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Tools for Advocates

Sugar Water Gets a Facelift: What Marketing Does for Soda

This Framing Brief describes the intensive, immersive, incessant marketing tactics soda companies are using to encourage young people to drink more of the top non-alcoholic beverage in American soda.
[download pdf]

What Surrounds Us Shapes Us: Making the Case for Environmental Change

This Framing Brief shows how advocates see that what surrounds us-our neighborhoods, school and workplaces-influences our health. When people understand that, then the policies that improve places makes sense.
[download pdf]

Food Marketers Greenwash Junk Food: Companies Tout Link to Health and Environmental Movements

This Framing Brief explains how food and beverage companies are borrowing the symbolism of the environmental movement to cast a favorable "green" light on themselves and their products. But many of the products they label green are still high in fat, salt and calories, and whether they are eco-friendly is open to debate.
[download pdf]

Reading between the Lines: Understanding Food Industry Responses to Concerns about Nutrition

When a food or beverage company does something that might be good for health, should public health groups congratulate them publicly? If not, why not? What do these promises mean? When companies' words don't match their deeds the answers are not always clear. This Framing Brief describes how food and beverage companies are reacting to pressure from public health groups and explores the implications for framing public health's responses to those actions.
[download pdf]

The Problem with Obesity

Obesity has become the popular term for a set of problems that result in premature death and injury from diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. It is a convenient term, but we should stop using it. This Framing Brief explains why.
[download pdf]

Toolkit: How Advocates Can Fight Junk Food Marketing to Kids

Communities confronting obesity are frustrated by the corporate marketing practices that make unhealthy foods and beverages attractive, easily available and readily affordable in our communities. Because pervasive mass media advertising campaigns are created by multinational corporations and regulated by the federal government, many local advocates feel powerless to do anything about this issue. However, what many people don't realize is that food and beverage corporations' marketing practices go far beyond TV advertising -- and there are many things local communities can do to limit the reach of corporate marketing. BMSG is guiding grantees in the HEAC Initiative in how to confront these marketing practices through local policy change so they can transform the marketing environment that contributes to persistent and savage disparities in health.

To do this, BMSG developed a toolkit for HEAC sites on fighting junk food marketing to kids at the local level. Our toolkit answers the questions:

• How are food and beverage companies marketing their unhealthy products to young people?
• What are their target marketing strategies?
• How can neighbors, parents, teachers, and young people themselves confront marketing that interferes with creating healthy eating environments in their neighborhoods?

The BMSG toolkit provides examples and stories of what local communities can do about unhealthy marketing practices, so people can take action to reduce unwanted marketing and promotion. The toolkit contains everything you need to begin a discussion and take action in your community.
[download pdf]

Paquete de herramientas "Luchemos Contra la Promocin de Alimentos Chatarra entre los Nios" esta disponible en Espaol
[transferir paquete de herramientas en Espanol pdf]

Video: Fighting Junk Food Marketing to Kids

Click the link below to watch streaming video in English or Spanish that vividly illustrates the problem and what local groups can do about it. Contact us for a DVD version.

Quicktime Video -- (english) Small (32 MB)  |   Large (84 MB)
Quicktime Video -- (spanish) Small (31 MB)  |   Large (83 MB)

Web site: Digitalads.org

This Web site exposes the immersive and often insidious practices food and beverage companies use to market their products to children and youth online, using everything from Web sites to mobile phones. The foods and beverages being marketed are, by and large, among those that health experts, including the Institute of Medicine, have said children should avoid. Visit the site to learn more about digital marketing, read reports from experts on the subject, and keep up-to-date on the latest ad campaigns.

Web site: Jointuse.org

This site explores a public health strategy called joint use, which increases opportunities for children and adults to be physically active by allowing schools and communities to share resources like parks, swimming pools and playgrounds. Visit jointuse.org to watch videos of joint use success stories, view PhotoVoice photo essays by youth documenting barriers to physical activity, download fact sheets, research summaries and policy analyses, and find out how to jumpstart a joint use partnership in your own community.

Navigating the Trade Press: What Are the Food and Beverage Industries Discussing?

Public health advocates are often at a disadvantage when facing corporate heavyweights simply because they are not privy to the same information. The annotated bibliography reveals the issues at the top of the agenda for food producers and marketers, alerting advocates to a rich source of information on an industry that, to a large degree, determines what Americans eat. Tobacco control advocates learned the importance of "eavesdropping" on the industry literature first, and created some of the first electronic advocacy tools as mechanisms for sharing information about the industry; now they mine the tobacco industry documents for insights into corporate strategies. Public health advocates working to prevent obesity need the same understanding of the food and advertising literature as their colleagues have built for tobacco, alcohol, and firearms. This report takes the first step by identifying and assessing the few "must read" periodicals from the food, beverage, and advertising industries, including standard advertising industry magazines such as AdWeek and Advertising Age, the Marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal, and other more specialized journals from the food industry such as Beverage World.
[download pdf]
[download Food Industry Sources.xls]

Questions about our work? Struggling with a framing challenge? Want to know
more? Talk to us!