Digital marketing and childhood obesity: Legal challenges

Global media is shifting. Television, radio, and print media are being reinvented or replaced by new digital technologies and systems such as the Internet, cell phones, handheld devices, and increasingly portable computers. This shift has serious implications for childhood obesity and global public health. Public health practitioners understand that the marketing of unhealthy foods is a major factor in the global childhood obesity epidemic, but their current methodology for addressing said marketing will not work in the coming digital age. While marketers have adapted to the changing media environment, public health practitioners and public health law have not.

Digital marketing presents two new problems for the public health community. First, the need for oversight of advertising has never been greater. New technologies nourish the creation of ever-more potent advertising by allowing for advanced accumulation of personal data and the dissemination of advertising via new, seductive media. Second, the nature of the new media does not lend itself to traditional public health methods of regulation. Learning to use and adopt the legal tools of the digital environment for public health goals is the only way to move forward and formulate a truly effective public health strategy to confront the marketing of unhealthy foods.

This presentation will apply legal analysis to the current regulatory scheme for digital marketing, note foreseeable problems in applying public health methodology to the digital sphere, and make recommendations for new approaches.