Television has traditionally been the preferred medium for children’s food advertising, but the landscape is changing rapidly. To fight back calls to limit advertising, the food industry claims that obesity has increased at the same time children are watching less television and hence see fewer TV ads for food. Children watch less TV because their attention is being captured by other electronic media through heavy use of video games, computers, and portable music devices.

The industry has thus been forced to diversify their methods and has done so brilliantly. Using war-like terms to describe their new methods (guerilla marketing, viral marketing, stealth marketing), the industry markets aggressively in magazines, over the Internet, in schools, with product placements in movies and subsequent tie-ins with food products and fast food chain, and much more. Food company kid’s clubs, website games replete with food products, product placements in video games, required TV watching in schools (Channel One), and the cell phone are additional examples. With new cell phones equipped with a GPS (Global Positioning System) chip, companies can identify the location of the user. The child marketers boast that tens of millions of children power up a cell phone when they leave school each day and can (and will) be beamed advertisements to local food establishments. The ability of parents to shield their children from marketing has been low for years and is now eroded further. Story and French published a survey of these new marketing techniques and found that little but the technology has changed; the foods most heavily marketed to children continue to be high in sugar and fat and fail to encourage healthy eating.