Grant: Project Grant

Unhealthy food and beverage marketing negatively impacts the food preferences, dietary habits and health of young people, yet little is known about the power and exposure of such marketing to teenagers. Marketers aggressively target teenagers across multiple platforms with various appeals. In a digital world, such marketing rapidly evolves and expands, making it difficult to track. Researchers and policy makers are thus left to both identify the platforms and then subjectively determine the criteria (or indicators) of teen-oriented food marketing. The upshot is a limited understanding of the actual engagement with and power of unhealthy food marketing to teenagers-knowledge critical for enhancing teenagers' skills in navigating marketing messages and for informing policy. This project will implement a mobile app called GrabFM!-Grab Food Marketing!-which allows for the tracking of food marketing to teenagers. The project will also generate a typology of 'teen-tested' indicators of food and beverage marketing, and analyze such marketing across demographic variables, and over time. Since Health Canada is interested in the marketing of unhealthy foods to children (as part of its commitment to the federal Healthy Eating Strategy), the project will generate critical policy relevant knowledge. Teenagers (aged 13-17), recruited from schools across Canada, will use (an already developed and pilot-tested) app (GrabFM!) to capture the food marketing that they feel is targeted to them. The app allows for the documentation of food type, brand, platform, and types of appeals used, and the demographic characteristics of the users. This study innovatively connects teenagers with technology to assess the persuasive power of the food marketing aimed at them, providing real world evidence of what teens actually see and how they classify marketing appeals. It will generate critical evidence for Health Canada as it seeks to monitor such marketing, and engage teenagers in the process.