then we’ll move into our discussion.

3 So, let’s begin this panel now by hearing from

4 Elizabeth Lascoutx of CARU.

5 MS. LASCOUTX: Thank you, Dr. Schneeman and

6 Dick for having me here, and thank you to the FTC and the

7 Department of Health and Human Services. 

8 The Children’s Advertising Review Unit is a

9 Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus,

10 created in 1974 at the request of the advertising

11 industry with a mandate to ensure that advertising

12 directed to kids under 12 is truthful, accurate and

13 appropriate for the developing cognitive abilities of its

14 audience. Our system is overseen by the National

15 Advertising Review Council, which is called NARC, I’m

16 sorry to say, a strategic alliance of the AAAAs, ANA, AAF

17 and Council of Better Business Bureaus.

18 Policy for our self-regulatory system is set by

19 NARC. Support comes from the industry. We are, after

20 all, self-regulation. But our daily operations are

21 independent of NARC and the industry under CBBB

22 administration.

23 CARU’s guidelines are comprehensive standards

24 for messages targeting children in all media. They go

25 far beyond truth and accuracy and far beyond anything
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1 that could be required by law or regulation. They’re

2 developed and revised with input from our Academic

3 Advisory Board, experts in the fields of communication,

4 child development, child mental health and as of last

5 year, nutrition. We draw further input from industry

6 experts, where appropriate, and final approval comes from

7 NARC, and I was supposed to put my slides up. Sorry

8 about that.

9 The guidelines are carefully and broadly drawn

10 to be flexible and adaptable to a constantly changing

11 media and marketing landscape. In the mid-nineties, CARU

12 and an industry task group developed guidelines for

13 protecting children’s privacy on the Internet which

14 ultimately formed much of the basis for COPPA. 

15 Similarly, this last May, CARU convened a task force to

16 develop an appropriate approach to advergaming and we

17 expect its recommendations later this fall.

18 Some of the guidelines specifically address

19 food advertising, but all the guidelines apply to all

20 advertising. Dick Kelly asked me to show some specific

21 guidelines that we’ve applied to food. All right, this

22 first one, copy, sound and visual presentations should

23 not mislead children about product or performance

24 characteristics, including nutritional benefits. 

25 Advertising and packaging for Unilever’s Popsicle Juice
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1 Pops contained a statement, real fruit juice pops. CARU

2 determined that children might think they were 100

3 percent juice when they were about 30 percent and the

4 advertiser eliminated the claim from both advertising and

5 packaging.

6 Yesterday, we saw an ad showing some fruit

7 jumping into a blender and coming out as candy. We had

8 exactly the same issue with that ad and the advertiser

9 pulled it off the air at our request.

10 Second guideline, what is included and excluded

11 in the initial purchase should be clearly established. 

12 Ads for Burger King and McDonald’s children’s meals

13 showed the premium toy and the traditional burger, fries

14 and soft drink that had long been the components of those

15 meals. Our concern was that kids might not know that

16 there were now other choices, applesauce, apple slices,

17 milk, juice, that they could order and still get the

18 kids’ meals. Both advertisers agreed to show more

19 choices in their ads.

20 Comparative claims should be based on real

21 product advantages that are understandable to the child

22 audience. An ad for Nutella truthfully claimed that it

23 had less fat and sodium than peanut butter, but since it

24 had more sugar, CARU asked them to modify the claim and

25 they did. 
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1 The amount of products featured should be

2 within reasonable levels for the situation depicted. An

3 ad for Pringles showed four youths each with his or her

4 six-serving can. The advertiser agreed to show single5 serving cans in future ads.

6 Representations of food products should be made

7 so as to encourage sound use of the product with a view

8 toward healthy development of the child and development

9 of good nutritional practices. An ad for an online

10 promotion for Heinz Bagel Bites contained the line, the

11 more you scarf, the more you can win. CARU believed this

12 encouraged over-consumption of a snack food and the

13 advertiser removed the line from its ads and its website.

14 Yesterday, I sat here and listened to some

15 pretty harsh criticism of our self-regulatory system,

16 which I’ll assume was uninformed. But Linda Brugler and

17 the panel on changes to advertising and marketing got it

18 right. We’re as good as it gets at fulfilling our

19 mandate, which is to scrutinize how products are

20 advertised to children, not what products are advertised.

21 We monitor over 1,000 commercials every month,

22 along with print, online and radio and we don’t miss

23 anything. CARU investigates roughly 100 ads or websites

24 a year. We have a compliance rate of over 97 percent

25 when we ask for modification. And as I said, there’s
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1 nowhere we could refer these cases if advertisers

2 refused. Our guidelines go beyond anything required by

3 law. That speaks to the extraordinary support for our

4 system from the business community.

5 As for transparency, CARU issues a press

6 release at the conclusion of every case, which is also

7 posted on our website. Full decisions are available to

8 the general public on request. 

9 A further indication of industry’s buy-in of

10 our guidelines is that most of the ads we see are already

11 in full compliance because the internal reviews at the

12 agency and client level have our guidelines in mind, and

13 we will look at scripts, story boards, rough cuts and

14 websites to ensure that the finished communication

15 complies with the guidelines when asked to by the

16 advertiser.

17 Our work with the industry isn’t just

18 monitoring for the ads that fall through the cracks,

19 though. We work collaboratively with the industry to

20 raise the bar on best practices. This spring, we engaged

21 the major producers of fruit snacks to share our concern

22 that the category name could confuse children as to the

23 actual fruit content. The result is that they’ve agreed

24 to change the name of their current products to fruit25 flavored snacks in advertising and on packaging. 
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1 Lastly, while our industry is well aware of our

2 system and guidelines, our outreach to consumers has been

3 secondary. We’ve already been easy to find. If you

4 google kids or children and advertising, we’re the first

5 up and we’ve always had a contact us link. But we’ve

6 recently taken some steps to increase consumer awareness

7 of CARU and our availability. We’ve redesigned our

8 website to include an interactive complaint form with

9 specific instructions on how to lodge a complaint and the

10 NARC has created the new position of Communications

11 Director to help in outreach to parents and consumers. 

12 I thank you for your time and I look forward to

13 answering questions.

14 DR. SCHNEEMAN: Next, we will hear from

15 Charlotte Hebebrand from the European Commission. 

16 Charlotte?

17 MS. HEBEBRAND: Good morning. I bring warm

18 regards and regrets from John Bell who is the head of our

19 Strategy Unit in Brussels and the Director General for

20 Health and Consumer Protection. He had very much looked

21 forward to participating in this very interesting

22 workshop, but unfortunately, as Barbara has said, had to

23 be called away to attend to a family emergency. 

24 It’s a pleasure for the European Commission to

25 participate here today and we thank our two hosts. The
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1 Commission is very pleased with the excellent working

2 relationship we have both with HHS and the FTC. I will

3 just speak here a little bit about the fact that obesity

4 is no longer an American problem and also to discuss a

5 little bit to give you a very broad landscape of the

6 marketing of food in Europe. Then I would like to close

7 with explaining the actions that are being taken by the

8 Commission to address the increasing problem of obesity.

9 So, very clearly, obesity is no longer confined

10 to this side of the Atlantic. The statistics in Europe

11 really speak for themselves. We are now looking at a

12 situation where in the EU, one in five kids is

13 overweight. We have 400,000 annual rise in cases, new

14 cases of overweight or obese children in the EU. That’s

15 adding to those that are already overweight, 14 million

16 and three million obese children.

17 Also interesting to note, seven member states

18 in the EU right now have a higher obesity prevalence than

19 the U.S. So, those are pretty alarming statistics. 

20 Now, what is happening in the EU with regard to

21 marketing of food to children? There are some EU-wide

22 provisions that apply to all of our member states and

23 there are two in particular that I will highlight. One

24 is a very new directive that has just been passed this

25 year. It’s called the Unfair Commercial Practices
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1 Directive, and that includes safeguards to ensure

2 responsible advertising to children. For example, it

3 bans ads that encourage children to use what’s called

4 pester power to get their parents to buy certain

5 products. It also bans ads that tell children directly

6 that they must buy a particular product. So, those are

7 no longer allowed across Europe.

8 There is an older directive called TV Without

9 Frontiers in Europe, which essentially the purpose is to

10 regulate broadcasting in Europe, but it also includes

11 provisions on the protection of minors when it comes both

12 to advertising and tele-shopping. 

13 But, of course, there has been more activity

14 beyond this sort of umbrella at the EU level in the

15 individual member states, and I will just try to give you

16 a flavor for some of those. Some member states have gone

17 to more restrictive measures than the ones I’ve just

18 outlined. We have one member state, Sweden, which has a

19 total ban on ads aimed at minors, regardless of what type

20 of ad. Another member state, Greece, has a ban on toy

21 ads from 7:00 in the morning to 10:00 at night. 

22 Some member states have legal restrictions on

23 ads around kids programming or detailed rules on the

24 content of ads. Most recently, you’ve seen this in

25 France and Ireland. And it’s important to emphasize that
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1 most of the member state activities aim at reinforcing

2 industry voluntary measures. There has been a lot of

3 action by individual companies. There have been quite a

4 number of industry codes of conduct in member states.

5 And the governments are really focusing on

6 getting the food and the advertising industry to

7 voluntarily restrict their activities, in particular with

8 regard to having responsible self-regulation, and they

9 are sort of issuing a challenge to the industry to use

10 their social marketing techniques to promote healthier

11 food.

12 But I think it’s fair to say that more remains

13 to be done. A number of studies in Europe have shown

14 that advertised foods differ from what’s recommended for

15 a healthy diet and they also show that ads do have an

16 impact on children’s diet. 

17 Perhaps the study that’s gotten the most

18 attention recently was one which the U.K. Food Safety

19 Agency commissioned in 2003, the so-called Hastings

20 Report, which concluded that food promotion affects

21 children’s food preferences, purchase behavior and

22 consumption in two ways. At the brand level it can

23 influence a kid to buy one brand over another, but also

24 at the category level, that is perhaps confectionaries

25 over fruit.
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1 I’d like to now speak a little bit more

2 broadly, not just on marketing, but what is the EU doing

3 to address the problem of obesity. We have an ongoing

4 scientific assessment by our food safety authority, EFSA,

5 to look at the issue and to come up with some nutritional

6 guidelines. We also are working on reviewing our

7 nutritional labeling in Europe which for now is still a

8 voluntary measure unless you make a nutrition claim. So,

9 you will see maybe some proposals coming forth in the

10 next year.

11 Since 2003, we have a network on nutrition and

12 physical activity which is advising the Commission on

13 preparing a strategy to combat obesity. We are

14 undergoing a consultation process, the result of which

15 will be a nutrition green paper, which will then be

16 followed up by an EU Commission communication on

17 nutrition, physical activity and obesity. And very

18 importantly, in order to focus minds, the European

19 Commission has launched a European Platform for Action on

20 Diet, Physical Activity and Health. This was just

21 launched in March of this year by Commissioner Kiprianu. 

22 It is meant to be a forum for open and informal

23 discussions on diet and physical activity. The focus

24 here is on self-regulation, but I think Commissioner

25 Kiprianu has been quite clear in saying that if at the
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1 end of the day those self-regulation efforts don’t really

2 amount to very much, he will not be afraid to propose

3 some legislative acts as well.

4 The members of this platform basically include

5 all relevant players that are willing to enter into

6 binding and verifiable commitments that can help to halt

7 and reverse current obesity trends. So, we have the food

8 industry there, the advertisers, retailers, the catering

9 industry, NGOs, as well as scientific experts from WHO

10 and other places.

11 The aim of this platform is to get the partners

12 to share their initiatives, to gather best practices, but

13 also very concretely for the different players to make

14 very concrete commitments and allocation of additional

15 resources to fight the problem. So, you’ve had the

16 players already give their baseline commitments for this

17 year, and by the end of this year, we expect to see

18 increased commitments that they’re willing to make for

19 the following year. 

20 The platform also includes a number of working

21 groups whose purpose it is to deepen our understanding of

22 the issue. One of them, in particular, will look at the

23 issue of food marketing. It is a working group on

24 informing consumer behavior, education, information and

25 commercial communication. 
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1 What we are planning now as part of this

2 platform is a trans-Atlantic platform event. We are

3 hoping this could take place in May of next year because,

4 obviously, we have the same problem on both sides of the

5 Atlantic and arguably, we have the same players on both

6 sides of the Atlantic. Certainly, the food industry is

7 very international.

8 We are very keen to learn from the U.S.

9 experience and we are looking at inviting around 50

10 experts from the U.S. This would be from the

11 administration, regulators, consumers and certainly also

12 from the business community. The idea would be for the

13 EU and the U.S. participants to, again, exchange best

14 practices and discuss what could work best going forward

15 in the future.

16 This event -- and we don’t yet have an agenda

17 outlined, but I will be glad to, and my office will be

18 glad to, keep all of you informed about this, but it will

19 be opened by Commissioner Kiprianu, as well as the

20 Minister President of the then EU presidency from Austria

21 and also some key members of the European Parliament. 

22 So, we really are very excited about this event and I

23 know that we will see quite a number of you or

24 representatives of your organizations at that event. 

25 So, with that, thank you very much and we’ll be
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1 in touch as the agenda for this develops further.

2 DR. SCHNEEMAN: Margo Wootan will be next from

3 CSPI.

4 DR. WOOTAN: Well, good morning. Just to

5 start, I guess I’d like to echo what Chairman Majoras

6 said yesterday. We completely agree that obesity and

7 children’s poor diets are affected by many different

8 factors, but that food marketing is one of the most

9 important. So, we’re very pleased that the FTC and HHS

10 are stepping up their efforts, giving more attention to

11 these issues.

12 We also want to say, from CSPI’s perspective,

13 we don’t believe that the food industry or food marketers

14 are intentionally trying to undermine children’s health. 

15 We recognize that it’s just not their goal necessarily to

16 address health. But I think there’s no doubt, no

17 question that the goal of food marketing aimed at

18 children is to influence their food choices, their food

19 preferences, what they ask their parents to purchase, and

20 one thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet in this meeting,

21 is what they purchase themselves. Since a lot of people

22 are only talking about the little tiny kids, we forgot

23 that many children have lots of money in their pocket,

24 lots of opportunity to make food choices on their own. 

25 So, it also affects what they buy themselves.
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1 We haven’t heard in this workshop very much

2 about the science behind that, but certainly companies

3 know and parents know and studies show that food

4 advertising works, that it is effective. And if you’re

5 not familiar with this science base, I would encourage

6 you to read one of the many reviews that is now

7 available. The Institute of Medicine is currently

8 pulling together a review of the science, which is

9 supposed to be available this fall. We haven’t heard a

10 lot about the IOM, though many of us have been following

11 that process very carefully.

12 There also is a very well done, comprehensive,

13 systematic review of the literature that’s been done for

14 the U.K. Food Standard Agency which is quite good, and a

15 number of non-profits, including the Center for Science

16 and the Public Interest have a review of the issue of

17 food marketing. This is ours, which is available on our

18 website. But Kaiser Family Foundation has one, American

19 Psychological Association and others. So, if you are

20 thinking there isn’t science in this area, you need to

21 look a little closer because there have been dozens and

22 dozens, hundreds of studies done in this area, looking at

23 food marketing aimed at children.

24 Now, considering the current political

25 environment, government, as we’ve heard throughout this
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1 workshop again and again and again, government is

2 unlikely to require companies to change the way they

3 market food to children any time soon. The steps that

4 Kraft and Nickelodeon and PepsiCo and other companies are

5 beginning to take is very encouraging and we’re really

6 feeling very optimistic and hopeful that things around

7 food marketing to kids may change in the near future. 

8 But they haven’t changed much yet. That if you watch

9 children’s television for an hour or two or take a walk

10 down the aisles of a supermarket with a child or surf the

11 Internet, you will see that food marketing aimed at kids

12 is just out of control. There’s a lot of it, it’s very

13 sophisticated, slick, very enticing and it’s almost

14 exclusively for foods of poor nutritional quality. That

15 currently self-regulation through the Children’s

16 Advertising Review Unit is not working.

17 So, we’re going to talk on our panel about ways

18 to strengthen self-regulation. In fact, that currently

19 seems like the most promising approach. The Center for

20 Science and the Public Interest developed a set of

21 guidelines for responsible food marketing to help move

22 the issue of self-regulation along to give companies a

23 starting point from which they could work to develop

24 their own guidelines, to help give CARU some ideas of

25 ways that they could strengthen their own guidelines
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1 around food marketing to kids. We thought these are more

2 up-to-date, they’re more comprehensive, they’re much

3 clearer than much of what’s out there today.

4 Now, also, just one other clarifying point I’d

5 like to make is that we don’t think that self-regulation

6 or government regulation is to supplant parental

7 responsibility. Of course, parents are ultimately

8 responsible for what they feed their children. But self9 regulation or changes in regulation, changes in food

10 marketing help to support parents to make it possible for

11 them to feed their children a healthy diet. That getting

12 our children to eat a healthy diet would be much easier

13 if we, as parents, didn’t have to contend with billions

14 of dollars worth of marketing for almost exclusively

15 nutrition-poor food.

16 Today’s parents are just completely out17 maneuvered by food marketers. Companies have

18 considerably more expertise and persuasive techniques. 

19 They can hire nutritionists and psychologists and market

20 researchers and other experts where parents have very

21 little expertise in these areas. Companies also have

22 cartoon characters, toy giveaways, contests and a wide

23 range of techniques that we, as parents, don’t have. We

24 saw yesterday how powerful Elmo can be. You know, I

25 can’t get Shrek to come to dinner and sit down and
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1 encourage my daughter to eat her zucchini. All I can do

2 is say, you know, Cameron, please do it, I wish you would

3 eat more vegetables. So, we have to keep in mind the

4 differences in resources and expertise that parents have

5 compared to what companies have. Also, that parental

6 authority is significantly undermined by the wide

7 discrepancies between what parents tell their children is

8 healthy to eat and what companies tell our children is

9 desirable to eat.

10 So, our guidelines for responsible food

11 marketing address not only how food is marketed, but more

12 importantly or as importantly, which foods are marketed

13 to children. That’s in, you know, big contrast to what

14 CARU does or what the FTC looks at, which is mostly

15 looking at techniques.

16 Those approaches really fail to address the

17 heart of the problem with food marketing today, and that

18 problem is not so much that marketing is bad. I wish we

19 had more marketing for broccoli and bananas and other

20 healthy foods. I’m glad to see some movement in that

21 area. But simply changing the way a sales pitch is

22 couched is often irrelevant because the real problem is

23 that the food itself undermines children’s diets and

24 health. 

25 So, CSPI is urging companies not to market
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1 soda, caffeinated drinks, other sugary drinks, sports

2 drinks, imitation juices and other sugary beverages, and

3 we have nutrition standards for foods that limit the

4 amount of saturated and trans fat, sodium, added sugars,

5 limits on portion sizes, and also to make sure that the

6 food contains some nutrients. Sometimes people forget,

7 you know, the main reason we’re supposed to eat, in

8 addition to calories, is to provide nutrients in

9 children’s diets.

10 So, our marketing guidelines, set nutrition

11 criteria that would limit the marketing of many products

12 that are currently marketed to children, but it doesn’t

13 limit it to only the ideal foods. It’s not that our

14 nutrition standards would only allow the marketing of

15 fruits, vegetables and whole grain, low fat milk, but

16 it’s a compromise, though maybe some in the food industry

17 don’t see it that way. But we allow for the marketing of

18 some nutritionally improved versions of foods that we

19 know children are going to eat. So, maybe some low fat

20 cookies or baked chips that maybe aren’t the healthiest

21 things in the world, but are certainly better than many

22 of the options that are currently being marketed to kids.

23 Now, just to give an example of the difference

24 between the way we deal with the techniques by which

25 foods are marketed compared to what CARU does, the
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1 language that CSPI uses is much more specific, more

2 actionable. That while there’s a lot of overlap between

3 the principles and guidelines of CSPI’s and CARU’s

4 guidelines, ours are, on the whole, much more specific,

5 much clearer, much more actionable.

6 For example, the CARU guidelines point out that

7 the mere appearance of a character with a product can

8 significantly alter a child’s perception of a product. 

9 However, CARU’s guidance suggests that character

10 endorsements should reflect the true experience and

11 belief of the endorser and that the character shouldn’t

12 be shown in both an ad and a show at the same time. You

13 know, as if the biggest problem is like when the

14 character is shown as opposed to the use of the character

15 to promote an unhealthy food. Also, cartoon characters,

16 which are often shown with food, don’t ever eat. So, you

17 know, it never reflects the true experiences of that

18 character. In contrast, CSPI’s guidelines urge companies

19 not to use marketing tie-ins with movies or television

20 shows, cartoon characters or celebrities with foods of

21 poor nutrition quality.

22 So, our guidelines deal with many of the same

23 kinds of techniques and issues, nagging, product

24 formulation and reformulation, toys, contests, games,

25 club memberships and advergaming. They also provide a
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1 lot of guidance about in-school marketing, which is very

2 important, and our guidelines call on companies to

3 support healthy eating in schools and to support parents’

4 ability to feed their children a healthy diet for those

5 many hours that our children are outside of our control

6 and at schools and ask companies not to market, to sell

7 or to give away low nutrition foods or brands anywhere on

8 school campus. So, that includes selling sugary soft

9 drinks, as well as the many different kinds of marketing.

10 So, our guidelines for responsible food

11 marketing, I have some copies with me if anybody would

12 like some. You can also find them on our website at

13 cspi.org/nutritionpolicy. Thank you.

14 MR. KELLY: And next will be Patti Miller from

15 Children Now.

16 MS. MILLER: Good morning. Thanks for having

17 me here today. Over the last day-and-a-half, there’s

18 been a good deal of focus specifically on television

19 advertising and there’s also been several panelists who

20 have urged the audience to focus more broadly on

21 interactive media and the ways in which interactive media

22 are being used to market products to children. 

23 I’d like to take this opportunity this morning

24 in my brief remarks to talk again about television, but

25 specifically to focus on how television is changing and
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1 what the implications are for the ways in which children

2 are going to be marketed to and why this is going to be a

3 very great concern to the nation’s parents.

4 As television transitions from analog to

5 digital, children will soon be able to view television

6 and access the Internet from the same platform with a

7 simple click of a mouse. Young viewers may be able to

8 link to the Internet during a TV show to access

9 information about a program, surf a website or even

10 purchase merchandise. As television changes, questions

11 arise about how children are going to be targeted and

12 marketed to in an interactive world and how these

13 emerging advertising practices will affect young viewers,

14 especially when you consider the fact that the majority

15 of this advertising is for fast food, junk food and sugar

16 cereal.

17 Imagine this scenario, for example. Little

18 Joey is watching Scooby Doo on television and he’s able

19 to click on Scooby’s head where he’s immediately

20 transported to a website where he can be exposed to more

21 marketing or even purchase Scooby Snacks or even the

22 Scooby doll. Children Now and the Children’s Media

23 Policy Coalition are increasingly concerned about this,

24 about the ways in which kids will be marketed to in a

25 digital television environment, especially when you
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1 consider their inherent vulnerability to commercial

2 persuasion.

3 We know how interactive media, specifically the

4 Internet, is already being used to entice children

5 through, what we’ve heard a lot about over the last day

6 or so, advergaming, and I won’t go into specific examples

7 of advergames since I know we’ve talked a little bit

8 about that in the last day. But as we heard yesterday,

9 the average amount of time that a child spends with an

10 advergame is 26 minutes, and that’s clearly much more

11 than a 30-second commercial, which provides ample

12 opportunity to expose children to specific brands.

13 Now, many companies are starting to investigate

14 the potential of interactive advertising on television. 

15 Digital advertisers believe that the transition from the

16 web to TV should be smooth given children’s familiarity

17 with computers. As one executive remarked, children

18 already have been communicating with the brands through

19 the web which should make it easier to build a dialogue

20 through interactive television. Kentucky Fried Chicken

21 is experimenting with interactive TV to reach young

22 consumers. During a TV program targeted to 4 to 11-year23 olds, KFC encourages young viewers to enter designated

24 areas by clicking on a remote control when prompted by

25 presenters on the show, and they have a special section
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1 that features the company’s logo, offers games and

2 provides information about menu and restaurant locations.

3 We’re also really concerned that interactive

4 advertising is going to be used to track the viewing

5 habits and interests of viewers without their knowledge

6 or consent. Eventually, interactive television will

7 allow advertisers to target individual viewers with

8 personalized ads and they’ll be able to target children

9 according to gender, age, household income and race by

10 tracking the history of their individual television

11 viewing habits.

12 It’s essential that children are protected,

13 especially when considering the role that advertising of

14 unhealthy foods plays in their short and long-term food

15 preferences and consumption habits. Currently, we have

16 rules about the amount of advertising allowed in

17 children’s programming and we have rules about the

18 separation of programming and commercial content. It’s

19 essential that these rules are updated for the digital

20 age, especially when you consider kids’ unique

21 vulnerability to commercial persuasion, the fact that

22 they will be exposed to and will be interacting with

23 advertising for undefined periods of time and the

24 individualized ways in which children will be targeted in

25 a digital television environment. The bottom line is
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1 self-regulation is not going to be sufficient. Children

2 will need greater protections.

3 Last fall, the FCC tentatively concluded that

4 there should be no commercial links embedded in

5 children’s television programming. The Children’s Media

6 Policy Coalition is working to bring this issue to a

7 conclusion to ensure that there are policies in place to

8 protect the health and well-being of our nation’s

9 children in a digital television environment. Thank you.

10 MR. KELLY: Thank you. Dr. Montgomery from

11 American University.

12 DR. MONTGOMERY: Thank you, and I’m very, very

13 happy to be here. The last time I was at the Federal

14 Trade Commission was in the late nineties. At that time,

15 I was representing my organization, the Center for Media

16 Education, and the topic was children’s online privacy. 

17 And some of the same people who are here today were there

18 then, the conversation was somewhat similar. I think

19 there was a great deal of concern about the issue and

20 many proposals to do something about it. The industry

21 was very, very interested in promoting the concept of

22 self-regulation and in resolving the problems through

23 self-regulation. Industry came forward, individual

24 companies with very good initiatives for responsible data

25 collection practices to children and CARU also came
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1 forward with some proposed additions to its guidelines

2 for children. 

3 Ultimately, however, what we needed and what we

4 were able to get was a law, the Children’s Online Privacy

5 Protection Act of 1998, which most of you are familiar

6 with, and that law gave the FTC the authority to develop

7 some rules and to bring the parties together, the

8 stakeholders together to work out some rules in a very

9 narrowly tailored way, to create some safeguards around

10 data collection to children in the online environment. 

11 And our effort from the beginning was to try to create a

12 level playing field and a set of rules of the game for

13 marketing to children in the digital media environment.

14 CARU is one of a number of self-regulatory

15 initiatives that are part of the Safe Harbor Rule. So,

16 CARU in the area of COPPA and also, I would say, in the

17 area of children’s television advertising, operates, in

18 these cases, within a framework of law and rules, federal

19 rules.

20 I think we’re in a very similar situation now

21 with perhaps even a great deal more at stake, and I see

22 the workshop that the FTC has convened as a very, very

23 good first step in bringing today’s stakeholders

24 together. But I believe that we will need more

25 comprehensive approaches and a stronger role by
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1 government to ensure really adequate safeguards for

2 children in the future, particularly. And I think it’s

3 particularly important, as several others have said over

4 these two days, that we take into account not just

5 television but this expanding digital media landscape

6 that our children are growing up in.

7 I also wanted to urge us to think about not

8 just small children but about adolescents as well. I’m

9 the mother of a tween. She has all of the

10 characteristics of a tween, I can tell you. You guys

11 have figured her out, and she’ll soon be a teen. And I,

12 like many other mothers, many other parents, know very

13 well that she may not have the same cognitive issues, she

14 may be able to cognitively figure things out, but there

15 are emotional issues she deals with as an emerging

16 teenager and she deserves to be treated fairly in the

17 marketplace.

18 So, Patti’s laid out some of the issues in the

19 new media landscape, I want to just give you a couple

20 more. I have a printed statement I’m happy to share with

21 you that sort of illustrates where digital marketing is

22 going and what we’ve got to look at. We’ve talked about

23 advergaming, branded environments, integration of

24 advertising and content, that is where everything is

25 going in digital media. We must take that into account. 
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1 I got an email the other day from mycoke.com urging me to

2 come back to the site and to create a blog that I could

3 send to all my friends and fill out surveys where I could

4 win some points that I could use. I could also win them

5 by drinking lots of Coke. Viral marketing, I think many

6 of you have heard about that. And then web-based

7 promotions and integrated marketing campaigns. 

8 I have a couple of examples here, and I don’t

9 have time to share them all, but Nick -- Nickelodeon,

10 who’s done some very, very good things, also last year

11 had a campaign with Fairly Odd Parents where they put

12 codes in Pringles Snacks Stax and the packages enabled

13 kids to go to Nick.com and insert the code numbers and

14 then watch the show and do all kinds of other things, and

15 that was coordinated with a retail campaign where the

16 products were supposed to jump off the shelves, as one

17 marketer said, and as many of you know, Nick is going to

18 have a souped-up website called TurboNick that will

19 feature “leave-behind ads” that won’t disappear from the

20 screen until a new ad comes up.

21 Then, also, there are all kinds of things going

22 on in the area of wireless technology with text

23 messaging. There’s some work going on with McDonald’s

24 and Kellogg, many, many more. These are just a handful. 

25 They’re happening under the radar of parents and
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1 policymakers as well and they’re kind of hard to keep

2 track of. I mean, as a parent, it’s hard for us to know

3 what games our kids are playing, you have to talk to

4 them, I agree. You have to tell them you want to know

5 where the games are, you have to join, you have to be a

6 member. So, it’s very challenging for parents.

7 Here’s what I think. I think that if the FTC

8 is going to do research, and I believe it should, they

9 really ought to be doing research on the contemporary 

10 food marketing practices aimed at children and teens in

11 the digital media to determine what safeguards are

12 needed. Some of these new practices in the interactive

13 media environment may well violate existing government

14 rules against deceptive advertising, which the FTC

15 currently has the full authority to regulate.

16 We may need to have a requirement, as we do

17 with COPPA, where companies will disclose, as they do

18 their privacy practices, what their marketing practices

19 are, you know, how they target children, what kinds of

20 market research they do to probe the psycho-social and

21 the cultural practices of children and teens. At any

22 rate, we need to continue this dialogue and I look

23 forward to participating. Thank you.

24 MR. KELLY: Thank you. And last, Wally Snyder

25 from the American Advertising Federation.
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1 MR. SNYDER: Thank you very much. I want to

2 echo the comments in all the panelists in thanking the

3 FTC and HHS for holding this workshop. I think the

4 tonality is excellent. These are very open and this is a

5 great time to exchange ideas and join issues, quite

6 frankly.

7 I am President of the American Advertising

8 Federation. I want to disclose to you, at this point, I

9 am also a lawyer. I do that in the ad industry all the

10 time. I want you to know, also, I’m a member of the

11 National Advertising Review Council which does oversee

12 the activities of CARU. I believe that CARU has, for

13 many years, demonstrated its commitment to effective

14 self-regulation of advertising directed to children. 

15 CARU has been enormously effective in helping to maintain

16 the truthfulness and the appropriateness of advertising

17 directed to children.

18 Now, some have said CARU has no teeth. CARU

19 does have teeth and there’s a tremendous compliance

20 record to show that fact. Of all the cases that are

21 brought to CARU, well over 95 percent are resolved

22 voluntarily, and another very important point to remember

23 is, if they’re not resolved voluntarily, they can come to

24 the Federal Trade Commission for final resolution.

25 Secondly, it’s an organization which I think
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1 really wants to reach out to the public and learn much

2 more. One of the distinct advantages of the CARU

3 guidelines is that they are not static. The guidelines

4 evolve as necessary to address emerging issues. And I

5 can tell you as a member of the Board of NARC that the

6 Board of Directors and CARU remain committed to

7 strengthening the children’s advertising review process

8 and it is always part of CARU’s purview to be thinking

9 about how to improve the process.

10 We understand that there are many stakeholders

11 in this arena and so we really want to make sure that we

12 hear from them and CARU hears from them. The

13 recommendations that are coming from GMA will be

14 carefully reviewed and they’re, again, a great example of

15 helping CARU to move on in its effectiveness. All of

16 them, I think, will be given a great deal of attention.

17 You also heard Elizabeth mention we want more

18 interaction with the public and particularly parents so

19 that they understand how CARU works and that they can

20 complain to us. Finally, the consumer groups certainly

21 use CARU. CSPI, a leading consumer group, has, itself,

22 asked CARU to take action on numerous occasions against

23 particular advertising.

24 Now, CARU is evolving. A few years ago, CARU

25 was at the forefront of reviewing child-directed
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1 advertising on the Internet, and you heard how many

2 websites are actively reviewed by CARU. CARU will also

3 continue to evolve by adding more academic representation

4 to its Advisory Task Force, and very importantly, you

5 heard Elizabeth say and others that CARU is going to

6 strengthen its review on the issue of advergaming and

7 examining what role self-regulation will play in this

8 area.

9 Now, I believe that CARU, however, is only part

10 of the fabric of self-regulation. It is only part. The

11 process begins at the point of creation of an ad. 

12 Advertising and agencies also have guidelines for

13 ensuring the appropriateness and truthfulness of

14 advertising. These are based upon the CARU guidelines

15 and they’re often even more stringent than the CARU

16 guidelines. In addition, commercials must withstand the

17 scrutiny of the standard departments of the broadcast and

18 now many cable networks that have standards. And, again,

19 these standards are based upon the CARU guides, but often

20 go further. This review process is ongoing from

21 conception to execution and every day pouches of scripts

22 and commercials are sent to the networks for their

23 review. Once a commercial does make it on the air, it is

24 subject to the CARU guidelines and to the scrutiny of

25 consumers and competitors who speak or complain to CARU
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1 about the questionable advertisements.

2 In conclusion, I believe CARU is judged

3 unfairly by those who feel that CARU should evaluate what

4 foods are advertised to consumers. CARU’s expertise is

5 in the message, not what foods, and CARU needs to stay

6 focused on the advertisements and not on foods, the good

7 foods/bad foods debate which will only be inappropriate

8 and unworkable. Thank you very much.

9 MR. KELLY: Thank you. Barbara and I want to

10 frame the discussion we’ll have in the last about 23

11 minutes about the reach, scope, visibility and

12 enforcement of the existing guidelines and basically

13 proposals for change. I want to start first with a

14 question for Elizabeth. 

15 As you see in the definition under the CARU

16 guidelines, the CARU guidelines apply to advertising

17 directed to children under 12. The directed to children

18 concept, how is that determined under the CARU

19 guidelines?

20 MS. LASCOUTX: Well, it used to be a lot

21 easier, obviously, when there was traditional kid

22 programming in the morning and afternoon and weekend

23 mornings, but we generally look to -- we still look at

24 those day parts, but we also look at obviously media that

25 are specifically designed for kids, like Nickelodeon,
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1 except for Nick at Nite, and Disney, Radio Disney and

2 websites that are specifically targeted to kids. But

3 other than that, we have a kind of internal working rule

4 that -- which we’ve borrowed from other industry codes,

5 that if there is a 35 percent under 12 demographic in

6 programming before 9:00 at night, we will look at it and

7 consider it within our purview.

8 Now, if it’s a program that doesn’t look like

9 it has any appeal to kids and the ads, except for one,

10 which is for a drink or a candy are for insurance and

11 automobiles, we will assume that is not kid-targeted, but

12 rather team-targeted.

13 MR. KELLY: Thank you. The next question is

14 the -- and this is for -- not just for Elizabeth, but for

15 everyone on the panel. When you look at the definitions

16 that are there, it also applies to advertising directed

17 to children under 12. That includes, in its 

18 listing from the CARU guidelines, print, broadcast,

19 cable, et cetera. The first question is sort of the

20 reasonableness of having that standard as a standard

21 under 12. It’s already been mentioned here about the

22 issue of those younger teens. 

23 And the second question is, what about the new

24 forms of marketing that are out there? A lot of them, it

25 has been mentioned today, licensing, product placements,
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1 viral buzz marketing, advergaming, in-store promotions. 

2 So, I’d like to focus the panel discussion sort of

3 looking at these limits that are in place on the reach of

4 the CARU guides and a discussion about what would be the

5 pros and cons of going beyond them.

6 Wally, why don’t we start with you?

7 MR. SNYDER: I think we’ve always used the

8 standard of 12 and under. I think it’s been one that

9 this country has sort of embedded in culture. We believe

10 that that is a turning point. We know that that’s not

11 the perfect turning point. It seems to me that as far as

12 the age restrictions, 12 and under are really workable,

13 acceptable.

14 I do believe as I said in my remarks that all

15 of these methods of marketing need to be reviewed. And

16 the example we started with was advergaming with that

17 task force now looking at that at CARU, and I know that

18 the NARC Board will be certainly open to looking at

19 recommendations for other areas that we should be looking

20 at.

21 MR. KELLY: The Wall Street Journal talked

22 about that the recommendation was coming in from GMA to

23 look at product placement in TV shows and use of licensed

24 characters. Do you have any sense of what those

25 recommendations might exactly be and what changes they 
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1 might at least be contemplating for the guidelines? 

2 We’ll start with Wally and then anyone else can come.

3 MR. SNYDER: Well, I know, first of all, we’re

4 going to be receiving the letter today. I think they had

5 been fairly characterized, very positive and I think we

6 need to look at the details as we go forward.

7 MR. KELLY: Well, let’s open it up to the other

8 panelists both in terms -- 

9 MS. LASCOUTX: Can I -- 

10 MR. KELLY: Yeah, sure, go ahead, Elizabeth. 

11 MS. LASCOUTX: I just wanted to speak to the 12

12 and under.

13 MR. KELLY: Yes.

14 MS. LASCOUTX: When we were established, and we

15 were established with an advisory board of developmental

16 psychologists and experts in child development, and the

17 whole rationale for setting up a separate CARU from the

18 NAD, which looks at truth and accuracy in non-kid19 directed advertising was that there was a recognition

20 that truth and accuracy wasn’t enough with kids and it

21 was specifically based on their developing cognitive

22 abilities. And the wisdom at the time, at least, was

23 that, you know, 12 was kind of when you stopped being a

24 kid and started being a teenager and you could

25 understand. It didn’t mean you were going to behave
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1 well, but you could understand. So, it made sense as the

2 kind of developmental divide.

3 The other thing is, of course, that it’s also

4 the age that’s used to kind of demarcate children’s

5 programming if you look at the Nielsen. So, it was just

6 sort of a perfect fit.

7 DR. WOOTAN: Can I add to that? I think one

8 thing that we, as scientists or advertisers or public

9 health whoever -- whichever perspective we happen to come

10 from in this room or on this panel, don’t really get to

11 decide what a kid is, that that has been decided by

12 others way above our pay grade, that children are

13 children under 18, and that we have to look at those

14 children as having different vulnerabilities.

15 I think one mistake that a number of people

16 have made is looking at marketing to kids only on the

17 basis of whether it’s deceptive, misleading, whether kids

18 can understand it. There’s been a lot of focus on, do

19 kids really understand persuasive intent, and I think

20 that’s a part of the equation. But more importantly is

21 the question of does their marketing have a negative

22 effect on the children’s health or well-being? You know,

23 deception is bad, but, you know, giving a child a disease

24 is something totally different. 

25 So, I think we really need to focus the whole
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1 discussion differently around marketing. Yes, let’s talk

2 about persuasive intent and understanding and all that,

3 fine. But as a more minor secondary point, the main

4 point of consideration should be does the marketing have

5 a negative effect on the child’s diet, health, well6 being, risk of disease, risk of disability, potential

7 health care costs? And if we look at it in that way,

8 sure, young children possess unique vulnerabilities in

9 terms of their understanding of marketing, but older

10 children possess vulnerabilities that might be even more

11 important, that children -- older children have an

12 opportunity to buy foods when their parents are not there

13 to guide them and they have money. You know, I don’t

14 have to worry about my seven-year-old buying any goods,

15 she never has money. She doesn’t have any opportunity to

16 buy food, but teenagers do and they buy a lot of food

17 that their parents don’t know about. 

18 So, we need to look at junk food marketing and

19 sales in schools, and while there’s been momentum aimed

20 at younger children because of the way, I think, that

21 even my colleagues in the public health and advocacy

22 community have framed this, they’ve framed it wrong and

23 they’ve framed it too narrowly. It’s the high school

24 students who are more vulnerable and the middle school

25 students to junk food marketing in schools, just as one
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1 example.

2 MS. KELLY: Charlotte, in Europe, is there an

3 older age that seems to be set in some of these self4 regulatory programs?

5 MS. HEBEBRAND: On the self-regulatory, I’m not

6 sure what the age cut-off is. I know on the legislative

7 efforts, in Sweden, for example, it’s kids under 12. In

8 Greece, where there’s only a toy ad ban, I believe it’s

9 directed at all minors. So, I think it varies quite a

10 bit.

11 MR. KELLY: The issue of going beyond

12 advertising and covering some of this new marketing that

13 is occurring, I’d love to hear some comment or discussion

14 about the pros and cons of expanding beyond looking just

15 at advertising and going into marketing itself.

16 MS. MILLER: I think you have to expand it to

17 more than just advertising. When I was looking yesterday

18 at the study when they were talking about TV ads

19 decreasing, if that, in fact is true, we’re not talking

20 then about marketing, and that’s what I think is

21 changing. You’re talking about branded environments,

22 you’re talking about the advergames, you’re talking about

23 product placement, on and on and on and on, viral

24 marketing as Kathy mentioned. 

25 I mean, the whole field has changed, and I
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1 think for us to actually look at the amount of types of

2 advertising that kids are exposed to, that really means

3 marketing. So, I think in terms of what kind of

4 guidelines are going to be set, it has to be expanded to

5 include new interactive technology, the way that

6 television is changing and the whole nature of the

7 branded environment.

8 DR. MONTGOMERY: Obviously, I agree with that. 

9 But I also want to point out that I think CARU does an

10 admirable job and often under not easy circumstances in

11 terms of resources and so forth. Elizabeth may remember,

12 however, the issues of Internet advertising was an issue

13 that my organization, the Center for Media Education,

14 really made more prominent through the release of our

15 report in 1996 called Web of Deception. And that, I

16 think, generated a great deal of debate and controversy

17 and discussion, healthy discussion I think ultimately,

18 and also prompted the industry to take some actions. 

19 The point I’m making is that self-regulation is

20 generally reactive and it is often narrow and somewhat, I

21 would say, minimalist. That is if there’s a controversy

22 that comes up, the latest one, as you hear, is

23 advergaming. Oh, my god, there’s advergaming, what are

24 we going to do about that? Then, an incremental change

25 is made in the list of little problem areas that the
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1 industry has had to deal with, and that becomes the next

2 thing that they make some corrections on. And I think

3 that’s good, I’m happy that the industry does that. But

4 I do think we’re at a moment with this incredibly

5 changing media landscape and at a point where we’re

6 facing a health crisis with our young people where it’s

7 time to revisit these issues and not to get caught up --

8 hopefully, not to get caught up in the polarized debates

9 that characterize --

10 MR. KELLY: Wally, you want to talk about --

11 DR. MONTGOMERY: But to build some consensus.

12 MS. LASCOUTX: I would just like to respond

13 very briefly.

14 MR. KELLY: Elizabeth, and then -- 

15 MS. LASCOUTX: Not to devolve into a debate

16 here, but the industry and CARU were not reactive back in

17 the mid-nineties. At the time that the CME petitioned

18 the FTC to regulate the kid space on the Internet, CARU

19 had an active task group of its advisory board and people

20 who were not on the board who were, in fact, much more

21 knowledgeable than we about this new medium, kind of

22 looking at this new medium, figuring out what was

23 different about it, identifying privacy as really the

24 only really new thing that we didn’t cover, and we were

25 at the point of kind of scratching our heads and figuring
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1 out what the approach was at that very same moment.

2 I mean, there were a lot of different groups

3 that had just -- that had focused on it. And when we

4 came out with our guide -- we came out with our first set

5 of guidelines in 1996.

6 DR. WOOTAN: Dick, actually before Elizabeth

7 moves on -- 

8 MR. KELLY: We have a lot of things to cover,

9 so I would like to move on. If we have some time, we’ll

10 come back to this issue, but there’s a very important

11 area that we need to discuss and make sure we get in and

12 then we can come back.

13 DR. SCHNEEMAN: Right. I want to shift the

14 discussion of the panel to the suggestion that there

15 should be some sort of nutritional profile that’s

16 incorporated into guidelines. So, I’d like the panel

17 members to address some of the pros and cons of using

18 industry-wide nutrient standards like those that have

19 been proposed by CSPI. Are those standards reasonable? 

20 Are there other criteria that we should be considering? 

21 So maybe if we could focus on that topic for a while. I

22 think it’s something that we could have a perspective

23 from each of the panel members. I can start -- Wally, I

24 can’t see you, but I know you’re down there.

25 MR. SNYDER: I’m down here. Well, I think the
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1 question you said, are the guidelines reasonable goes to

2 one of the ultimate questions here, is what’s the

3 consensus that these are the right nutritional standards? 

4 And when you’re dealing with the food product -- the

5 product rather than the ad, you raise a lot of central

6 questions. I mean, would the government set these

7 standards? I don’t think the government’s going to do

8 that. I don’t think the government should do it.

9 So, how do we understand that these standards

10 are going to be effective in terms of this obesity issue? 

11 I think a much better approach is to make sure that the

12 ads directing you to the foods are appropriate and fair

13 and non-deceptive. That is a workable area and I think

14 it will have the greatest impact. I have great concerns

15 about nutritional standards and what its ultimate effect

16 would be on the public and on children.

17 DR. MONTGOMERY: I would say I think this is a

18 conversation we need to have. I don’t think we should

19 side-step it. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be

20 easy, but we know that the food industry’s created

21 special food categories targeted at kids and teens in the

22 late eighties and nineties responding to demographic

23 changes where teens were making more decisions and

24 spending more money in the family. Now, industry’s

25 actually responding as well by creating new products in
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1 response to the concerns over health that could shift

2 that balance. 

3 So, I think a lot of companies within the food

4 industry are already on board in terms of trying to make

5 those changes. So, I think we need to be able to have

6 that dialogue and try to figure out how best to do it.

7 MS. MILLER: I would echo what Kathy said. I

8 think it would be very difficult to operationalize, but I

9 think parents and kids need more information. They need

10 to know what’s in the food that they’re eating and then

11 how these products are then being marketed to them. So,

12 I would say, actually, the idea of it is a really great

13 idea and it’s, I think, a question of how to

14 operationalize. But if we could start that conversation

15 and move it along, it would be very helpful.

16 DR. WOOTAN: I’ve already said what I think,

17 but one thing is is that if we don’t address the

18 nutritional quality of the product, we miss the main

19 problem with food marketing today. It’s not so much that

20 there’s tons of deception, lots of misleading ads,

21 although there’s a little of that, it’s mostly that

22 overwhelming majority of ads and other marketing aimed at

23 children are for foods that they should be eating less

24 of. They’re for foods of poor nutritional quality. 

25 It is definitely possible to do this. People
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1 talk about how it’s impossible, but states have

2 regulations with nutrition standards for food sales and

3 marketing in schools. The Federal Government has some

4 standards around school meals, that there are models to

5 look to. Kraft has a model that can be looked to. 

6 PepsiCo has some nutrition standards for its marketing

7 practice. So, I just don’t see how we can have

8 responsible food marketing aimed at children if we don’t

9 address nutrition because that is the core of the issue.

10 MS. HEBEBRAND: There is actually a very

11 pertinent debate occurring on this topic right now and it

12 may be instructive to follow that as it goes through the

13 process. The Commission has put forward a proposal on

14 health and nutrition claims. Again, this is more on the

15 legislative side, certainly not on the self-regulatory

16 side. But it may be instructive in any case.

17 The proposal does argue that for some foods,

18 such claims maybe should not be allowed, certain foods

19 that have certain nutritional profiles, and it’s been a

20 big, big discussion in Europe. The end is not yet clear,

21 but I think it will be instructive for all of us maybe to

22 look at the outcome of that.

23 MS. LASCOUTX: Well, to the last point that was

24 just made, any claims that are made for any product,

25 food, otherwise, targeted to kids or otherwise has to be
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1 substantiated. So, there’s no -- I mean, you can’t make

2 a health claim for a food that you can’t substantiate it.

3 My own feeling is that the determinations about

4 nutritional standards are best left to the companies that

5 manufacture the foods or the government, but the

6 government doesn’t seem to be likely to do that. But

7 we’re not experts in nutrition. I don’t know how one

8 would go about evaluating the nutritional properties of

9 every single food that was advertised to see if it were

10 appropriate. And I think one of the suggestions of CSPI

11 is that for a certain brand or restaurant advertising, it

12 would have to be -- you’d have to evaluate the

13 nutritional composition of every single product in the

14 brand or menu component, and I just think the

15 practicalities would be pretty much insurmountable.

16 DR. WOOTAN: We can help you with that.

17 DR. SCHNEEMAN: I’m curious if anyone on the

18 panel would like to speculate whether if there were a

19 nutrition standard, would it increase or decrease

20 advertising to children or would we wind up in about the

21 same place? Would it -- 

22 DR. WOOTAN: Well, if you look at Kraft as an

23 example, it probably wouldn’t decrease the amount of

24 marketing to kids. It would shift the marketing from

25 certain products to other products. 
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1 MS. LASCOUTX: But as has been pointed out many

2 times, it’s not just Kraft. I mean, a lot of the quick

3 serve restaurants and the other food manufacturers are

4 also making improvements to their products, involuntarily

5 pulling back on the products that they’re marketing to

6 kids. So, I don’t know that an across the board imposed

7 from outside standard is even going to be necessary.

8 DR. SCHNEEMAN: I’d like to, once again, shift

9 the discussion a bit to talk about the role and

10 responsibility of parents. Maybe bring forward some of

11 the concerns that parents are expressing, what are their

12 opportunities to get those concerns out into the

13 forefront so that they can be addressed. And maybe Patti

14 and Kathryn, I’ll have you start out with this and see if

15 other panel members -- 

16 MS. MILLER: Sure. To echo what Margo said

17 earlier, I think parents are being out-maneuvered. I

18 mean, clearly -- I mean, kids are exposed to 40,000 ads

19 on TV alone and most of them are for fast food and junk

20 food and sugar cereal and that’s not taking into account

21 all the other forms of marketing we’ve been talking

22 about. 

23 In a recent Kaiser poll, half of parents said

24 that their children’s food habits and food choices are

25 influenced a lot by the TV ads that they see, and more
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1 than a fourth said that they were influenced somewhat. 

2 More than a third said that they had to deal with the nag

3 factor of their kids, someone was saying yesterday in the

4 aisle four of the grocery store having the temper tantrum

5 because they can’t get the sparkling package of sugar

6 snacks that they want. So, parents have a really tough

7 job, I think.

8 One of the things I’m concerned about is really

9 getting information into the hands of parents. I mean, I

10 can’t imagine that many parents know about CARU and that

11 it’s out there for them, and so I’m glad to hear that you

12 guys are thinking about more public education efforts so

13 the parents, if they want to file a complaint about an

14 ad, would know where to go, because I think most parents

15 don’t and I think most parents don’t know what to do. I

16 mean, again, this is so powerful. As we saw yesterday

17 with Elmo, that parents are competing against some pretty

18 incredible marketing powers and they’re losing the

19 battle.

20 This is not to say that I don’t think parents

21 have a responsibility because I think parents do and

22 there are things that parents can do. They can take TVs

23 out of the bedroom and set up rules for TV viewing and

24 try and model healthy eating habits. I think those are

25 all really good things. But I think parents need some
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1 help so they can make informed choices about what their

2 kids are eating and they’re just being bombarded and

3 their kids are being bombarded.

4 DR. MONTGOMERY: I would agree, obviously. 

5 Parents do need help. I think sometimes it’s very

6 complicated for us in this new media landscape to

7 understand everything that’s going on and even I, who

8 study it, have to consult with my daughter sometimes to

9 find out things that I didn’t know about it. She’s a

10 very important source of information. 

11 But I think as we did with COPPA, we were able

12 to create a situation where parents got some help with

13 their disclosures of privacy policy. So, if I go on a

14 child’s website, for example, I can click on the privacy

15 policy and it appears in fairly understandable English so

16 that I know what actually is happening on that website

17 and can help make a decision about whether I want my

18 child to venture there. And I think we need more

19 information for parents and for kids. I mean, I think

20 they all need -- we’re helping to train these kids to be

21 good consumers in our society as well and we need to do

22 what we can to help them.

23 So, it’s not just parents -- especially as they

24 get older. It’s parents and kids being able to get this

25 information and for all of us to play a role in helping
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1 them to be very effective consumers.

2 MR. SNYDER: I think parents are desperate for

3 more information and you heard what was being done by the

4 companies yesterday, the different formulations and so

5 forth, and yet, the research is that parents want more,

6 they don’t know enough. And I know there’s a real

7 opportunity here to really make sure that parents are

8 informed. 

9 As to the segment of self-regulation, as I

10 mentioned, we really want to open that up to parents so

11 that they can comment so we know what we’re doing and

12 what the guidelines are.

13 MS. MILLER: I think if parents, though, are

14 going to get the help they need, I think one thing that

15 they need are policies that have to be in place. 

16 Because, again, I don’t think that self-regulation is

17 going to be enough to make sure that parents can feel

18 like they can put their kids in front of the TV without

19 just being exposed to excessive advertising. There have

20 to be rules.

21 DR. WOOTAN: But if you listen to industry and

22 government officials talk about parental responsibility,

23 you know, parents are supposed to work with their school

24 board to get soda and junk food and junk food marketing

25 out of schools, we’re supposed to get fast food companies
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1 to provide nutrition information on the menu, we’re

2 supposed to work with CARU and work with multi-billion,

3 multi-national corporations to get them to change their

4 marketing practices and the kind of products that they

5 make, all the while while we take care of our family,

6 take care of our home and work full-time. I mean, let’s

7 talk about parental responsibility but let’s put it in

8 perspective of, you know, what parents are facing, the

9 resources and the expertise that they have.

10 I mean, I’ve been lobbying D.C. Public Schools

11 to try to improve the nutritional quality of school

12 foods. I have a Ph.D. in nutrition, I’m a leading

13 advocate on food marketing to kids, school foods. It is

14 tough to do and I can do it during the work day. You

15 know, the average mom or dad trying to do this, this is

16 crazy what we’re asking them to do.

17 MR. KELLY: Elizabeth, one last comment and

18 then we’re going to go to the questions from the

19 audience.

20 MS. LASCOUTX: You can go to the audience

21 questions.

22 MR. KELLY: All right. We have lots and lots

23 of questions and, Margo, you’re the winner just so you

24 know. You have gotten the most questions of any of the

25 specific panelists.
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1 DR. WOOTAN: It’s probably that I’m more

2 unpopular than popular.

3 MR. KELLY: No, it’s an interesting mix of

4 questions. But why don’t we start. There’s one question

5 that was raised about the issue that you set up this

6 proposal for guidelines directed to children and the

7 question was, well, do you think those same kind of

8 provisions ought to be directed to advertising directed

9 to older folks, perhaps to me or to parents, because

10 there’s a lot of advertising that’s directed to older

11 folks that also is for the same kinds of products?

12 DR. WOOTAN: No. Our guidelines for

13 responsible food marketing are aimed at children, that we

14 take, as a society, many steps to protect children, that

15 we see that in the same vein. You know, if we want

16 children to sit in car seats and wear helmets, they also

17 should be protected from heart disease and diabetes and

18 other diseases that kill and cause disability. So, these

19 are clearly guidelines for children.

20 MR. KELLY: There’s another question about what

21 are the specific reasons not to advertise diet sodas to

22 kids?

23 DR. WOOTAN: Our guidelines do not exclude diet

24 soda. They only exclude the marketing of soft drinks --

25 well, actually, that contain added caloric sweeteners. 
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1 So, that’s just incorrect.

2 MR. KELLY: There was a specific question -- 

3 DR. WOOTAN: Unless it’s caffeinated.

4 MR. KELLY: There was a specific question about

5 what percentage of manufactured food would you think

6 would qualify under the CSPI proposal. 

7 DR. WOOTAN: You know, I haven’t done any kind

8 of percentage, but one hope is that if companies were to

9 really adhere to responsible marketing practices, that

10 there would be a real explosion in healthier, better for

11 you products that could be marketed to kids. You know,

12 clearly there are huge categories of foods like fruits

13 and vegetables and many whole grains that could be

14 marketed. But there are also like Kids Cuisine frozen

15 dinners, there are options, there are a number of

16 cereals, there’s lowfat milk, there’s juices, seltzer,

17 flavored waters, a number of different kinds of crackers,

18 granola bars, a bunch of different kids of chips and

19 nuts. There’s, you know, a range of products that could

20 be marketed under our guidelines.

21 MR. KELLY: We got a vote from one of the -- it

22 looks like here. It’s a suggestion, I think, for all of

23 us. How about the old-fashioned solution for parents,

24 just say no to your kids.

25 MS. MILLER: You know, again, I think that just
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1 really -- I want to echo, of course, we all have a

2 responsibility in this issue, but I think when that kind

3 of frame comes up, it really is putting the onus on

4 parents and I think taking the responsibility off of all

5 the different constituencies that have to play a role in

6 this, including the industry. I think parents, again,

7 it’s like David versus Goliath and what are parents

8 supposed to do in this onslaught of advertising. So, I

9 just don’t think it’s a fair frame to put that burden on

10 parents. Clearly, they have a role to play, but there

11 need to be policies in place to give parents that added

12 help. So, you know, there have to be limits, I think, on

13 the amount of this kind of advertising.

14 MR. KELLY: And there’s been no question that

15 over the day-and-a-half, we’ve had a lot of discussions

16 of ways that all of us can reach out to parents to help

17 them in this effort. Barbara?

18 DR. SCHNEEMAN: This is a question that I don’t

19 think we’ve really touched on in the panel discussion so

20 far and it’s a question about how self-regulation

21 integrates the evidence that there are environmental,

22 contextual and personal characteristics that affect the

23 way ethnic minorities are marketed to and respond to

24 marketing. And so, I think it would be important to have

25 some comments about the role of self-regulation with
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1 respect to the issues we heard yesterday on ethnic

2 minorities.

3 DR. MONTGOMERY: Elizabeth, if you don’t want

4 to respond, I’ll say something. I’m sorry. I would just

5 say I think it’s important. We ought to take that up. I

6 mean, I think it is important. I don’t think we probably

7 have said enough about it and we tend to talk, all of us

8 probably, myself included, as if the child audience, the

9 child consumer population was homogeneous and that’s not

10 the case. So, I think it’s a very important issue that

11 also should be part of the -- what I see as a

12 conversation that we are beginning now.

13 MS. MILLER: Forty percent of youth today are

14 youth of color and that number is dramatically growing,

15 and then when you also think about, as was mentioned

16 yesterday, African American and Latino kids are spending

17 more time with media. So, when you think about the ways

18 they’re specifically being targeted, that’s an area for

19 great concern.

20 MS. LASCOUTX: I agree, and I think it’s an

21 important area for us to look at further. I mean, we

22 have not -- that’s not part of our expertise and perhaps

23 that’s one of the areas that we should be expanding our

24 advisory board. We have, recently, or a year ago, added

25 bilingual staff so that we can, in fact, at least monitor
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1 the Spanish language media and we’re doing that. But as

2 we are looking to broaden our advisory board, that might

3 be a very good idea.

4 MR. KELLY: There’s a question from those

5 watching us. Panel, please comment on the usage or

6 relevance of the food label as a regulatory tool for

7 companies to use as a ranking mechanism for their

8 products.

9 DR. WOOTAN: I would address that because

10 actually, you know, people say it’s impossible to set

11 these kinds of limits or nutrition standards for

12 marketing or for the sale of foods in schools. But if

13 you look at the kinds of standards that individual school

14 districts, states, legislators, regulatory agencies,

15 individual health groups come up with, they’re amazingly

16 similar. I think actually if you look at the nutrition

17 guidelines for marketing that Kraft and CSPI have,

18 they’re a lot more the same than they are different,

19 because when you look at the science, you come to a

20 similar conclusion. It’s not that we copied off each

21 other, it’s that we all looked at the same science base

22 and you come up with similar numbers and many of those

23 numbers come from FDA.

24 So, our cut-offs for fat, for saturated fat

25 come from the label. All of our cut-offs for sodium come
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1 from definitions from the FDA. We use definitions for

2 claims, as well as cut-offs for disclosure and

3 disqualifying levels of nutrients. Portion sizes, ours

4 are based on FDA standard portion sizes. Added sugars,

5 since the FDA has failed to provide a daily value for

6 added sugars, though hopefully some day they will, that

7 we use the recommendation from the Institute of

8 Medicine’s DRI Report, which is very well grounded in

9 science and accepted by consensus. So, I think if you --

10 and the problem nutrients that we look at are based also

11 on what’s recommended by the dietary guidelines and our

12 cut-off for what a whole grain is is based on FDA. 

13 So, if you look at our nutrition standards for

14 food marketing to kids, they are largely based on

15 consensus numbers, many of them from the FDA.

16 MR. SNYDER: Can I just comment, also? I mean,

17 the conceptual scheme for regulation and self-regulation

18 in this country has always recognized the importance of

19 labels, and labels, as providing more complex information

20 to parents and consumers. There were good examples of

21 that yesterday on the labels that were shown in those

22 presentations. I think the question was really the role. 

23 I think labels are very important. They’re a source of

24 information for consumers and parents. Advertising plays

25 a bit of a different role there, but it can never be
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1 inconsistent. And I think that both are very important.

2 DR. SCHNEEMAN: This question asks if the panel

3 could discuss what or give some perspective on what is

4 the industry’s standard definition of deceptive

5 advertising to children. How would industry define that?

6 MS. LASCOUTX: Well, obviously, if it’s false,

7 it’s deceptive and so that my colleagues at the NAD have

8 a much easier time because all they have to do -- not all

9 they have to do, but they have to look at the

10 truthfulness or accuracy of expressed or implied claims. 

11 With kids, we also have to add kind of misleading to what

12 is deceptive and I think the Commissioner was talking

13 about that earlier, that, you know, something that is

14 factually true can be misleading to children. 

15 So, it’s really -- that’s why we have these

16 very specific guidelines that go beyond truth and

17 accuracy. So, you know, anything that will imply that a

18 product will confer certain prowess on you can deceive or

19 mislead a child. So, the definition of deceptive for

20 children is far broader than that for older kids.

21 DR. SCHNEEMAN: Wally, did you want to comment

22 on that question, also?

23 MR. SNYDER: No, I think that’s what I would

24 say.

25 MR. KELLY: We have a question for Margo. What
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1 would be the CSPI’s position if a major fast food chain,

2 quick serve, was using a popular kids movie or character

3 in brand advertising where no specific foods or menu

4 items are mentioned? Really the point of the question

5 is, should fast food chains never use licensed kid

6 properties in any promotions?

7 DR. WOOTAN: Our recommendation about

8 advertising that doesn’t show a product, which just

9 promotes a brand, is that that brand should include a

10 large number of healthy options, at least half of the

11 options should be healthful. 

12 So, if McDonald’s was to use a branded

13 character and showed a Happy Meal that had chicken

14 nuggets, apple dippers and apple juice, that would comply

15 or be consistent with our guidelines because it would

16 show a healthful meal, a balanced meal. If they just did

17 generic branded advertising for McDonald’s with a

18 character, that would not comply because the overwhelming

19 majority of choices at McDonald’s are still of poor

20 nutritional quality. It’s nice that they’ve added salad,

21 yogurt, a chicken sandwich, some apple dippers, but

22 still, if you look at McDonald’s menu, overwhelming the

23 choices are poor nutritional quality and the children’s

24 entrees still are just hamburger, cheeseburger and deep

25 fried chicken nuggets that have plenty of trans and
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1 saturated fat.

2 DR. SCHNEEMAN: Okay, a question I think again

3 addressed to several people on the panel, can a campaign

4 that promotes healthy food succeed without reducing or

5 restricting campaigns that promote junk food? So, sort

6 of looking at the balance between these two.

7 MS. MILLER: I think public education campaigns

8 are very, very important, but I believe, as Vicky Rideout

9 said yesterday, they have to have the reach and exposure

10 in order to actually have a chance against the competing

11 messages that are out there. I mean, if you have one PSA

12 promoting carrots and then you have 100 ads for various

13 sugar cereals, you know, it’s hard for that message, I

14 think, to resonate. So, that’s why I think public

15 education campaigns need to have the resources committed

16 to them because I don’t know that they can be successful

17 in this barrage of other advertising.

18 So, my sense is we need more public education

19 messages, but we also need a reduction in some of this

20 really unhealthy advertising for foods that are not good

21 for kids.

22 DR. WOOTAN: But it seems like that question is

23 grounded in the idea, and I hear a lot of industry

24 critics of addressing junk food marketing to kids,

25 thinking about addressing this issue as a ban on all
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1 marketing to kids, and that’s what -- we’re not

2 recommending that, by any means, though I know some

3 advocates are. That responsible marketing can allow for

4 the commercial marketing of healthful foods. We’re

5 thrilled, Marva, to see SpongeBob and Dora and other of

6 your very popular characters, which our children love, on

7 spinach and oranges and carrots, that we can use

8 marketing to promote healthy eating. 

9 It’s not that marketing is good or bad. 

10 There’s no inherent evil in marketing. The problem with

11 marketing aimed at kids is that it encourages children to

12 eat an unhealthy diet. The balance of messages is way

13 skewed toward unhealthy foods that our children should be

14 eating much less of, not be encouraged to eat more of.

15 MR. SNYDER: I wonder if you could push the

16 fans up this way. 

17 MR. KELLY: We’re going to be ending in just a

18 second, but here’s some fans for you to take with you.

19 (Laughter.)

20 MR. SNYDER: What I wanted to add was, I think

21 in America we really are used to this informational

22 complexion. You’re going to hear more about the Ad

23 Council and what it’s done, you heard about it yesterday. 

24 Very effective campaigns are coming out from the Ad

25 Council and they’re well-funded and they really have got
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1 a tremendous media base to them. At the same time, the

2 products that Margo’s been referring to are getting

3 attention by companies and are being advertised, and at

4 the same time, all food products are being advertised,

5 but it has to be done appropriately and fairly and I

6 think that’s really the standard we have to make sure is

7 working.

8 DR. SCHNEEMAN: As anticipated, we have far

9 more questions than we have time, but I think it’s good

10 that we have these questions and it helps give a sense of

11 some of the issues that are being raised as a result of

12 the panel discussion. I did want to give Charlotte one

13 last opportunity. You might feel you’re in the middle of

14 a U.S. food fight here, but if there are some

15 perspectives you have from the EU and what you see

16 happening there, I did want to give you an opportunity to

17 comment on some of these issues.

18 MS. HEBEBRAND: I think it is difficult to

19 weigh on this self-regulation versus legislative action. 

20 I mean, I would just point out the obvious, I guess, that

21 legislative actions take a long time on this side of the

22 Atlantic, but certainly also in Europe. For any kind of

23 proposal to go through the European Union, we’re talking

24 at least two, three years. 

25 So, I think the focus on the issue -- and
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1 certainly this conference, I think, has done that very

2 well. In a way, that’s the idea behind that platform

3 that the European Commission has launched. I think self4 regulation can certainly work. It should be given a try,

5 it should be increased. But I think the important issue

6 is to keep the focus on it and to make sure that you can

7 actually monitor what self-regulation achieves. This is

8 something we hope to do in Europe. I think it remains to

9 be seen whether it’s ultimately successful. But I think

10 in the big picture, self-regulation certainly is

11 something that perhaps could be done more quickly. It’s

12 not to say that it’s the best way to do it, but I would

13 just point out that obvious fact.

14 MR. KELLY: This brings an end to our

15 discussion. I think we, literally and figuratively, have

16 been on the hot seat.

17 (Applause.)

18 MR. PAHL: Thank you. If I could ask everybody

19 to remain in their seats for a moment, we’re going to go

20 directly to the open forum part of our agenda.

21 Another thing, as well, I’d point out to

22 everyone is they’re working very hard on getting the air

23 conditioning back up and running and I would ask everyone

24 to be as patient as you can be.

25 (Whereupon, there was a brief pause in the
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1 proceedings.)

2 MR. PAHL: Could the people at the head table

3 move and take seats so that we can begin with the next

4 part of our program? Thank you very much.

5 We have one person who has expressed an

6 interest in speaking during our open forum, and that’s

7 John Warden from the Kids Fitness Challenge, who will be

8 at the microphone located at the other end of the

9 platform.

10 MR. WARDEN: Thank you very much. I know how

11 hot it is in here, so I’ll be very brief. The Kids

12 Fitness Challenge tries to take a positive approach to

13 the issue of child obesity. We focus on nutrition,

14 physical activity and positive mental health. Something

15 that hasn’t been talked about too much in this discussion

16 is the need of depression and anxiety and the role it

17 plays in overeating and inactivity.

18 Our program has special events in communities

19 throughout the country where we engage parents, teachers,

20 kids and community leaders and special events that

21 promote healthy eating, active lifestyles and enables

22 schools to raise money to promote nutrition education and

23 physical activity and after-school programs in their

24 schools. We’ve funded, for example, full-time P.E.

25 teachers in elementary schools through the Los Angeles
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1 Unified School District.

2 We are going to be doing a big pilot program

3 and we’d like to thank Bill Dietz at the CDC and the

4 folks at the President’s Council on Fitness. We are

5 going to launch a school lunch pilot program featuring

6 fresh fruits and vegetables, healthy snacking in vending

7 machines and pilot program physical activity programs for

8 kids in elementary, middle school and high school and

9 we’re going to study the results of the physiology change

10 of the kids, as well as the effect on test scores,

11 physical fitness scores, attendance and discipline.

12 We’re very excited about this program and our program is

13 going to be completely funded by corporate support.

14 We take the position that we would like the

15 marketers and advertisers at this council to take a more

16 positive approach, to be bolder and more ambitious in

17 your plans to develop healthy items for kids and parents. 

18 As a father and a consumer, I know that there’s not

19 enough choice for my son or my family and that the demand

20 is there. All you need to do is look at the rising

21 market share of stores like Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and

22 Rolled Oats and see how their products are flying off the

23 shelves to know that there is market share to be gained.

24 We urge you to be more bold, take a positive

25 approach and try to help us solve the rising rates of
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1 obesity. Thank you.

2 (Applause.)

3 MR. PAHL: Thank you, John. We’ll now take a

4 15-minute break and we’ll begin with our next panel at

5 11:10. Thank you.

6 (Whereupon, a brief break was taken.)

7 MS. FAIR: Thank you for taking your seats,

8 please. Thank you very much. Actually, the air

9 conditioning works fine. We were using this as good a

10 justification as any to advertise our new OJO campaign at

11 the FTC, which is fighting fraud, including health fraud

12 aimed at the Hispanic community. So, we have also been

13 told that the compressor has been fixed, it turned on

14 about five minutes ago. I think we’re down two-tenths of

15 a degree in just five minutes, so we hope this is a step

16 in the right direction.

17 The final panel of the day, before we receive

18 closing remarks, is going to cover the obvious topic, the

19 next steps that should be taken. What should the

20 government and the private sector do to help make

21 children’s diets healthier and encourage responsible

22 marketing?

23 Our moderators for this panel, we’re pleased to

24 have Dr. Michael O’Grady, who is HHS’s Assistant

25 Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and Mary Engle,
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1 Associate Director for Advertising Practices with the

2 FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

3 PANEL 5: WHAT SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT AND THE 

4 PRIVATE SECTOR DO TO HELP MAKE CHILDREN’S DIETS 

5 HEALTHIER AND ENCOURAGE RESPONSIBLE MARKETING

6 DR. O’GRADY: Thank you very much and thank you

7 very much for coming. I wanted to talk for a little bit

8 before the panel gets started, especially given the other

9 panels we’ve heard both this morning and yesterday to

10 set a little bit of the perspective, especially from the

11 way we view it at HHS.

12 As I think we heard very forcefully and

13 eloquently from our Surgeon General this morning, our

14 perspective is that this is a public health crisis and

15 you’ve seen our various speakers that have been here over

16 the last couple of days and the organization overall, the

17 Centers for Disease Control, NIH, FDA and the Office of

18 the Secretary. That we view this as something that is

19 really a public health concern that we need to move

20 forcefully in. You saw the statistics, you heard the

21 motivation coming from the Surgeon General.

22 What we’re looking for in a number of different

23 things is really the evidence-based prevention that we

24 can move in here and how does marketing fit into that

25 kind of a context. So, what we’re really doing is we’re
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1 moving on a multiple -- let’s call it a multi-variate

2 approach whereas this is one of those variables involved. 

3 And so, we’re really moving across -- we’re bringing our

4 best talent to bear here, you’ve heard a number of them

5 over the last couple of days, and we really are trying to

6 figure out how to do things. We’re trying to figure out

7 how to empower parents, not blame them, and we’re very,

8 very interested in the disparities and what the

9 implications are to those overall.

10 So, you’ve heard these different panels, we’re

11 coming up on the last panel now. I think all of us here

12 have been to different conferences. Sometimes, boy, it

13 was a good conference, what comes out of it? Two years

14 later, there’s another conference. We’d like this to be

15 different. We’d like to really think about solutions. 

16 We’d really like to think about next steps that are going

17 to be doable and effective in this area. We want to

18 think about what works and there’s a number of different

19 things -- and my job working with the Secretary cuts

20 across the entire breadth of HHS from welfare to work to

21 Medicare, all across. 

22 And there’s a number of things you can see in

23 common between policies that move forward, become

24 mobilized and are effective. They tend to be practical,

25 they tend to be achievable and they tend to be flexible,
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1 and it struck me, especially that last one, that when

2 we’ve talked about a market like this, when we talked

3 about not only how it’s changed within television but

4 we’ve moved across into the Internet, that the idea of

5 how flexible, how in effect self-correcting you would

6 need to be in this particular policy to be able to -- you

7 know, because this market is going to move clearly,

8 quickly, agilely, probably much more agilely than the

9 government can ever move, if other policy areas are any

10 indication.

11 So, how do you do that? If we’re in a

12 situation where we’re simply regulating or legislating

13 after the fact, it will always be catch-up ball. When we

14 think about what are the really practical solutions, how

15 people can work together, where those lines need to be

16 drawn and how you build this infrastructure to solve this

17 problem, I really want to make that emphasis as we talk

18 about things to the panel about how you make something

19 that really can work.

20 For our last panel, we have brought a group of

21 stakeholders together to give us their thoughts and where

22 we go from here, and that is clearly the theme here. 

23 We’re asking the panelists to help us think about

24 concrete next steps, public, private sector, how they can

25 work together to help make sure that children’s diets are
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1 healthier and encourage responsible marketing. We are

2 hoping that our panelists will be able to react to things

3 they have heard over the last day or so and to bring

4 their individual expertise to bear and their perspective

5 on this broader question.

6 We will hear from the GMA on the proposed

7 changes to the current self-regulatory framework they are

8 announcing today and we will hear reactions to this and

9 how we can continue to move forward together. 

10 There is a lot to be done and I look forward to

11 the discussion, and now, I’ll turn it over to Mary Engle,

12 my able colleague from the Federal Trade Commission.

13 MS. ENGLE: Now, it’s my pleasure to introduce

14 Vivica Kraak of the Institute of Medicine who will make a

15 10-minute presentation on three IOM studies regarding

16 childhood obesity. Vivica is a Senior Program Officer in

17 the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of

18 Medicine. She staffed the IOM study that produced the

19 report called Preventing Childhood Obesity: Health in

20 the Balance. This workshop is partially a response to

21 some of the recommendations in that report.

22 MS. KRAAK: Thank you. On behalf of the

23 Institute of Medicine, I’d like to thank the HHS and FTC

24 for inviting me to share the perspective of the IOM and

25 the various studies that we’re involved in right now that
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1 are related to the topic of this workshop and also

2 commend both institutions for responding so quickly to

3 one of the key recommendations embodied in the Preventing

4 Childhood Obesity: Health in the Balance report. So,

5 the Committee on Preventing Childhood Obesity is very

6 excited about this event, particularly to bring together

7 various perspectives in a very constructive environment.

8 The Institute of Medicine is a non-profit

9 independent institution that has the mission to advise

10 the nation to improve health. What I’d like to talk

11 about just in the 10 minutes I have is a brief background

12 of the IOM study background, the process and the key

13 conclusions from the Preventing Childhood Obesity Report. 

14 The three recommendations I’d like to specifically

15 highlight are those related to the food, beverage and

16 restaurant industries, as well as advertising and

17 marketing guidelines to children and a third that focused

18 on advertising guidelines in schools. 

19 There are a number of other recommendations,

20 and I don’t want to diminish the importance of those,

21 I’ll just gloss over them, but you’re able to get a copy

22 of the report or the executive summary if you contact us. 

23 And then I’ll wrap up with a brief overview of the food

24 marketing and the diets of children and youth study

25 that’s in process right now. We hope to release that in
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1 early November to the public and a Progress in Preventing

2 Childhood Obesity Report.

3 The Preventing Childhood Obesity: Health in

4 the Balance study was a Congressional request in 2002,

5 and we had a number of sponsors. Within DHHS, we had

6 CDC, several NIH Institutes, the Office of Disease

7 Prevention and Health Promotion, as well as the Robert

8 Wood Johnson Foundation. It was a two-year study and the 

9 task for the Committee was to develop a prevention focus

10 action plan to prevent the number of children in the

11 United States, and youth, who were not yet obese. What

12 we did is convene a 19-member multi-disciplinary expert

13 committee at the IOM which met six times over the course

14 of the two years to address the scope of work and also

15 review the relevant scientific evidence to develop

16 findings, conclusions and recommendations for the report.

17 Before the report was released, there was a

18 rigorous blinded peer review process. There were 19

19 committee members, but we had 21 reviewers, and that just

20 strengthens the report. So, we made sure that each

21 recommendation and all the evidence that’s reviewed is

22 strongly, soundly supported and defensible before the

23 report goes to the public.

24 The key conclusions of that Obesity Prevention

25 Report were that childhood obesity is a serious
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1 nationwide health problem with multi-factorial causes and

2 it requires a population base prevention approach as well

3 as a comprehensive response. The goal is energy balance

4 for children and youth to promote both healthful eating

5 behaviors, as well as regular physical activity for them

6 to achieve a healthy weight, while also protecting their

7 health and normal growth and development.

8 The third key message is that preventing

9 childhood obesity is a collective responsibility. There

10 are multiple stakeholders and sectors that must be

11 involved in changing society at different levels.

12 So, what is needed is leadership at all

13 different levels. We need to build an evaluation into

14 existing obesity prevention intervention and any new ones

15 that we initiate. There needs to be a commitment for

16 adequate resources to make that happen. Efforts need to

17 be coordinated at all levels and what we need to move

18 toward is a societal norm where we have behaviors, both

19 eating behaviors and physical activity behaviors that

20 contribute to obesity, which are currently the social

21 norm and we need to move in a direction where healthful

22 eating behaviors and physical activity become the new

23 societal norm. 

24 And a good comparative reference point for you

25 is that the Surgeon General’s report on smoking and
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1 tobacco was released a year after I was born, which is a

2 little bit over 40 years ago, and at that time, the

3 smoking prevalence in adults was as high as 30 percent,

4 and we’ve been working on that issue for over 40 years

5 and look how far we’ve come. But we’ve still had to work

6 on that. So, when yesterday a point came up, how far

7 into the future do we need to be strategically planning

8 about obesity, in our committee, our chair had said to me

9 very insightfully one day, this is going to be on our

10 public health agenda for the next 40 to 50 years. So,

11 all of us need to be prepared to work on this issue for

12 that length of time, and to use an example that Marva

13 gave yesterday, this is not a sprint, this is going to be

14 a marathon. But we need to think about this as a mega15 marathon it’s going to be 40 or 50 years.

16 The key stakeholders involved are parents,

17 families, schools, communities, health care, industry,

18 media and the government, and the action plan that was

19 developed, which is a blueprint for the country for

20 obesity prevention developed a series of recommendations

21 for government to make obesity prevention a national

22 public health priority. There was a series of

23 recommendations for creating a healthy marketplace, one

24 for a healthy media environment, healthy communities, a

25 healthy school environment and a healthy home
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1 environment. 

2 For the purposes of today, I’m just going to

3 focus on three recommendations in the marketplace and the

4 school environment. What the Committee concluded is that

5 young consumers and their parents will need to change

6 their food and beverage preferences and engage in regular

7 physical activity and fewer sedentary pursuits in order

8 to achieve energy balance. The food, beverage,

9 restaurant, entertainment, recreation and leisure

10 industries, so industries very broadly can be

11 instrumental in changing consumer behaviors, and there

12 are many opportunities to influence consumers’ purchase

13 decisions at different points. We’re looking at product

14 development, packaging, labeling, promotion, distribution

15 through multiple channels and pricing strategies.

16 So, the first recommendation for creating a

17 healthy marketplace is focused on industry should make

18 obesity prevention in children and youth a priority by

19 developing and promoting products, opportunities and

20 information that will encourage healthful eating

21 behaviors and regular physical activity. Now, we’re just

22 dealing in this workshop with the energy input side of

23 the equation, but that’s what I’m going to focus on.

24 So, for food and beverage industries, the

25 Committee recommended that we should develop product and
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1 packaging innovations that consider energy density,

2 nutrient density and standard serving sizes to help

3 consumers make healthful choices. For the full-service

4 and quick serve restaurant sectors, they should expand

5 healthier food options and provide the calorie content

6 and general nutrition information at point of purchase. 

7 And although it didn’t end up in the formal

8 recommendation, there was some carefully worded text in

9 the report that the Committee encouraged the restaurant

10 sector to enhance or adapt the food guide pyramid or

11 develop a new food guidance system and relevant education

12 materials that would convey how portion sizes should be

13 distributed throughout the day for children of different

14 age groups at restaurants.

15 The second recommendation about creating a

16 healthy marketplace focused on industry should develop

17 and strictly adhere to marketing and advertising

18 guidelines that minimize the risk of obesity in children

19 and youth, which you’ve seen a few times over the course

20 of the last day-and-a-half. And in order to achieve

21 this, the IOM Committee recommended that the DHHS

22 Secretary should convene a national conference, which is

23 what we’re at today, to develop guidelines for or to

24 begin the dialogue to develop guidelines for the

25 advertising and marketing of foods, beverages and
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1 sedentary entertainment directed at children and youth

2 with attention product placement, promotion and content. 

3 Industry should implement the advertising and marketing

4 guidelines that are developed at this conference and the

5 FTC should have the authority and resources to monitor

6 compliance with the food and beverage and the sedentary

7 entertainment advertising practices.

8 And the third recommendation in the report is

9 that schools and school districts are urged to develop

10 and implement and enforce school policies to create

11 schools that are advertising-free to the greatest extent

12 possible. 

13 There’s one other recommendation that focuses

14 on creating a multimedia and public relations campaign to

15 promote obesity prevention of children, youth, families,

16 as well as society at large, and that relates to one of

17 the panels we had yesterday, but I didn’t include that in

18 what I’m going to show you today. 

19 I’m going to just wrap up with two other

20 studies that are in progress. I can’t talk much about

21 them, so you’re not going to get any sneak previews other

22 than when they are anticipated to be released, but it’s

23 been 25 years since there’s been a comprehensive review

24 of the literature in the United States on the influence

25 of marketing on children’s diet and health. And so, at a
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1 Congressional request, the CDC asked the Institute of

2 Medicine last year to review the effects of food and

3 beverage marketing on the diets and health of children

4 and youth in the United States, including the

5 characteristics of effective marketing of foods to

6 children and youth to promote healthy food choices.

7 And also to provide in that report recommendations for

8 public/private stakeholders to foster healthy food and

9 beverage choices.

10 We anticipate that report will be released in

11 early November. So, stay tuned.

12 And there’s a third study that was initiated

13 just a few months ago, which is supported by the Robert

14 Wood Johnson Foundation. The purpose of that study is to

15 implement the obesity prevention report recommendations

16 as well as to go out and organize three regional symposia

17 to really go out into the communities and understand

18 better what we need in terms of evaluation. So, we have

19 a newly convened committee. It’s a 13-member committee

20 that is charged with developing an evaluation approach to

21 assess whether or not we truly are making progress in

22 obesity prevention actions for various sectors.

23 We were in Wichita, Kansas, for our first

24 regional meeting three weeks ago where we convened about

25 110 different stakeholders who discussed how you create a
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1 healthier school environment. We’re in the midst of

2 organizing a regional meeting in Atlanta in early October

3 that will bring together people around the IOM

4 recommendations for communities and government. And of

5 particular interest, we’re in the process of organizing a

6 meeting in early December in Irvine, California, for

7 industry.

8 So, if you are interested in being involved and

9 being considered for that meeting, please contact me

10 after this meeting.

11 And then the product is that we hope to release

12 the report about the evaluation approach in 2006. Thank

13 you.

14 MS. ENGLE: And now, I’d like to introduce the

15 panelists for this last panel of our workshop. Mark

16 Berlind of the Kraft Food Company. Mark is Executive

17 Vice President, Global Corporate Affairs at Kraft.

18 Dan Jaffe. Dan is Executive Vice President of

19 the Association of National Advertisers.

20 Dr. Penny Kris-Etherton of the American Heart

21 Association’s Nutrition Committee. Dr. Kris-Etherton is

22 Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at Penn State

23 University.

24 Brock Leach with PepsiCo. Brock is Senior Vice

25 President, New Growth Platforms and Chief Innovation
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1 Officer at PepsiCo.

2 Dr. Susan Linn, a psychologist, is Associate

3 Director of the Media Center of the Judge Baker

4 Children’s Center, as well as Co-Founder of the Campaign

5 for a Commercial-Free Childhood. And I couldn’t help but

6 note a very interesting part in Dr. Linn’s bio is that

7 she is an award-winning ventriloquist and children’s

8 entertainer who has pioneered the use of puppets in child

9 therapy.

10 Manly Molpus is President and Chief Executive

11 Officer of the Grocery Manufacturers of America.

12 And, finally, Dr. Donald Lee Shifrin is a

13 Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and

14 currently serves on its National Task Force on Obesity. 

15 A practicing pediatrician, Dr. Shifrin is Clinical

16 Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington

17 School of Medicine in Seattle.

18 Our first panelist -- we’re not going to be

19 quite in alphabetical order, close to it, but I’d like to

20 have Dan Jaffe.

21 MR. JAFFE: Thank you very much. Also, I want

22 to thank the FTC, HHS. I think this has been a very

23 important and successful workshop. I don’t know why I

24 was given the honor of speaking first, but what I’d like

25 to try to do in the next minute or two is try to cover --
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1 try and put together what’s been happening for the last

2 two days, because instead of coming up with new

3 recommendations, I think that what has been proposed here

4 and what has been put forward here will make a

5 substantial difference in beating these issues and I

6 think it’s useful to see what we -- at least as I

7 understand it, what has happened in the last couple of

8 days.

9 First, I think it should be clear to anybody

10 who has been listening to the companies that have spoken

11 at this conference that the marketplace is working. Most

12 importantly, the marketplace is working because they are

13 responding to consumers who are demanding products that

14 are healthful, nutritious and low in calories. They are

15 competing in the marketplace. It makes a difference to

16 their bottom line and that suggests that this type of

17 development is going to continue.

18 What’s important is that the companies that

19 spoke are representative. If we go down any aisle in the

20 supermarket, if you go to any restaurant in this country,

21 you will see there are new options that have come into

22 play just in the last year or two to provide people more

23 nutritious and low-calorie foods. So, I think that the

24 marketplace will work and we should not stand in the way

25 of the marketplace and suggestions to try to ban or
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1 restrict advertising would be counter-productive, and

2 certainly those types of efforts that would try to say

3 that you could have only certain foods advertised are

4 almost certainly unconstitutional, because it’s not bad

5 foods. There is no bad food, there is bad diets.

6 Also, this is not a do-good, feel-good

7 activity, as I said. This has become an integral part of

8 the whole process. 

9 Now, second, we have a strong interlocking

10 system of industry self-regulation, but more importantly,

11 not only is CARU operating effectively with 97 percent

12 compliance decade after decade by companies, but it is

13 moving forward to meet the new challenges. And so, there

14 are proposals already underway before the National

15 Advertising Review Council, of which our association is

16 one of the members and others. But there are going to be

17 proposals, as you’ll hear from Manly Molpus, to go

18 forward. This is a living, breathing, effective

19 organization and it does have teeth. I can certainly

20 tell you that I have heard companies scream when the CARU

21 comes around and cracks down on their ads. They

22 certainly think that it is not just a watchdog that

23 barks, but a watchdog that bites.

24 Third, and I think this is very important and I

25 don’t know how much attention it has really gotten so
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1 far, we do believe there has been a gap in our handling

2 of these issues with kids. It’s the whole question of

3 media literacy. Dick O’Brien yesterday talked about

4 launching this program. This has been accepted by the

5 Executive Committee of the Ad Council, our public service

6 arm. We’re going to make a big program to try to help

7 kids navigate more effectively and with greater

8 understanding through the media and advertising

9 environment.

10 And, fourth, the Ad Council has a whole series

11 of programs. You’ve heard about the Small Steps Program,

12 which has over $106 million worth of public service ads

13 in just the first 10 months. So, they’ve just launched

14 this coalition to try to help everybody else’s marketing

15 views and they have shortly to launch a program

16 specifically dedicated to children in regard to

17 nutrition. 

18 And, fifth, I believe is a very important

19 component, one that has not been discussed for government

20 to play. ANA supports efforts by government to provide

21 funding for research, partnerships and education on

22 nutrition and physical activity. We think it’s an

23 outrage, frankly, that in only one state in this country

24 is physical education required in the lower schools. 

25 Senator Frist’s Impact Legislation S-1325 provides this
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1 type of comprehensive approach and we strongly endorse

2 this proposal and we believe that the industry will get

3 behind it because we think that this is only going to

4 work if everybody in industry and government are working

5 in the same direction. 

6 I believe people feel passionately about this

7 issue, want to help and will help. We are committed to

8 this issue. We will see that we will do whatever is

9 needed to be done to make our self-regulatory system

10 effective, our communication system effective, and if

11 people from any side have suggestions, we will listen to

12 them. That doesn’t mean we will necessarily agree with

13 everything that is put forward, but we are open to hear.

14 I would be able to go and discuss some of these things in 

15 more detail, but I see a fairly long line of people

16 behind me and so I will step down at this point. Thank

17 you.

18 MS. ENGLE: Dr. Kris-Etherton.

19 DR. KRIS-ETHERTON: Well, I’d like to start by

20 thanking representatives from the FTC and Department of

21 Health and Human Services for the opportunity to

22 represent the American Heart Association Nutrition

23 Committee at this very important conference that is being

24 held to address the topic, Perspectives on Marketing,

25 Self-Regulation and Childhood Obesity.
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1 American Heart Association has a long-standing

2 commitment to fighting heart disease and stroke. 

3 Cardiovascular disease still remains a leading cause of

4 death in the United States. Yearly economic toll is

5 staggering. Just last year, the direct and indirect

6 costs associated with cardiovascular disease were about

7 $400 billion. The astonishing conundrum that confronts

8 us is that we can prevent most heart diseases with

9 healthy lifestyle practices, including good dietary

10 practices, regular physical activity, not smoking

11 cigarettes and regular medical check-ups.

12 There are many American Heart Association

13 programs and activities that are aimed at controlling 

14 risk factors for cardiovascular disease. One new

15 initiative is targeting childhood obesity, and I think

16 that it’s one model that illustrates a next step that

17 could be taken by other organizations, the government and

18 private sector to help make children’s diets healthier

19 and including responsible marketing. 

20 So, the program I’m going to describe is the

21 Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association

22 Alliance to Create a Healthier Generation. Governor Mike

23 Huckabee from Arkansas also is a member of the Alliance. 

24 This is a 10-year relationship that’s championing the

25 fight against the nation’s fastest-growing children’s
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1 epidemic, obesity. 

2 There are two goals of the Clinton Foundation3 HA Alliance, and they are, one, by 2010, halt the

4 increasing prevalence of childhood obesity in the United

5 States. Two, by 2015, reduce the prevalence of childhood

6 obesity by 10 percent. 

7 Well, how will the goals of the Alliance be

8 reached? The Alliance hopes to foster an environment

9 that helps all kids pursue a healthy lifestyle. To do so

10 is going to speak to a variety of audiences, consumers,

11 industry, health care providers, schools and the media,

12 and focus on several key areas that have a major impact

13 on lifestyles and behaviors of children. So, I’d like to

14 just quickly go through the activities that are planned

15 for these different targets.

16 In terms of consumers, the consumer group

17 that’s targeted is kids and the Alliance is going to

18 launch a for kids by kids movement to mobilize kids,

19 especially those ages 9 to 13 to take charge of their own

20 health and lead healthier lives. Tools will also be

21 developed for parents to help families incorporate heart22 healthy habits in their daily routines. And the Alliance

23 is looking at how we can get kids to drive the market

24 toward better health.

25 In terms of industry, a target that’s going to
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1 be addressed right away, the Alliance is going to work

2 with restaurants, manufacturers of consumer packaged

3 foods, food service companies and the fitness industry to

4 make changes that encourage healthier eating and more

5 physical activity. And the first focus in terms of the

6 industry target is on children’s meals at fast food

7 establishments and restaurants. 

8 And then, in terms of the media, a target

9 that’s going to be hit on right away, the Alliance is

10 going to collaborate with media outlets on a public

11 education campaign to encourage healthy lifestyles and

12 increase understanding of the benefits of good nutrition

13 and physical activity. The campaign will focus on for

14 kids by kids messages to children and disseminate

15 information to parents and educators.

16 And two other groups that are going to be

17 targeted down the road are health care providers. The

18 Alliance is going to work with professional associations

19 and other health care organizations to create tools and

20 continuing education opportunities that can help

21 providers better recognize, prevent and treat obesity in

22 children. And then another target is schools. The

23 Alliance is going to develop innovative approaches to

24 encourage more healthy food options in schools and

25 increased physical activity during and after school, in
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1 collaboration with school leaders and community groups. 

2 Tools will be developed for educators to include in

3 classroom activities.

4 So, you can see that this is a broad-based

5 comprehensive program that is being driven, in large

6 part, by children. It’s being set up to have far7 reaching effects and a very big impact. And this is what

8 has to happen. We must all come together, government,

9 industry, professional organizations, using a multi10 pronged approach to see a big impact.

11 So, in summary, the conference we’ve attended

12 has shown that we’re tackling a very complex topic,

13 childhood obesity. It’s clear that we need to combat it

14 from many angles. Public health groups need to work with

15 industry to develop healthier products and consistent

16 health messages to create a big healthy food marketplace. 

17 Likewise, public health and government groups need to be

18 working with children, parents, other family members,

19 teenagers, coaches, et cetera, to improve health literacy

20 and increase interest and demand for healthy products and

21 other behaviors. The industry can help improve

22 children’s behavior and children can play an active role

23 in guiding industry’s behavior. 

24 In summary, the best model for moving forward

25 is one where public health, government, industry,
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1 caretakers and children -- children who are very

2 important members of this effort -- all work together to

3 move our nation towards better health. Thank you very

4 much.

5 MS. ENGLE: Dr. Linn.

6 DR. LINN: Thank you. Well, I want to thank

7 the FTC and HHS for inviting me here today. 

8 (Laughter.)

9 DR. LINN: Actually, it’s a real honor to be

10 here today and I really do want to thank the FTC and HHS

11 for inviting me here to speak. And what I want to talk

12 about today, I want to talk about rights and freedoms,

13 the rights of children to grow up and the freedom for

14 parents to raise them without being undermined by

15 corporate interests. 

16 The Surgeon General spoke earlier today about

17 our social, moral and ethical responsibility to ensure

18 public health. With that in mind, I’d like to say that

19 there is no social, moral or ethical justification for

20 marketing junk food to children. And given the projected

21 costs of obesity to American taxpayers, there appears to

22 be no economic justification either.

23 Speaking for myself and my colleagues across

24 the country, I want to ask the FTC not to abandon

25 children to the financial interests of the food industry. 
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1 I was saddened to hear Commissioner Leary say that he

2 didn’t want the FTC to be a nanny agency. We heard in

3 the earlier panel how overwhelmed parents are. When

4 parents are overwhelmed, children need nannies, they need

5 help.

6 The question that we should have been asking at

7 this workshop is what’s best for children, not how can we

8 improve self-regulation. Self-regulation has failed. 

9 When CARU -- the head of CARU endorsed what amounts to

10 General Mills’ latest campaign to sell sugar cereals,

11 that’s evidence of failure. When Coca-Cola claims that

12 they don’t market to children under 12, yet their product

13 placement is rampant on American Idol, which is

14 consistently in the Nielsen ratings a top-rated program

15 for children 2 to 11, and when -- if you go to

16 Toysrus.com, you can find toys, Coca-Cola toys for

17 children as young as four. That’s evidence of failure.

18 When the advertising industry, which spent

19 about $100 million marketing to children in 1983 is now

20 spending $15 billion and a significant portion of that on

21 food advertising, that’s evidence of failure. When

22 McDonald’s pays rap artists to shout out Big Mac in their

23 songs and there’s no action from CARU, that’s evidence of

24 failure. 

25 We’re going to hear proposals from the Grocery
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1 Manufacturers Association for tweaking self-regulation,

2 but let us remember as we listen that the GMA is on

3 record for opposing just about every state bill that

4 would restrict the sale of junk food or soda in schools

5 and that the comments they submitted for this workshop

6 today deny the link between marketing and childhood

7 obesity. These proposals may sound good, but they won’t

8 address the fundamental issue.

9 By relying only on voluntary self-regulation,

10 we have turned our children over to an industry that

11 generates profits by selling them junk food. As

12 documented in comments by the Center for Informed Food

13 Choices, companies like General Mills and PepsiCo

14 routinely violate the existing GMA guidelines. Without

15 the threat of real consequences from an outside agency

16 whose first allegiance is to children and families, the

17 incentives for business as usual, no matter what is said

18 here today, are just too great.

19 My colleagues and I are not naive about the

20 current political situation. Although we know that this

21 administration is loathe to regulate corporations, we

22 offer the following truth. That it is the government of

23 the people, by the people and for the people who should

24 be the guardians of public health, not corporations, not

25 the food industry whose allegiance is first and foremost
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1 to their stockholders. Thank you.

2 MS. ENGLE: Manly Molpus.

3 MR. MOLPUS: Thank you very much, Mary, and

4 thank you for this opportunity to be here. I was just

5 asking Susan Linn if she would like to read my remarks

6 and I’ll just mouth them up here.

7 DR. LINN: I’d be happy to.

8 (Laughter.)

9 MR. MOLPUS: Here it is. But we’re delighted

10 to be here and real congratulations to HHS and FTC for

11 putting together such a constructive two days of dialogue

12 with a wide array of views, of which you’re about to hear

13 some of those. But I can tell you that for the companies

14 that make the products that Americans eat and drink every

15 day, there is no issue more important than obesity. As

16 you’ve heard from GMA members here at this workshop,

17 there is truly an extraordinary industry-wide effort

18 underway today to meet this challenge.

19 Let me give you just a few examples of what our

20 industry is doing. This fall, GMA will sponsor a

21 nationwide education campaign with Weekly Reader to

22 promote the new food guide pyramid to students, teachers

23 and families. We’ll distribute a My Pyramid Education

24 Kit that will reach more than four million students. The

25 American Council for Fitness and Nutrition, a non-profit
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1 organization established by food and beverage companies,

2 is now in the process of going from city to city across

3 America to showcase programs that are effectively

4 addressing obesity at the community level and helping

5 Americans, especially kids, live healthy lifestyles.

6 And just yesterday, we released the results of

7 a survey of our members. We learned that companies

8 participating in the survey have introduced 4,500 new or

9 reformulated products with improved nutrition, including

10 reduced saturated and trans fats, reduced calories, less

11 sugar and less sodium. These companies are also using

12 multimedia, including advertising, product labeling,

13 websites, brochures and education initiatives in schools

14 and communities to provide consumers with health and

15 nutrition information. 

16 GMA members want to provide, and it’s in our

17 interest to provide, a wide array of food and beverage

18 choices and we want to market these products responsibly

19 and we’re committed to do so. But I am here today to

20 talk to you specifically about the important issue of

21 self-regulation in children’s advertising. The self22 regulatory system, in our judgment, in place today works

23 and it works extremely well. But because it is good

24 doesn’t mean that we can’t and shouldn’t try to make it

25 better, and I’m encouraged that CARU is already working 
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1 to do just that. 

2 GMA member companies who are supporters of CARU

3 have spent a good bit of time working very intensely to

4 develop a series of recommendations to strengthen the

5 self-regulation of advertising to children. Our goal is

6 to help CARU even be more responsive to parents’

7 concerns, which we recognize, and to reflect changes in

8 the marketing and media environment that we’ve talked

9 about here about the last two days. The GMA members that

10 support CARU are committed to providing the financial

11 support required to implement these steps. So, I ask you

12 not to prejudge our effort. Let’s look at the

13 recommendations, let’s implement the recommendations,

14 let’s watch the results.

15 Here are the seven recommendations. First,

16 public access. We believe consumers, especially parents,

17 should have immediate and direct access to CARU to

18 express concerns about specific ads and about children’s

19 advertising in general. We recommend establishing a

20 toll-free consumer response line and website, publicizing

21 the existence of both and responding to consumers

22 directly.

23 Two, transparency. We believe a summary of

24 CARU’s regulatory activities should be available to the

25 public on the CARU website and should include the kind of
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1 information that is now provided in written reports to

2 subscribers. The website ought to provide the public

3 with easy access to an overview of the scope of CARU’s

4 regulatory activities.

5 Three, expanded expertise. We support

6 expanding CARU’s external advisory boards to provide more

7 expertise on matters related to health, wellness and

8 nutrition, including educators, nutritionists, fitness

9 experts, behavioral experts and experts on FTC and FDA

10 policy.

11 Four, pre-review. We support enhancing the

12 existing mechanism for pre-review of advertising with the

13 goal of preventing advertising that is not consistent

14 with CARU’s guidelines from reaching the marketplace. 

15 This voluntary mechanism could be enhanced by an expanded

16 staff and use of the advisory board.

17 Five, expanded scope. We believe CARU’s

18 guidelines should address advertising contained in

19 commercial computer game, video games and other

20 interactive websites, commonly referred to as advergames. 

21 We would also recommend that paid product placement on

22 children’s TV programming be prohibited and that CARU

23 guidelines be expanded to ensure that third party

24 licensed characters in advertising are used

25 appropriately.
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1 Sixth, collaboration. We believe that robust

2 self-regulation requires effective support from both

3 industry and government. To that end, we would encourage

4 the FTC to look for ways to strengthen its relationship

5 with CARU.

6 Seven, resources. To ensure adequate

7 enforcement capacity, to improve its effectiveness and

8 improve consumer access, we believe that CARU staff must

9 be substantially increased. And as I said earlier, our

10 members are prepared to provide the resources to

11 implement these steps.

12 The measures I’ve detailed are more than words,

13 we are committed to working with all stakeholders to make

14 these recommendations a reality. In addition to changes

15 to CARU, we believe that government can play a role in

16 helping support private sector initiatives to promote

17 healthy lifestyles. In that regard, we have two

18 recommendations. First, we think that HHS could develop

19 an awards program that recognizes companies for promoting

20 healthy lifestyles, perhaps modeled on the Baldridge

21 Awards, which have been very successful, and available to

22 all industries. This would be an excellent way to

23 showcase and incent best practices in the obesity issue

24 and what the private sector can do.

25 Second, the government should maintain its
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1 support for healthy lifestyle communication programs,

2 like the HHS-Ad Council Small Steps campaign and the

3 CDC’s VERB Program. In fact, GMA has urged Congress to

4 fund these important initiatives and we invite our fellow

5 stakeholders to join us in that effort.

6 At the beginning of this workshop, Chairman

7 Majoras challenged us all not to just share ideas but to

8 take action. Over the last two days, we’ve learned much. 

9 But the important work now lies ahead and it’s time to

10 turn our ideas into actions and GMA members are prepared

11 to do just that. Thank you.

12 MS. ENGLE: Mark Berlind.

13 MR. BERLIND: This has been a very important

14 workshop and really we think presents an opportunity for

15 significant progress on the important issues that it

16 raises. There’s been a lot of good discussion, all the

17 issues that I think are the important ones have been put

18 on the table and been discussed, and there’s a lot of

19 information out there for all of us to consider.

20 We really think at Kraft that this is the kind

21 of workshop and the beginning of the kind of dialogue,

22 exactly the kind of dialogue that the IOM Report that

23 Vivica mentioned recommended, and we’d emphasize that a

24 dialogue is an ongoing thing. We don’t see -- and we

25 hope that this workshop is not a one-time event where
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1 people get together for two days and that’s it. As Manly

2 just said, there’s lots of work to be done, and as

3 Assistant Secretary O’Grady said earlier, the real test

4 is going to be what are the actions and the specific

5 concrete reforms that emerge from this process? But

6 we’re very encouraged by what we’ve seen over the past

7 couple of days.

8 Chairman Majoras did frame the issue very well

9 yesterday. In her opening remarks, she said, on the one

10 hand, bans of advertising of products are not appropriate

11 and are not likely to be pursued on the one hand, but on

12 the other hand, the status quo is unacceptable and change

13 has to occur, and we at Kraft and as part of the food

14 industry definitely want to be part of that change.

15 Our company believes that in order for self16 regulation to be credible and effective, our consumers

17 need to have confidence in us and that it’s important for

18 companies to take their own steps, their own meaningful

19 steps to move the ball forward in the absence even of

20 industry action or self-regulatory action, and we have

21 tried to do some things and I think you’ve heard in the

22 past couple days that many companies are doing things,

23 each in accordance with their own business model and in

24 accordance to what they think is the right thing to do. 

25 But we think that the steps that each company takes
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1 contributes to the whole and it contributes to an overall

2 climate where consumers will have confidence that the

3 industry is, indeed, being self-regulated in an

4 appropriate way and that its actions are responsible.

5 The industry is also taking steps together

6 jointly, which Manly just described for the group, and we

7 think there’s a lot of important suggestions there and

8 they deserve serious consideration, even by folks who are

9 initially skeptical perhaps of what the industry would

10 put forward, and we would also say that we are very

11 encouraged and very happy that so many companies have

12 specifically signed up for these proposals in a very

13 short period of time and that there’s a lot of momentum

14 behind this process. This is not something I think that

15 you would have seen six, eight or 12 months ago, a group

16 of companies coming together relatively rapidly to try to

17 move the ball forward. So, we think that’s important.

18 I did want to say something about the whole

19 discussion and the debate over the numbers and how many

20 ads are being seen and whether it’s a lot, whether it’s a

21 little, has it changed. The data is very important to

22 many of you and it’s important that we all proceed based

23 on the facts, but I just wanted to make the point that to

24 Kraft, at least, those are not the numbers that we focus

25 on the most because irrespective of whether 5,000 ads or
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1 4,000 ads or 10,000 ads are being seen per year, we’re a

2 consumer focus company, we listen to our consumers and we

3 have heard loud and clear from them that they see an

4 issue with the advertising that is going on of food

5 products to kids, especially younger kids now. So,

6 irrespective of what the data shows, we think that this

7 is an issue that needs to be addressed, which is why

8 we’re so happy about the progress made at this workshop.

9 By the same token, as Dr. Dietz pointed out in

10 his presentation yesterday, obesity and weight gain is a

11 serious problem in this country. We can quibble about

12 how many deaths, how much illness, how much weight gain

13 and all the rest, but our consumers are telling us that

14 they think it’s a serious problem, so we feel the need to

15 act. So, the most important data to us is what we hear

16 back from our own consumers.

17 I think that there’s a lot of common ground

18 that has emerged from this workshop, perhaps more than

19 some people might realize. To take just one example to

20 illustrate that, I think if you look at the very

21 challenging but very concise and specific principles that

22 Senator Harkin articulated yesterday on the one hand and

23 the proposals that Manly just put forward on the other

24 hand, there is a fair amount of similarity and congruence

25 and I think hope for everybody reaching a place where
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1 there can really be a significant consensus on this

2 issue.

3 Senator Harkin, for example, called for

4 stakeholder input; the GMA proposals call for augmenting

5 external advisory boards for CARU. Senator Harkin called

6 for compliance and an independent monitor; the GMA

7 proposals called for building enforcement capacity,

8 improving transparency and having a closer relationship

9 between CARU and the FTC and the HHS. And we think that

10 it would be very valuable if the FTC and the HHS could

11 take a look at how we’re doing and perhaps issue a

12 report. I don’t know how it would work, but maybe a year

13 from now, let’s take a look at how well these proposals

14 are being implemented and let’s have that closer

15 relationship.

16 Senator Harkin’s principle number three was to

17 look at the cumulative effects of advertising and that’s

18 not specifically mentioned in any of the GMA proposals

19 that Manly mentioned, but we specifically have put

20 forward the principle of broadening the involvement and

21 advice to CARU on matters of children’s health. So, that

22 is a very important principle that perhaps a lot of

23 people could agree on.

24 Senator Harkin’s fourth principle was that

25 self-regulation should cover all advertising vehicles. 
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1 You just heard Manly specifically say that we want to

2 make sure that the CARU regulations and rules on things

3 like advergaming and licensed characters and paid product

4 placement are strengthened and specifically added into

5 the mix.

6 Picking up on what Commissioner Leary said

7 today, we need some advice, I think, from the FTC about

8 how to move forward as an industry, how to craft these

9 standards appropriately, how to get into the details in a

10 way that addresses those concerns. But we are encouraged

11 by the progress that has been made here today.

12 So, I would just close by saying that beyond

13 the whole issue of self-regulation and how to strengthen

14 it, which I know the focus is here, we think the most

15 important thing that the industry can do and that Kraft

16 can do as a food company is to continue to come up with

17 products that give consumers the better nutritional

18 profiles that they increasingly want, but combines it

19 with the great taste, the great convenience and the fun

20 that they continue to demand. And to the extent that we

21 can all work together from whatever side of the

22 perspective, of the equation that we come from, to foster

23 a climate where companies can be encouraged to do that,

24 where the market can be encouraged to change those

25 societal norms that I think Vivica mentioned earlier and
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1 encourage everybody, whether it’s consumers and

2 companies, and give them the incentives to market those

3 products successfully and to consume those products,

4 that’s what’s going to ultimately make the biggest

5 difference to address these issues. Thanks very much.

6 MS. ENGLE: Brock Leach.

7 MR. LEACH: You got to hear from me yesterday

8 so I’m going to cut right to the chase on recommended

9 next steps. The first is work diligently as an industry

10 and with partners with CARU to build on their success in

11 self-regulation but to strengthen it along the lines to

12 what Manly spoke to earlier. I also listened very

13 carefully to what Senator Harkin had to say about his

14 four objectives, and like Mark, I don’t know the details

15 of what he has in mind, but I believe directionally, we

16 can get to those objectives and we’ll obviously have to

17 work through on how close we are on the details. But I

18 think that it’s within grasp. So, I’m encouraged as

19 well.

20 I would also just make a comment on self21 regulation. As somebody who spent 23 years in the

22 marketing trenches, when a CARU complaint crosses your

23 desk as a brand manager, you don’t respond to it as an

24 interesting item, you respond to it as you would an FTC

25 complaint, and a lot of departments, by the way, respond
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1 to them as if they were FTC complaints, and you move

2 quickly. That’s why most of the stuff gets addressed and

3 pulled before there’s any further action because it’s not

4 worth it. We change it and get on with it. And we, of

5 course, have been subject to plenty of CARU complaints.

6 So, I know whereof I speak. But I would just tell you

7 that it is, from a marketer’s point of view, a mechanism

8 that has strength.

9 But anyway, all of the self-regulation stuff,

10 as I said yesterday, I think is the first 20 percent. I

11 think the other 80 percent is going to be around product

12 choices. Our goal here is to develop healthier product

13 choices and market those and do that in an environment

14 where people, in particular kids, are learning how to

15 make balanced eating and exercise choices. 

16 So, in that spirit, there are three other

17 things I would recommend as next steps that involve both

18 private and public collaboration. The first is, I said

19 earlier, is consistent messaging. I think building on

20 the work of Ad Council, the Coalition for Healthy

21 Children and the extensive work CDC, in particular, has

22 done in learning how to communicate to create a

23 consistent set of messages that can be reinforced in many

24 different ways, including commercial ways, I think would

25 be very helpful, and I think it would really provide
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1 additional support to parents and to people in schools.

2 The third recommended next step would be to

3 coalesce around a national model action plan for healthy

4 schools, something that goes beyond school vending. It,

5 obviously, has to include school vending. But my

6 concern, as somebody who’s very familiar with the school

7 vending debate, is that it is passing, in a lot of

8 locales, as a solution. It’s passing as a solution

9 legislatively when in reality there’s a lot more here,

10 like how are we going to get nutrition and energy balance

11 education into the schools, how are we going to get

12 physical activity into the schools, how are we going to

13 make sure the meal offerings are what they need to be,

14 and how do we make sure the vending and marketing

15 environment is right?

16 I think the Institute of Medicine Report and

17 the recommendations in that were terrific in the sense

18 that they got to what needs to be done. What I think we

19 need to do now, though, is take the stakeholders, which

20 include USDA and the states and the schools themselves,

21 and in particular, the people on the ground in the

22 schools, and figure out how is it that we bring all the

23 resources to bear to help solve this problem, including

24 the funding resources. Obviously, industry has a role to

25 play in that. But I see it being kind of a fractured
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1 effort right now and I think bringing the expertise

2 together to approach that on a national level and to

3 bring the best thinking to it would be a welcome thing. 

4 That would happen through the work the IOM is doing, that

5 could happen through the AHA program that was outlined. 

6 I’m not sure of the best vehicle, but I think it needs to

7 be a national dialogue with the right folks.

8 And, finally, I think a program to recognize

9 and encourage positive industry action, as Manly

10 outlined, could have the biggest effect of all because I

11 think the industry already sees the opportunity here and

12 I think putting in place some encouragement on what to

13 do, whether it’s for employees or whether it’s for

14 product development or whether it’s community actions, I

15 think all that could have a surprising impact. And so,

16 all of that is consistent with focusing on creating

17 healthier choices in an environment where people learn to

18 make great choices. That’s my commentary. Thanks.

19 MS. ENGLE: Dr. Shifrin.

20 DR. SHIFRIN: Thank you for your patience. I

21 realize this is the last presentation. You’ve all been

22 very patient. Hopefully, it will be worth it. I want to

23 also thank the FTC and the HHS for convening this

24 workshop. It’s a pleasure to be here today representing

25 the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is an
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1 organization of 60,000 pediatricians and pediatric

2 specialists dedicated to the health and well-being of

3 children. As the Surgeon General stated today earlier,

4 I’m sorry he left because we can compare grandparent

5 stories, prevention is the hallmark of pediatric care. 

6 The present trends indicate that families,

7 traditional families, single-parent families, divorced

8 families, step families, schools, communities,

9 policymakers, physicians, the food industry and the media

10 all drive behavior and influence the most significant

11 ongoing chronic health threat to our children. 

12 Therefore, all play a critical role in reversing the

13 trend of obesity. Much like it’s been stated that

14 smoking was a pediatric disease, the same could be said

15 that obesity is now a pediatric disease. Pediatricians

16 are committed to helping kids learn to lead active

17 healthy lives.

18 The Academy’s Board of Directors assigned the

19 highest priority to address the childhood obesity crisis

20 by creating a national task force in 2003. The focus of

21 the task force is on prevention, treatment, reimbursement

22 and advocacy both at a local, state and national level. 

23 As a practicing pediatrician daily, I see parents, much

24 like Sam’s family that was described yesterday by Dr.

25 Zucker, and care givers every day who are searching for
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1 help with their overweight families. As I speak to you

2 today for these two to three minutes, with a significant

3 sense or urgency, I can assure you that these two minutes

4 are statistically more time than many of my colleagues

5 have with families to discuss nutritional and activity

6 awareness, media time and literacy issues during an

7 annual or every other year health maintenance

8 appointment.

9 Contrast that with the amount of time that

10 children spend seeing -- let’s bandy about the number --

11 40,000 or so commercial messages each year, the 20

12 percent of two to seven-year-olds that have televisions

13 in their bedrooms, the 68 percent of eight to 18-year14 olds that have television in their bedrooms, it hardly

15 seems like a level playing field for parents and

16 pediatricians.

17 The Academy has always been one of the

18 strongest advocates for children on Capitol Hill. We

19 have a long-standing media education policy recommending

20 amounts of media time that are healthful for the

21 families, but we recognize that educating families about

22 moderation, healthful choices, balance rather than

23 restrictions, portion size and physical activity many

24 times are lost in the tsunami of their children’s media

25 exposure to less healthful foods. Marketing has
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1 empowered kids to demand, parents constantly need to

2 negotiate.

3 There are many risk factors that contribute to

4 childhood obesity and we’re not denying that and there

5 are many lines of defense beginning with parental

6 responsibility, but that is not the only line of defense. 

7 All children need a good support system behind their

8 success in achieving this long-term change. While many

9 obstacles to recognition, prevention and treatment seem

10 insurmountable, the Academy recommends early guidance in

11 office space encounters, as well as increased physical

12 activity, decreasing sedentary activities, including our

13 recommendations for screen time for all families, and

14 providing tools in continuing education for its members,

15 as well as education and motivation for children and

16 parents on this critical issue.

17 The following are highlights of the Academy’s

18 positions on advertising and marketing issues

19 specifically as they relate to this problem. One, the

20 American Academy of Pediatrics considers advertising

21 directly to young children to be inherently deceptive and

22 exploits children under the age of eight years. 

23 Two, the Academy supports and advocates for

24 social marketing intended to provide healthful food

25 choices and increased physical activity. Industry should
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1 develop and advertise healthful food and eating choices. 

2 Healthful foods that are nutrient-rich and palatable, yet

3 low in excess energy from added sugars and fat need to be

4 readily available to parents, school and child care food

5 services and others responsible for feeding children and

6 independent of socioeconomic status or community. 

7 Examples of healthful foods are whole grains, vegetables

8 and fruits, lowfat dairy products and others as

9 recommended by the new USDA guidelines.

10 Advertising and promotion of energy dense,

11 nutrient-poor food products to children may need to be

12 regulated or curtailed. For example, the increase in

13 sugar-sweetened drinks has been linked to obesity. 

14 The government certainly should fund more

15 research to assess the effects of television and other

16 media marketing on the behaviors of children. The

17 Academy, as a member of the Children’s Media Policy

18 Coalition, wants children’s advertising protections to be

19 updated for digital television. As Ms. Miller dictated

20 earlier, we are going to a digital universe. This

21 includes a prohibition on interactive advertising to

22 children in the digital world. I also would remind you

23 it’s not going to be digital television, it’s going to be

24 cell-a-vision. Okay, for those people who can’t see

25 this, this is a Forbes Magazine cover for May talking
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1 about cell-a-vision. Forty percent of 12 to 14-year-olds

2 have cell phones, unrestricted, unregulated content. $10

3 billion are being put in venture capital to put content

4 into phones. Our friends at Disney are now marketing

5 phones to eight to ten-year-olds. It’s been said that

6 nature abhors a vacuum. Obviously, technology abhors a

7 vacuum.

8 The use of exclusive foreign contracts as a

9 means of generating revenue for schools needs to be

10 addressed such that revenue is not generated at the

11 expense of our children’s health. The AAP recognizes

12 corporate sponsorship of school events, activities and

13 programs as advertising and promoting product branding. 

14 Schools should develop curricula to teach children and

15 adolescents media literacy, something we called for in

16 our media education statement that was published in

17 August of 1999. The Academy launched its own Media

18 Matters Campaign in 1997 to help teach media literacy and

19 we look forward to talk more to the Ad Council about

20 their new media education campaign.

21 In closing, I appreciate the opportunity to

22 participate in this meeting. The AAP supports the

23 Institute of Medicine recommendations on marketing, media

24 and advertising as stated in their Prevention of Obesity

25 Report. As experts in the primary and specialty care of
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1 children, we would welcome the opportunity to participate

2 in an ongoing dialogue with the Federal Trade Commission

3 and the food industry about possible implementation of

4 those recommendations. And because everybody was quoting

5 sources, I thought that I would give you a quote from one

6 of only three honorary members of the American Academy of

7 Pediatrics. His name is Mr. Rogers, I’m sure you all

8 remember him and I’m going to direct this quote to all of

9 the industry representatives and government officials

10 here today.

11 Mr. Rogers said, “We live in a world in which

12 we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say it’s

13 not my child, not my community, not my world and not my

14 problem. There are those who see the need and respond. 

15 I consider those people my heroes.” So, the Academy

16 obviously is looking for heroes here today. Thank you.

17 DR. O’GRADY: Thank you very much. There’s a

18 number of things that I think we’d like to get going with

19 the dialogue, but I did want to take a second to thank

20 all the panelists for their very interesting

21 presentations and the tweaks of different things,

22 different ideas that they’ve put on the table. And I

23 wanted to kick things off a little bit with just a couple

24 of questions and answering a couple of questions that

25 came up here.
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1 To Mr. Molpus in terms of you, you brought up

2 an idea of HHS putting together something that would be

3 along the lines of awards for healthy lifestyles and I

4 just want to let you know that we already have, and have

5 for at least two years now, had a Secretary’s Prevention

6 National Awards and we’re very interested in that sort of

7 stuff and we’d love to talk to you more about what you

8 had in mind with that. But we have found that in our

9 prevention awards, it has been very successful in terms

10 of the idea of your ability to go out, identify people

11 who really are doing ground-breaking work in this area

12 and sometimes in very unexpected areas, whether it’s

13 churches or small businesses and different -- you know,

14 across the board in terms of very innovative work.

15 And you also brought up the idea of

16 communication campaigns, and I’d like to support that and

17 I think we are if you look at kind of what we spend our

18 money on and how we move in. Certainly, at the CDC and

19 NIH, there’s a number of different things to realize, and

20 certainly if you’ve ever heard our -- either our current

21 Secretary or our past Secretary, Tommy Thompson, talk

22 about prevention, there’s this notion, definitely, that

23 we have to reach people before they show up at a doctor’s

24 office, before they show up at an emergency room. And

25 that really means changing the way we do business and it
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1 does mean moving out into social marketing, these sort of

2 communication campaigns that we’ve talked about on a

3 number of different areas.

4 Although we have vast expertise at HHS, NIH,

5 CDC, if you need an epidemiologist or an endocrinologist,

6 you know, we’ve got them, we’ve got the best. But I

7 think as experts in our own fields, we recognize that

8 this area of marketing and how you target audiences and

9 whatnot, that it’s something that we’re freshmen, maybe

10 at best sophomores, and I don’t think I have to tell

11 anyone who’s ever seen a public service announcement

12 compared to a really well put together marketing campaign

13 that -- you know, we don’t want to be still there with --

14 and I apologize if anybody was involved with McGruff the

15 Crime Dog or any of those sorts of things -- but we

16 really need to up our sophistication. 

17 I guess I’d like to make that promise to you

18 that that’s an area that we definitely identify as a

19 priority and we’re moving forcefully to do. At the same

20 time, the ability of industry, if you’re willing to share

21 that kind of data and expertise, we recognize that we are

22 not up the learning curve in this area and we would love

23 to start that kind of dialogue of how do you identify

24 particular populations at risk, how do you identify these

25 sorts of most effective ways, and we’d be very, very
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1 interested in working together in that area.

2 There was sort of a question in there, did 

3 you -- 

4 MR. MOLPUS: Well, let me respond briefly. 

5 First of all, we would be happy to provide any sort of

6 expertise, and we have a tremendous amount with HHS and

7 areas that you may have a little shortfall, at least give

8 you some ideas of how our companies go about assessing

9 these things and looking at our research and our

10 marketing. I think, also, of course, HHS has a

11 tremendous role to play via FDA and the various issues we

12 can tackle there on labeling. I think we’ve discussed

13 doing something different about caloric labeling, which

14 we would agree needs, in some ways, more prominence for

15 consumers. So, there’s just a lot we can do together and

16 we would have some ideas. We’re aware of the initiative

17 that started under Secretary Thompson and I think there

18 are some ways to enhance that and make it a little bit

19 different and a little bit more all industry oriented in

20 a complete best practice sense, and we’d be happy to work

21 with you on that.

22 DR. O’GRADY: Great. I had one brief question

23 and then I’ll kind of open things up to my colleague from

24 the FTC here. In terms of the -- Dr. Kris-Etherton, in

25 terms of the American Heart Association, the For Kids By
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1 Kids Campaign and what you have in mind there, I guess

2 there were a couple of things that in terms of the

3 different discussions we’ve heard over the last day-and4 a-half that sort of tweaked my interest and also my

5 curiosity. The emphasis definitely seems to be for kids

6 by kids. At the same time, I wonder if you could talk

7 for a second about the interaction with parents because

8 the world of parents has clearly been brought up in a

9 number of different ways over the last day or so, and how

10 you’re drawing some of those distinctions that we’ve also

11 heard about how you deal with the younger kids versus

12 teens and what sort of tools, data, sort of what are the

13 resources that you guys are thinking about that you can

14 bring to bear to this problem?

15 DR. KRIS-ETHERTON: Well, things are still in

16 the developmental stages, but initially, kids that are 9

17 to 13 are going to be targeted and the very first town

18 hall meetings are actually starting in September. It’s

19 hoped that kids will be the initiators and the spark that

20 help drive parents’ decisions about what foods to choose. 

21 Of course, you know, you have to also work with parents

22 as well and that’s something that’s going to be down the

23 road as well. But I think that one thing that’s really

24 important is the Alliance is looking to see how we can

25 get kids to drive the market toward health. So, parents
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1 are a really important part of that, as are teachers,

2 schools, health care providers and the media, as well. 

3 So, it’s going to be a great big effort as well and

4 things are just getting put in place, but, of course,

5 parents are going to be a part of it, too.

6 DR. O’GRADY: Thank you.

7 MS. ENGLE: I have a question for Manly Molpus

8 with respect to the GMA’s proposals for perhaps some

9 recommendations they’re making to CARU. One of them was

10 to increase the scope of CARU’s oversight to include

11 online activities, advergaming and that type of thing and 

12 I was wondering about that. At the FTC, when we look at

13 advertising, we include everything that’s promotional in

14 nature no matter where or how it appears. Did you give

15 some consideration to expanding CARU’s jurisdiction to

16 speak generally in terms of advertising and not limit

17 your additions to the online area?

18 MR. MOLPUS: Well, when we put this proposal

19 together, we were thinking more in terms of responding to

20 CARU and CARU’s current scope, even though this is an

21 expansion of scope, and I suspect we better walk before

22 we run. But we’ll leave this up to NARC and their board

23 to determine how far they should go. This is a

24 significant expansion of scope for our industry to come

25 forward with, and if there are additional scope issues
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1 that we ought to look at, we would encourage NARC to do

2 that.

3 MS. ENGLE: And you think there would be

4 support for industry funding of an expansion of scope if

5 it looked like the initial steps, the walking was

6 successful?

7 MR. MOLPUS: If we agree on expansions of

8 scope, our companies have said we are in agreement to

9 help provide resources. But at this point, we looked at

10 what CARU has currently been doing, what was the next

11 step and what we had heard most about was advergames, and

12 we thought in terms of priorities, that should be tackled

13 first.

14 MS. ENGLE: One of the issues that we’ve heard

15 a lot about over the last day-and-a-half is sort of --

16 and I think maybe it was a question that was of the last

17 panel -- was the idea of parental responsibility and that

18 parents should just say no when their children are asking

19 for products that their parents don’t want them to have. 

20 At the same time, we heard about the tsunami of marketing

21 for products that are less healthful that parents have to

22 say no to. So, I was wondering, in terms of industry’s

23 willingness on a self-regulatory basis to decrease the

24 tsunami so that parents are not -- you know, right now,

25 there is a situation where if you look at the array of
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1 products, of foods that are marketed to children, you

2 could see that there is an imbalance in terms of those

3 that have more positive nutritional profiles. 

4 Since we’re here to talk about self-regulation

5 and what industries can do on their own initiative and

6 certainly, you know, that doesn’t involve the First

7 Amendment concerns that government regulation would, what

8 would industry be willing to do? I mean, Kraft is

9 certainly taking some steps with respect to nutritional

10 profile of foods they advertise to younger children. 

11 Would there be more support perhaps from other industry

12 members or GMA as an advocate to its members to do that

13 kind of thing?

14 MR. MOLPUS: Brock and Mark may want to respond

15 to this, but I can tell you that what you’re seeing today

16 is the benefits of fundamental free enterprise and

17 competition and innovation at work, and I think for a

18 while you are going to see a diverse array of company

19 strategies and programs to address this issue that fit

20 with company strategies. You’ve got some that we’ve

21 heard about today. There are many others out there that

22 have different approaches and I think this is the very

23 best approach we could possibly get right now because

24 you’ve got this huge engine running of consumer focus,

25 consumer responsiveness and competitiveness that’s going
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1 to drive a tremendous amount of change, already has, and

2 will continue to drive a tremendous amount of change

3 throughout the industry.

4 MR. JAFFE: Mary, could I respond to that for a

5 second?

6 MS. ENGLE: Um-hum.

7 MR. JAFFE: I think that the idea that you just

8 have to say no, that parents are in a situation where

9 they have to say no to all of these products is wrong. 

10 Many of these products are fine, it’s just that they

11 shouldn’t be your diet. And what we’re hearing is that

12 in the marketplace, there is a major incentive for

13 companies to come up with new products. You’ve heard

14 from the companies that have spoken at this conference

15 and you just heard from Manly that there’s been 4,000 new

16 products that have been reformulated. You’re going to

17 see much more of this in the marketplace because

18 companies are making money with this. 

19 You can see right on the table all the various

20 companies that are selling, you know, waters that were

21 not branded in the past. All the quick service

22 restaurants, virtually every one of them is selling their

23 salads, their apples. One of the quick service

24 restaurants is the largest seller of apples in this

25 country.
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1 We’re going to have a much different mix in the

2 marketplace because the marketplace is demanding it,

3 because the public is demanding it, because parents are

4 demanding it and they want to be doing what’s right for

5 their kids. So, the idea that we have to come up with

6 descriptive rules to say, only these types of things can

7 be advertised, I don’t believe is the right way to go.

8 DR. SHIFRIN: Can I inject something here? I

9 deal every day with families who are fractured. Fathers

10 have children one day and they pick them up Wednesday

11 night at 6:30 for dinner. These fathers are not known

12 for their nutritional creativeness, okay? They have

13 three things on their mind, pizza, what was it, 

14 quick service restaurants -- I want to be politically

15 correct -- or delivery, okay? That’s the three options

16 they have. Now, what I’m saying is that the marketplace

17 isn’t going to move that. 

18 What we need to do is move into some social

19 marketing to give them more options. It’s not enough to

20 say just say no to those people because they don’t have

21 the time or inclination. They want to spend time with

22 their children. They don’t want to spend much time in

23 the kitchen. This goes on with weekends, it goes on with

24 visitations, it goes on in the minority communities all

25 the time. So, the marketplace putting out new foods is
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1 exciting, but in the marathon that we’re going to be

2 looking at, it’s only one part of the equation, and we

3 have to think of very creative solutions for families

4 that really need those creative solutions, not the choir

5 that may be talking to the Kraft Food Company about their

6 products, because I guarantee you you’re not getting a

7 lot of calls from single fathers. If you are, I’d like

8 to know that.

9 DR. LINN: I’d like to respond to that as well.

10 I also work with very, very poor -- I work with very,

11 very poor children. Poor children watch more television,

12 they are advertised to more than other children. They

13 are bombarded with advertisements for junk food, and I

14 don’t see that giving positive nutritional messages in

15 the barrage of junk food is going to make much of a

16 difference to these kids. They’re just bombarded with

17 it. So, I don’t understand how one public service

18 campaign or a couple of public service campaigns or 10

19 public service campaigns about eating healthy food is

20 going to do anything unless you guys stop marketing

21 unhealthy food to kids. I mean, it’s just not going to

22 make much difference.

23 I mean, it’s very nice that SpongeBob

24 SquarePants is selling spinach, but, you know, the

25 Nickelodeon movie came out with all of this extra
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1 SpongeBob SquarePants movie food, and the kids I work

2 with, that’s what they all wanted. I mean, they all saw

3 the movie, they all want the food. We hear about how

4 Elmo can sell broccoli. Well, Elmo’s also selling fruit5 flavored snacks to kids, some fruit-flavored snack boxes. 

6 I think that’s confusing for children. Elmo says to eat

7 spinach, he’s also telling me to eat, you know, junk

8 food. 

9 That really needs to change, and if you’re

10 really serious about combating childhood obesity, I would

11 really like to see you say, we’re not going to do this

12 anymore, you know. I’d like to see Coca-Cola get rid of

13 their toys for young children or to see companies stop

14 partnering -- there’s not a children’s movie that comes

15 out that isn’t partnering with some, you know, junk food.

16 McDonald’s is selling salads exactly the same time that

17 they were advertising their salads and how wonderful it

18 was they were selling salads, they were getting rap

19 singers to insert Big Mac into their songs. I mean, how

20 is that really helping childhood obesity? 

21 And if you’re going to have awards for public

22 service campaigns, I hope that you take into

23 consideration all of a companies policies, not just this

24 one campaign.

25 DR. SHIFRIN: I just want to -- I don’t want to
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1 pile on here, but in deference to the marketplace, I

2 always thought that there was nothing so bad that it

3 couldn’t be used as a good example, but some of the foods

4 that have been built lately for adults that trickle down

5 to teenagers are blatantly not healthy at all, whether

6 they’re part of a diet or not. I suppose that if you

7 have one hour to go to nuclear obliteration, they would

8 be fine. 

9 But, you know, I think that you guys have the

10 most sophisticated marketing research in the world and

11 what I’d like you to do is put some of that to work and

12 say, we can help families who are looking for creative

13 solutions. I’ve got the number one single dad meal here

14 ready for you, just order number one. I do it on the

15 airplane. They got three meals to choose from, one, two

16 or three. That’s all I got. And you guys can do that by

17 creating, you know, marketing to certain -- you know, you

18 guys are experts at demographic niches. Let’s put it

19 this way, kids don’t grow up in neighborhoods anymore,

20 they grow up in demographic niches anyway. 

21 So, the answer is that you’re going to have to

22 put families in those niches because all families are not

23 -- one size does not fit all and we’re looking at you to

24 be the heroes here, not just in product, but in social

25 marketing.
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1 MR. BERLIND: Market and product research I

2 think is exactly the point. I mean, we and other

3 companies have tremendous incentives to find ways to come

4 up with nutritious products that appeal to kids, and we

5 think that the more successful that we can be at doing

6 that and developing them and creating incentives within

7 our own company to drive in that direction, that we will

8 win in the marketplace and other companies will want to

9 follow that or do it on their own or lead that, and

10 that’s the real answer here. So, there’s a lot of common

11 interest in pursuing that goal.

12 I would say, Mary, in answer to your question,

13 you know, we certainly think parents have responsibility,

14 but we think we, as a food company, have

15 responsibilities, too, and the government has

16 responsibilities and there’s a lot of shared

17 responsibility going around. So, what we prefer to talk

18 about and emphasize is things that relate to what we do

19 as a food manufacturer and as a food marketer. So,

20 there’s plenty of responsibility to go around, but no,

21 it’s not just all the parents and we’re focused on our

22 own.

23 By definition, self-regulation and improving it

24 requires, if not consensus, broad industry support, which 

25 as I said is what’s so encouraging about the proposals
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1 that Manly put forward today because they have a lot of

2 support and that’s a great way to step forward. I think

3 our belief is that as it becomes clearer and clearer over

4 time that what the great market potential is for

5 nutrition, fun, good-tasting products that appeal to

6 kids, then you’re going to just see more and more

7 movement in that direction by -- across the industry.

8 MS. ENGLE: I think that’s right and I think

9 we’ve all been thinking that what we need here is more

10 tasty, fun and still nutritious foods, because as someone

11 was saying yesterday, if it’s in the cupboard, it’s not

12 doing anything for anybody’s health. And so, we’re

13 looking for ways to promote competition among companies

14 to advance these more nutritious, yet still delicious and

15 fun foods that kids will eat and kids will ask their

16 parents for. 

17 We’ve also heard some discussion over this

18 workshop about the need for a positive nutritional

19 message to get out there and we’ve heard about the work

20 that the Ad Council is doing and that has a large budget

21 compared to -- over $100 million compared to what most,

22 say, government-funded educational budgets would have,

23 and we’ve also heard discussion about the need for

24 consistency across platforms reach out to the population

25 at large and how powerful television is because of its
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1 reach. That’s really unparalleled.

2 Is the Ad Council type of advertising campaign

3 something that the individual companies would consider

4 getting behind and supporting financially, for example,

5 to really extend the reach?

6 MR. LEACH: Well, I think they do in the sense

7 of contributing production dollars and so forth to the

8 campaigns. I would say that the messaging, though, and

9 getting it consistent is more important even in

10 reinforcing it in other commercial messages as well, so

11 that you have it not only coming about in the public

12 service campaigns, but you have it reflected in the same

13 kind of consistent messaging through the other stuff that

14 goes on.

15 I just wanted to make one other comment back to

16 your previous question, if I could. Marketing follows

17 product and so, I think, for example, nutrition standards

18 for purposes of helping companies get focused on

19 products, as what we’re doing internally, is very useful

20 because it helps us motivate our own organization, et

21 cetera. That’s a much more productive application of

22 nutrition standards, I think, than trying to use it to

23 restrict advertising, because advertising is a peripheral

24 marketing tactic on the edges of what we’re really trying

25 to get done here. What we’re really trying to get done
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1 here is we’re trying to find healthier products that are

2 really attractive.

3 So, I think the debate needs to start at the

4 other end of the pipe, which is how do we make sure

5 that’s happening, first and foremost, because the

6 marketing will follow, and that marketing can reinforce

7 not only the benefits of the product, but it can

8 reinforce the healthy lifestyles in the process, and

9 that’s what we’re certainly aiming to demonstrate.

10 MS. ENGLE: Dr. Kris-Etherton, did you want to

11 respond to that?

12 DR. KRIS-ETHERTON: Well, just to say that, you

13 know, I think parents also need to understand that

14 obesity is a problem and there are a lot of parents and a

15 lot of ethnic groups that don’t really know that it’s --

16 DR. O’GRADY: You need to speak into the mic.

17 DR. KRIS-ETHERTON: Okay. Parents, I think,

18 are key. They need to understand that obesity is a real

19 problem, and then along those lines, in Mike’s first

20 question, American Heart is going to be developing

21 materials for parents letting them know about the health

22 hazards of obesity so that maybe that can help drive more

23 healthy food products and advertising as well.

24 DR. SHIFRIN: Just looking at behavior changes

25 in pre-contemplative and then contemplative stages, when
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1 I see parents who are there for a totally different

2 reason, a sprained ankle, knees hurt because the

3 youngster is overweight and he’s doing P.E. and we talk

4 about the fact that this youngster’s gained 30 pounds in

5 one year, the parents are actually shocked because they

6 don’t notice it a lot of the time. The awareness factor

7 is fairly small. So, when you talk to them in a primary

8 care way, even that awareness sometimes even in a 10-

9 minute visit is enough to start them contemplating a

10 change. But it’s -- again, it’s a marathon. It’s like a

11 cruise ship, you’re not going to turn it around in two

12 minutes. It’s going to take 30, 40 miles to get the

13 cruise ship to turn around.

14 So, don’t think that you’re going to turn

15 around on a dime on it, and that’s why when we start this

16 in the office, we like to see other things going on

17 outside the office that’s going to reinforce that message

18 that they’ve got to start at least doing inventory about

19 what that youngster is eating and what kinds of

20 activities the youngster is or isn’t doing. 

21 And lastly, in terms of the digital problem,

22 very soon -- and we realize -- the Academy realizes we’re

23 not going to get the TV out of every bedroom -- the TVs

24 out of every child’s bedroom in America. However, those

25 televisions will be connected to digital boxes which will
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1 recognize that television as being watched by a youngster

2 that is either eight to ten years of age. And so, if we

3 are going to create PSAs for that age group, we’re going

4 to want them channeled into those boxes because that’s

5 what’s going to happen in the digital world. Everybody’s

6 going to know who’s watching the television and what age

7 they are. So, we look forward to working to craft

8 messages that can be delivered consistently, that are

9 going to influence youngsters to really start making this

10 sea change.

11 DR. LINN: I also think that parents need not

12 just education about obesity, but they need education

13 actually from before their children are born, when

14 they’re pregnant. They need education about the link

15 between media characters and junk food. They need to

16 understand that the products that they buy their babies

17 that are branded with Sesame Street characters or

18 Nickelodeon characters or Disney characters, that their

19 babies are going to love those characters, and when they

20 love those characters, they’re going to want all the

21 stuff that those characters advertise. That buying all

22 that stuff for babies is the beginning. You’re heading

23 for tantrums in the grocery store. That’s the link. I

24 mean, how is a two-year-old who’s developed all these

25 warm, wonderful feelings about Elmo, how is that two-
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1 year-old going to understand that he or she can’t have

2 Elmo fruit snacks? 

3 I mean, so the media literacy stuff that

4 everybody sort of talks about, and I know you guys really

5 love media literacy, but that it needs to be from even

6 before children are born, that parents really need to

7 understand that link, because they don’t get it. And

8 when they’re in the middle of the tantrum, they don’t

9 understand why it’s happening, they don’t make the link

10 between the fact that they have Disney wallpaper and

11 their two-year-old is having a meltdown about not being

12 able to get a Disney candy or something like that. They

13 need to understand that.

14 DR. O’GRADY: One thing in terms of thinking

15 about some of the comments that different people -- and I

16 do want to thank the panelists that did make positive

17 proposals, for the thought that they put into them and

18 the way that they went forward here. 

19 One of the issues that came up had to do with

20 this idea of a dialogue and a continued dialogue and how

21 you continue to move this process forward, and I guess I

22 was just -- especially, I think, two different commenters

23 made that suggestion and I was just hoping that they

24 might take a second to expand on what they had in mind.

25 MR. BERLIND: I think I was one of them and,
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1 you know, it could take many forms. I mean, hopefully,

2 there’s ways of having dialogues that do not require the

3 convening of a major event like this which -- with all

4 the planning and all the space that occur between that. 

5 But, to me, it’s everything from the informal

6 conversations that take place, whether it’s within

7 industry level or between members of the public health

8 community and industry, it’s working with folks here in

9 Washington, both in a group basis and an individual

10 basis, and perhaps all leading to some next event. I

11 look to you all for your thoughts about what a sort of

12 follow-up event to this one could be.

13 But if we get it -- if it’s established at some

14 point in the not terribly distant future, it’s something

15 we could all work towards to move the ball forward. I

16 mean, I can’t tell you -- I think Manly and Brock will

17 certainly agree with this, it’s the fact of having this

18 workshop that sort of galvanized the folks within GMA and

19 our companies to say, all right, well, there’s going to

20 be a workshop, let’s see what we can do to put some

21 proposals together, and I don’t know that that would have

22 necessarily happened without the fact of this event. So,

23 I don’t know what the appropriate spacing is, but this is

24 the kind of process that needs to continue.

25 DR. SHIFRIN: I think I was the other one that
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1 talked about a dialogue, at least someone who would admit

2 to it. I think that as pediatricians there’s a number of

3 frustrations we have about any topic, bicycle helmets,

4 car seat restraints, just name one, it will just fall out

5 of the sky. This one is a big one, autism, attention

6 deficit disorders. But we need advocacy partners here

7 because we can’t do it ourselves. Many physicians have

8 thrown up their hands. My partners constantly tell me

9 all day, it’s not going to work. I talk to them until

10 I’m blue in the face, they come back, they’ve gained

11 another 15 or 20 pounds and this time the family’s

12 separated and they’re living in two different spots and

13 the kids have different foods in different houses, what

14 can I do? I’m stuck. I don’t have any ammunition at

15 all, my gun’s empty.

16 So, what we need to do is continue the dialogue

17 from the partnership, from a health standpoint, a public

18 health standpoint as the Surgeon General said, and the

19 private sector, the industry, and also government. It’s

20 also a three-legged stool that we need to keep together

21 and I’m -- I certainly speak, I think, for our Board of

22 Directors in saying we’ll probably go anywhere and meet

23 anyone at any time to help out.

24 MR. MOLPUS: I’ll just add a word. I think

25 Mark is exactly right. Usually you get a question when
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1 you announce some new initiative. Well, why now, why not

2 a year ago or why not six months from now? I think the

3 catalyst for our agreement, our open-mindedness about

4 extending self-regulation to our industry truly came from

5 preparing for this meeting and not wanting to come here

6 and just talk about the status quo or defend what was

7 there, but to think about what steps we could take to

8 make something better.

9 I think, Dick, the success of all of this work

10 on obesity goes so much and it’s so fundamental to a

11 sustained effort, and it’s what the lady from IOM said

12 earlier, it’s going to be a long haul and it needs a

13 sustained effort, and sharing groups and forums, whether

14 it’s as formal as this or something less formal, is

15 helpful because it makes us all stand back and have to

16 think very carefully and very sensitively about where we

17 are on this issue and we all learn from the different

18 views that are here.

19 DR. O’GRADY: Thank you. And I have to just

20 reinforce certainly, you know, we’ll sit down with the

21 FTC and we’ll talk about kind of logical next steps and

22 we’ll have that dialogue and figure out what makes sense

23 as the next step. But I would say that one of these

24 themes that I heard across the last day-and-a-half, as

25 well as on this panel as well, that I’d like to
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1 emphasize, is it’s quite clear there is no one particular

2 dimension here that is going to solve this problem for

3 us. So, it really is -- and certainly we see this across

4 lots of different policy areas. You really have to hit

5 it across four or five major things. 

6 So, with the government doing social marketing

7 and moving into that area more strongly and trying to be

8 smarter and more effective, will that solve everything? 

9 Of course not. But that’s got to be one of the tools

10 that you bring to bear. Are there different ways to be

11 able to do these things, different ways to be able to

12 help and empower parents? Sure. Will that do it alone? 

13 Of course not. It’s got to all be in conjunction, three,

14 four different fronts being opened at the same time. You

15 know, to try and explain what goes on with childhood

16 obesity, it’s clear there is not one explanatory

17 variable, there are tens if not hundreds, and we have to

18 figure out how to address those and move forward and make

19 some progress.

20 MS. ENGLE: Well, that sounds like a summing

21 up. 

22 DR. O’GRADY: I didn’t mean it to be. 

23 MS. ENGLE: And I know we’ve passed the hour

24 that the panel was supposed to end. So, I just want to

25 thank the participants on this panel for the very
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1 thoughtful remarks and for their willingness to come here

2 and discuss what they have today, and also for all

3 recognizing -- I think everybody has agreed that this

4 conference is not just about reporting on the status quo,

5 but to move forward and to really driving further changes

6 in the future to help tackle this problem. So, thank

7 you.

8 (Applause.)

9 DR. O’GRADY: Given the lateness of the hour, I

10 think we’re going to go right to closing remarks, if

11 that’s all right with everyone. 

12 I think I was introduced before. I’m Michael

13 O’Grady, I’m the Assistant Secretary for Planning and

14 Evaluation at HHS. And I want to take just a couple of

15 minutes, I know everybody is hungry and everybody is

16 ready to move on. I want to take a sec to thank the FTC

17 and I really want to thank you very much for coming and

18 sharing your thoughts and concerns on this topic.

19 Based on the information shared during the

20 workshop, we can all agree that childhood obesity is an

21 alarming trend and a serious public health problem that

22 will have far-reaching consequences for individuals,

23 families, communities and the country. As we’ve also

24 heard over the last two days, and quite forcefully by our

25 Surgeon General, the problem is complex, multi-
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1 dimensional, having social, cultural and environmental

2 factors, and while we all understand the goal of

3 achieving the right balance between calories and

4 exercise, we know that influencing behavior is difficult,

5 change especially in developing healthier lifestyles.

6 Correcting this problem will require a long7 term commitment, as we’ve heard from a number of

8 speakers. The problem of childhood obesity didn’t happen

9 overnight and there is no quick fix. HHS has made a

10 long-term commitment and is diligently working to address

11 this problem. Hopefully, you are all familiar with our

12 Steps to a Healthier U.S. Campaign, the Dietary

13 Guidelines and efforts to help inform consumers by

14 improving the food label. There are also a number of new

15 launched activities, including HHS as a funder of the IOM

16 Report that you heard about earlier, HHS through the

17 Centers for Disease Control is studying the effects of

18 food marketing on children’s diet and health, identifying

19 characteristics of food marketing to promote healthier

20 choices, and as we have been here, HHS, through our

21 colleagues at the National Institutes of Health, have

22 been holding a workshop on what communication science can

23 tell us about promoting optimal dietary behavior.

24 For our efforts to be successful, solutions

25 will have to be multi-sectorial, reaching across many
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1 domains, including children, their parents, schools and

2 the medical community, media and the food industry. To

3 address this problem, everyone has a role to play. 

4 During the past two days, we have heard about efforts

5 begun across all these domains and about work that is

6 also needed, including that we have heard from the

7 consumer and public health community about more needing

8 to be done both by government and the private sector. We

9 have heard about initiatives from restaurants and food

10 companies about their introduction of marketing of

11 healthier foods. We have heard about proposed efforts to

12 coordinate messages across public and private campaigns

13 to increase the resonance of health messaging. 

14 We have heard from companies interested in

15 tightening current self-regulatory guidelines in

16 marketing to children and from those who think current

17 self-regulation lacks the teeth it needed to make a real

18 change. We’ve talked about research on this issue, but

19 we need more. We need to learn what works, what doesn’t

20 and how these different variables can work together.

21 Getting together at this meeting has allowed us

22 to identify the new partners in addressing this issue. 

23 This effort should not end here. It should be ongoing

24 and reflect the changes and practices, the health needs

25 of Americans and the knowledge that we gain from
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1 evaluation of our collective activities. This meeting

2 has given us a great deal to think about as far as the

3 next steps, and I can speak for the Department in saying

4 that we view the dialogue over the last two days as the

5 beginning, just the beginning, as we look forward to

6 working with all of you to move forward on addressing

7 this very serious public health problem. 

8 Thank you.

9 (Applause.)

10 DR. O’GRADY: And now my colleague, Lydia

11 Parnes from FTC.

12 MS. PARNES: Thank you. I guess I get the last

13 word this morning and I will tell you all, I usually eat

14 lunch at 12:00, so I’m hungry and I’ll be really quick.

15 Let me start by thanking Michael O’Grady and

16 his staff at HHS who were our partners in putting

17 together this workshop. Frankly, we couldn’t have gotten

18 or asked for better partners in this effort.

19 One of my favorite movies, Field of Dreams, in

20 that movie an Iowa farmer is told that if he builds a

21 baseball diamond in his cornfield, they will come. Well,

22 the FTC and HHS built a workshop to discuss childhood

23 obesity and you came. You came because you knew this was

24 an important issue. Why? Because childhood obesity

25 affects the very health of our children and we need to
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1 act quickly and effectively to address this very

2 important issue.

3 The panelists who came shared their expertise

4 and experience. The audience posed questions and made

5 comments that called on our panelists to apply their

6 expertise and experience, and with all of that, we all

7 learned. 

8 And based on what we’ve learned, I think there

9 are several things that are worth pursuing. First, we

10 should share our research on how to reach children with

11 nutritional messages. Second, we should all work

12 together to develop consistent educational messages and

13 get those messages out to parents. Parents care about

14 their children and we need to help them do the right

15 thing.

16 Third, food companies should continue and

17 expand on their efforts to make and market healthier food

18 options for children. Fourth, we should consider and

19 debate changes to self-regulatory standards, including an

20 assessment of the ideas that we just heard from GMA on

21 self-regulation. And fifth, we should support industry’s

22 good work thus far and encourage them to do more.

23 One of our panelists from yesterday asked if we

24 had a goal, a goal, he said, to reduce if not eliminate

25 the problem of obesity. What a great and difficult
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1 challenge for all of us. To meet this challenge, HHS and

2 the FTC will do all that they can to facilitate creative,

3 innovative and effective industry efforts.

4 As Chairman Majoras emphasized yesterday, our

5 task now is to seize the momentum that the workshop has

6 given us to confront the great challenge of childhood

7 obesity. I know that we’re all up to this challenge, I

8 look forward to working with all of you as we continue

9 this dialogue, and I want to thank you and I hope you all

10 have a good lunch.

11 (Applause.)

12 (Whereupon, at 12:56 p.m., the workshop was

13 concluded.)

14

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25
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1 C E R T I F I C A T I O N O F R E P O R T E R

2

3 WORKSHOP TITLE: PERSPECTIVES ON MARKETING, SELF4 REGULATION & CHILDHOOD OBESITY 

5 DATE: JULY 15, 2005 

6

7 I HEREBY CERTIFY that the transcript contained

8 herein is a full and accurate transcript of the notes

9 taken by me at the hearing on the above cause before the

10 FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION and DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN

11 SERVICES to the best of my knowledge and belief.

12

13 DATED: JULY 21, 2005 

14

15 

16 KAREN GUY 

17

18 C E R T I F I C A T I O N O F P R O O F R E A D E R

19

20 I HEREBY CERTIFY that I proofread the transcript for

21 accuracy in spelling, hyphenation, punctuation and

22 format.

23

24 

25 WANDA J. RAVER