Children and Adolescents’ Exposure to Digital Food and Beverage Marketing in Mexico During COVID-19 Times

OBJECTIVES: Characterize children's and adolescent's exposure of Digital Marketing (DM) and identify DM strategies of advertised food and beverages METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study. We used a crowdsourcing strategy to recruit children and adolescents around Mexico. Those with home access to Wi-Fi, with mobile capacity to record their habitual internet usage, and with abilities to upload their videos of exposure in a cloud were included. Once the videos were received, we performed a content analysis using the protocol for Monitoring of Marketing of Unhealthy Products to Children and Adolescents of the World Health Organization (Europe Office). The protocol and template were adapted to the Mexican context and then piloted in a sample of 20 children. We included an item to explore if COVID was used as a marketing strategy. Data was captured in an excel spreadsheet and then transferred to Stata 14. RESULTS: We received 45 minutes of internet exposure recordings from 348 children and adolescents. Overall, 45% of children and adolescents were exposed to food and beverage DM. Most of the DM was made of unhealthy food categories: fast food 17%, sweet snacks 10%, cakes and pastries 7%, among others. From the food and beverage advertising (f&b ads) 38% had at least one element to attract children, and 43% attracted adolescents. Brand characters were displayed on 10% of the ads; while licensed characters were displayed on 3.6%. We found that COVID19 was mentioned or illustrated in 3% of the f&b ads and that 67% f&b ads included an incentive to purchase or consume; such as: a person eating the product, or a f&b product served on a plate ready to eat. CONCLUSIONS: A restriction of unhealthy food and beverage digital marketing aimed at children and adolescents should be considered in the current Mexican advertising regulation. FUNDING SOURCES: This project was funded by UNICEF México and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The presenting author was funded by CONACYT México and was awarded with the Healthy Food Policy Fellowship.