Health-related food advertising on kid YouTuber vlogger channels

Abstract

This article seeks to identify the presence of food products on channels featuring kid YouTuber vloggers (or 'kidfluencers') aged under 14 years old in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom, to determine if they are encouraging a healthy diet. Content analysis was performed on a sample of 450 videos (6750 min) posted within a three-year time span. The results show that, with regard to the foods present in the videos, those most commonly present (71%) are non-essential and unhealthy foods and the United States is the country with the highest percentage of non-essential and unhealthy foods, followed by the United Kingdom and Spain. The channels in Spain show a higher number of healthy foods compared to the rest (N ¼ 11). The results suggest a relationship between consumer habits and what kid vloggers reflect in their channels.

Impact of Thin-Ideals in Influencer Posts Promoting Healthy vs. Unhealthy Foods on Tweens’ Healthy Food Choice Behavior

“…We do suggest influencers to be cautious with promoting food products in general, as promoting unhealthy food can have an impact on their followers’ unhealthy food behavior and lifestyle. Recent content analyses, however, show that influencers often abundantly endorse unhealthy food products in their videos ( Coates et al, 2019c ; Martínez-Pastor et al, 2021 ). Therefore, influencers should be made aware of the ethical responsibility they have when choosing to promote products.…”

‘My Mom Got Influenced by Yours’: The persuasiveness of mom influencers in relation to mothers' food assessments and decisions

“…Despite recent efforts to protect the consumers, research shows that the effectiveness of social media food marketing is rather worrisome, as this marketing technique is predominantly used to promote products that are high in fat, sugar and/or salt (Alruwaily et al, 2020;Coates et al, 2019a;Martínez-Pastor, et al, 2021;Potvin Kent et al, 2019). Studies investigating the effectiveness of these social media marketing efforts showed that the promotion of unhealthy foods by SMI indeed led to an increase of their intake among children (Coates, Hardman, Halford, Christiansen, & Boyland, 2019b;Coates et al, 2019).…”

“…Koordeman et al, 2010;Boyland et al, 2017;Harris and Brownell, 2009). While some studies quantified the amount of healthy vs. unhealthy food promotions on the social media profiles of child influencers (Alruwaily et al, 2020;Coates et al, 2019a;Martínez-Pastor, et al, 2021;Potvin Kent et al, 2019), to the best of our knowledge, no such information exists about the profiles of mom influencers. Despite mothers' determining role concerning the food habits of their children and their great exposure to social media content (Price et al, 2018), food marketing targeted at adults is currently not regulated in Europe and the quantity and impact of social media food marketing directed to mothers, to the best of our knowledge, remains unexplored.…”

Marketing motivations influencing food choice in 16 countries: segmentation and cluster analysis

“…Food advertising campaigns are responsible for part of the food market, since they directly influence consumers to buy certain types of food (Silva et al, 2021). Additionally, these marketing strategies are often directed to foods that are convenient, easy to consume, tasty, high in fat, sugar and salt, energy dense and very caloric but with a poor nutritional value (Carbonneau et al, 2021;Jiménez-Morales & Montaña Blasco, 2021;Martínez-Pastor et al, 2021). As a consequence, people tend to consume foods that are easy to purchase and cheap, but that contribute to the onset of many non-communicable diseases, leading to high social burdens also associated with obesity and related pathologies, like diabetes, high cholesterol, cardiovascular diseases and heart problems (Batschauer et al, 2020;Feriani et al, 2021;Lin et al, 2014;Loreto et al, 2021;Pan et al, 2021;Siu et al, 2007).…”