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In school, kids are a 'captive market'. It's a phrase used by marketers to mean people who can't choose to avoid a product or a marketing message.
What's the best way to reach young people with marketing? Put the marketing where those people will see it every day. That's
why some companies pay to put advertising on school books, like this exercise
book with an advert for fizzy drinks.A specialist media company gives
away free exercise books to schools, paid for by food manufacturers (and
other companies) who put their advertising on the cover and inside the
books.
This leaflet was sent to food companies. It asks: 'Do you want to get your food product into the hands and mouths of kids?' Food companies
pay to have their products handed out in school canteens. They hope kids
will try the products, chat about them with their friends, and then ask
their mums to buy the food to put in their lunchbox.
Can you get active by eating chocolate?
Free? Well, not quite. To get a free basketball, kids had to hand over 170 tokens from chocolate. A ten-year-old child consuming enough chocolate to earn a basketball through the Get Active scheme would need to play basketball for 90 hours to burn off the calories. To earn a volleyball net, kids and their families needed to chomp through 5,440 bars, costing about £2,200. Here's the maths. 5,440 bars of chocolate contain nearly 67kg of fat. At an average of 226.5 kcalories per bar, that works out to be over a million kcalories (1,230,800). The chocolate company said it wanted to help kids be healthy and fight the flab. After a lot of criticism, the company dropped the scheme.
Can chocolate help you learn maths?
If the chocolate company wanted to advertise on TV 328 times, it could cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds. Instead, they manage to get you to advertise to yourself, for free, every time you use their book! *
Note: The picture has been changed a bit so that you can’t see what
the real product is. The point is, this type of marketing is used by lots
of different food and drink companies to get young people interested in
their food and drink brands.
How many crisps to get a free book?
And have you ever stopped to think how much food is being eaten to get free books or sports kit? Since 1999, schools all over the UK have collected tokens from crisp packets, so that schools can exchange them for free books. One school reported that it had to collect 10,400 crisp packets to get just 63 books. The snack company who ran the promotion says that during the five years in which the scheme operated, schools throughout the UK traded in enough crisp packets to get 6.6 million books. That's an ENORMOUS amount of crisps!
Click here to download activity sheets on the subject of food marketing.
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Watch
out for advertising on your desk!
Are
those snacks really a free gift?
In
2003, a leading chocolate company launched 'Get Active', a scheme offering
free sports kit for schools.
This
maths book (bought in 2004) was designed for children by a food company
that sells chocolate.* The book has cartoons of people adding, subtracting
and dividing the chocolate bars. The chocolate company logo appears an
amazing 328 times in this maths book! It’s a clever way of
advertising the brand.
Have
you ever collected food packets for your school?
