How to best regulate marketing to children is getting renewed focus in Canada as of late.

Earlier this month, the University of Waterloo released a report – funded by the Heart & Stroke Foundation – showing a “glut” of marketing aimed at children in restaurants and stores that sell food.

While using colourful cartoon characters to sell sugary snacks to kids on TV have, for the most part, fallen out of favour, the report found that half of the ads observed outside of 800 stores across Canada and 41% of those outside of the 2000 restaurants surveyed used at least one “child-directed” marketing technique, such as anthropomorphized animals or themes of magic and adventure. Heart & Stroke claims these kinds of displays at point-of-sale encourage “pester power” –  children nagging parents to make an impulse purchase.

“We were astonished to see the pervasiveness of marketing to kids in stores and restaurants across Canada,” says Dr. Leia Minaker, associate professor at the University of Waterloo and author of the report. “While we expected to see marketing to kids in Canadian stores, we were surprised by the breadth of techniques employed by food and beverage marketers.”

As a result of the report, Heart & Stroke is urging the federal government to restrict point-of-sale marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages in grocery stores, restaurants and other retail locations.

“Food marketers do not have kid’s health at heart,” said Doug Roth, CEO of Heart & Stroke. “Given the high proportion of child-directed marketing observed in both stores and restaurants in this Canadian research, it’s clear that policies aimed to restrict marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to kids– something long promised by the federal government– should include point-of-sale locations.”

Heart & Stroke’s call comes as Bill C-252, a private member’s bill that would amend the Food and Drugs Act to limit marketing directed at children, takes its next steps through the legislative process. The bill was first introduced in Feb. 2022, and the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Health had its first meetings regarding the bill last week.

The bill – introduced by Liberal MP Patricia Lattanzio – would make advertisements for food and beverages that “contribute to excess sugar, saturated fats or sodium in children’s diets” forbidden if they are aimed at kids under 13. It has received tentative backing from the NDP, while the Conservatives have opposed the bill, claiming it may add regulatory red tape without actually addressing changing unhealthy eating habits.

But Ron Lund, president and CEO at the Association of Canadian Advertisers, says that the industry already has a turnkey solution restricting the exposure of children to marketing and advertising, in line with what the government is trying to do: its own Code and Guide for the Responsible Advertising of Food and Beverage Products to Children, the result of four years of consultation with food and beverage association stakeholders.

“The private member’s bill is throwing a wrench into the works again,” Lund says.

At its core, the code adopts the Quebec model for prohibiting advertising to children under 13 years of age, which has been in place for 42 years, and would apply it nation-wide across food and beverage marketing appearing in any media. In addition to meeting Health Canada recommendations for regulating marketing to children, the code would also restrict advertising in elementary schools, and also comes with pre-clearance services and enforcement mechanisms for non-compliance, with assistance from Ad Standards. It was announced in 2021, with full implementation planned for July of this year and a five-year review in 2028.

The code was developed after the Child Health Protection Act, a Senate bill, died when Parliament was dissolved ahead of the 2019 federal election. Lund claims that bill had “scary” language around food being unhealthy, equating food with something truly unhealthy, like cigarettes.

“We took the intent of that bill, and the code and guide Health Canada put around it, and constructed our own code and guide, which takes key elements of S-228, where we meet or exceed everything the government was doing,” Lund says.

According to Lund, Health Canada has said in its feedback the code is a “comprehensive” effort, but would not endorse it. Opposing organizations have also put forward additional concessions from industry, like on-pack messaging, instore or IP rights, which Lund says was not part of the original bill and it is “not going there now.”

“They’ve not given it the true study they needed to give it, to understanding where it is going,” Lund says. Politicians, bureaucrats need to know advertisers “already did what the government requested with Bill S-228, and take it from there,” he says.

That is part of the issue the ACA is raising with the current efforts to regulate. The ACA is questioning why, during the first and second readings for Bill C-252, the code was not mentioned once, when it presents a comprehensive, well-studied solution already set to be in place.

At the end of the day, however, as Lund tells strategy, childhood obesity is a multifactorial problem, and that there are lots of questions about sedentary lifestyle, screen time, the gutting of school physed programs and other potential issues at play besides food.

Stateside, major brands have come under fire for deceptive marketing practices when it comes to targeting young kids, especially when it comes to gaming apps like Roblox.

People need to know that the code is “applicable to all mediums, including games,” Lund says. “We are not after just television…some of the media, kids aren’t looking at at all.”

Under the code, advertising should be identified as such in the metaverse. If it is not clear to the public (including children, in instances such as this) then it may raise questions of compliance, says Ad Standards, the national not-for-profit advertising self-regulatory body.