Anna Lappe: Marketing Food to Children at TEDxManhattan (Full Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of author and educator Anna Lappé’s TEDx Talk: Marketing Food to Children at TEDxManhattan 2013 Conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Marketing food to children | Anna Lappe | TEDxManhattan

TRANSCRIPT: 

I want to ask you all to do me a favor if you don’t mind. Before I begin, I’d like us all to call into our minds a child or children who we love. It can be a daughter, a son, it can be a godchild, it can be a niece or a nephew, a brother or a sister. Just picture in your mind’s eye who that kid is, and I will be picturing this one. Yeah, I think she’s kind of cute. That’s my daughter Ida, that was on her second birthday. One of her friends gave her that tiara that she insisted on wearing for the whole rest of the party. So I’ll be thinking of Ida.

When Ida was 2, right around this age, she fell in love: deeply, madly in love. Her name was Dora. And Dora was pretty cool. She was adventurous, she even spoke Spanish, she was pretty cool. She also sold band-aids, and if you’re a parent out there, you might have had some experience with the Dora band-aid. If you have, you would know what I mean when I say my child became obsessed with these band-aids. It was the kind of obsession that got her faking injuries just so she could wear them. And I got completely sucked into supporting her habit. I’d like to tell you that that desperate woman hunting down the Dora band-aids late at night at Rite-aid wasn’t me. It was.

Of course, cute, charismatic cartoons like Dora aren’t just selling band-aids. The food industry has figured out how to use cartoon characters to get kids hooked on their products too. You may have seen Spongebob on pop-tarts or Shrek on Twinkies, like this one here. And it does say somewhere on there, “Ogre-green creamy filling, same great taste.” You may have seen some of these packages, you may have seen Dora on cupcakes, crackers, popsicles, ice cream.

And it’s not just cute cartoon characters the food industry uses to get kids hooked on their products. There’s lots of other things they’re doing. In fact, the food industry itself says they spend about $2 billion every year — $2 billion every year — in marketing directly to children and teenagers. And of course, the industry is spending many billions more than that in marketing that kids are seeing anyway.

The way that the food industry is now targeting young people, I have found, as I’ve kind of dug into what they’re doing, I found to be quite alarming when you think about it in the context of the fact that diet-related illnesses among young people are on the rise. We all know that. When we think about this omnipresent marketing, I think it isn’t an exaggeration to say that it has become downright dangerous.

So the food industry knows that marketing to kids works. What does it do for them? It builds brand loyalty which can sometimes last a lifetime. So you target young people, you get them hooked on your brands early, that’s a lifetime of brand loyalty. It also generates what the industry calls pester power. Some of you out there, you might be parents, you might be familiar with what pester power is. It doesn’t feel too good, but it works. 75% of parents say they have bought a product for the first time because their child asked them for it. Or to speak in industry terms, their child pestered them for it.

The more I learned about the ways that children and teens are being bombarded with food marketing, the more outraged I have become. And you might be too as you learn what I’m about to share with you today.