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Commercial Alert applauded new bi-partisan legislation in Congress to restrict the sale of junk food in public schools. The Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act would expand the definition of food of minimal nutritional value, and empower the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to stop the sale of unhealthy foods everywhere in school not just in school cafeterias.

“Our children are suffering from an obesity epidemic, but federal laws governing the sale of food in schools are a junk food manufacturers dream,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit corporate watchdog group. “It’s time for Congress to wake up and take the childhood obesity problem seriously.”

The federal definition of food of minimal nutritional value is extremely narrow. It includes only sodas, water ices, chewing gum, and candies made mostly of sugar. Still worse, the USDA can only stop the sale of these foods during meal times in cafeterias—not in vending machines elsewhere in schools, or in school stores.

In June 2005, the USDA rejected Commercial Alert’s petition to enforce the competitive foods rule, which prohibits public schools from selling food of minimal nutritional value during mealtimes in school cafeterias.

In 2003, Commercial Alert, backed by dozens of endorsing organizations and prominent scholars, started a campaign in support of the Childhood Obesity Prevention Agenda, to help stop the childhood obesity epidemic by banning the marketing, distribution and sale of junk food in schools, and improving the quality of food provided to schoolchildren.

Last month, in response to recent findings by scientists at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and elsewhere that certain soft drinks may contain amounts of the carcinogen benzene above the U.S. legal limit for drinking water, Commercial Alert and public health advocates sent letters to all U.S. chief state school officers, asking them to stop the sale and marketing of these soft drinks in public schools, until they can be proven safe and free from benzene contamination.

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Today, Commercial Alert launched the website StopDrugAds.org (http://www.stopdrugads.org/), devoted to ending direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising in the United States. The purpose of the website is to educate the public about the dangers of prescription drug advertising, and to mobilize thousands of Americans to voice their opposition to the ads.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is accepting public comment on DTC prescription drug advertising until February 28th. The stopdrugads.org website says that is not the proper role of drug executives to tell Americans what drugs to buy, and it encourages visitors to send comments to the FDA in opposition to DTC drug advertising.

“In effect, drug companies are practicing medicine without a license, and that should be illegal,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. “We’ve got to halt prescription drug advertising before the next Vioxx tragedy happens.”

On October 27th, Commercial Alert released a statement from 211 professors from U.S. medical schools that “direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs should be prohibited.” The statement’s endorsers include prominent medical school professors from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, Duke, University of California, San Francisco and other top medical schools, along with two former editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The American public has little trust for the pharmaceutical industry, and believes it should be more closely regulated. According to a Harris Poll in November, only 9% of American adults believe that the pharmaceutical industry is “generally honest and trustworthy.” Fifty-one percent believe that the pharmaceutical industry “should be more regulated by the government.”

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Commercial Alert sent a letter today to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requesting it to investigate whether buzz marketers are violating federal law prohibiting deceptive advertising. The letter asks the FTC to review evidence that “companies are perpetrating large-scale deception upon consumers by deploying buzz marketers who fail to disclose that they have been enlisted to promote products. This failure to disclose is fundamentally fraudulent and misleading.”

Commercial Alert’s letter urges the FTC to thoroughly investigate Proctor & Gamble’s Tremor, which has enlisted about 250,000 teenagers in its buzz marketing sales force. “The Commission should carefully examine the targeting of minors by buzz marketing, because children and teenagers tend to be more impressionable and easy to deceive. The Commission should do this, at a minimum, by issuing subpoenas to executives at Proctor & Gamble’s Tremor and other buzz marketers that target children and teenagers, to determine whether their endorsers are disclosing that they are paid marketers.”

The letter states “Buzz marketing also is known as ‘guerrilla,’ or ‘stealth’ marketing. The terms are significant because they suggest the subterfuge that corporations are working on the buying public. They often are not promoting products and services openly, the way conventional advertising does. Rather they are enlisting people to promote products under the guise of doing something else….The Federal Trade Commission should require any and all persons who are paid to engage in such practices to disclose their relationship to the corporation whose products they are pitching, including their compensation. Failure to provide such disclosure should be considered ‘unfair or deceptive acts and practices in or affecting commerce’ within the meaning of the Federal Trade Commission Act.”

The full text of Commercial Alert’s letter to the FTC is available at: http://www.commercialalert.org/buzzmarketing.pdf.

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In a speech today, Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein called for greater enforcement of federal prohibitions against “undisclosed promotions” on television.

Adelstein said “In fall 2003, a group called Commercial Alert asked us to take a number of different actions regarding product placement, and its filing, and the recent press reports I mentioned, clearly indicate that the time has come for us to step up our enforcement in this area.”

“We are greatly encouraged by Commissioner Adelstein’s defense of viewers right to know by whom they are being persuaded,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert.

Commissioner Adelstein’s speech is at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-258962A1.pdf

Commercial Alert’s petition for rule-making to establish adequate disclosure of product placement on television is at: http://www.commercialalert.org/fcc.pdf

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Commercial Alert filed a petition for rule-making today with the U.S. Department of Agriculture requesting that it strengthen the enforcement of federal rules prohibiting the sale of soda pop and some types of candies in school cafeterias across the country.

USDA rules currently prohibit the sale of “foods of minimal nutritional value” during mealtimes in school cafeterias. But the enforcement provisions for these rules are extremely lax, so some schools may not take them seriously.

“We’re asking the USDA to side with parents who want their kids to grow up healthy, not with the junk food companies that want to stuff our children with sugar and caffeine,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. “The USDA should strengthen existing rules against the sale of junk food in school – before the childhood obesity epidemic gets any worse.”

Copies of the petition to USDA for rule-making are available at http://www.commercialalert.org/fmnvpetition.pdf.

USDA admitted last month in a report that it does not know whether schools are complying with prohibitions against the sale of foods of minimal nutritional value during school mealtimes. The report stated, “it is unclear to what extent federal and state regulations [against the sale of foods of minimum nutritional value] are enforced at the local level.”

Foods of minimal nutritional value are defined as soda pop, water ices, chewing gum, and certain types of candies, such as hard candies, jellied candies, licorice and marshmallows.

According to a Wall Street Journal poll in February, 2005, 83% of American adults “believe public schools need to do a better job of limiting children’s access to unhealthy foods like snack foods, sugary soft drinks and fast food.”

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A request that could have limited advertisers’ ability to place products in television shows without regulation was rejected yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The 2003 request was made by Commercial Alert, a consumer advocacy group based in Oregon and founded by Ralph Nader.

The 17 page September 30, 2003 letter to the FTC referred to “product placements” as embedded advertising and “stealth advertising” and asked the FTC to determine whether product placements should be disclosed as advertisements.

In a written response yesterday, Mary K. Engle, the Commission’s Associate Director for Advertising Practices, stated that “…there may be instances in which the line between advertising and programming may be blurred…”, but concluded “…existing statutory and regulatory framework provides sufficient tools for challenging any such deceptive acts or practices.”

“Today, the FTC has essentially endorsed the deceptive and dishonest practices of the product placement industry, and turned its back on children who are suffering from an epidemic of marketing-related diseases like obesity and type 2 diabetes,” responded Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert

A Penn State study partially support the concept that product placement were more effective at “increasing positive brand attitudes” and increasing recognition and recall of featured products. The 2000 study was presented at the 50th conference of the International Communication Association.

More recently, a Washington Post profile of public relations agent Jonathan Cheban showed the secrets behind how product placement for products like Evian water work. The article quotes Cheban as saying, “We’re not tricking anybody…It’s a service for consumers because they want to know. Average people want to know what’s hot. And I only will do things that are classy and high-end.”

The same paper reported the next day that Cheban was banned from VH-1’s The Fabulous Life. The article quoted a VH-1 spokesperson as saying, “The network had no idea that there was any connection between Evian water and Jonathan Cheban. We’re not going to be booking him in the future.”

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