Contemporary Approaches for Monitoring Food Marketing to Children to Progress Policy Actions

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Protecting children from unhealthful food marketing is a global priority policy for improving population diets. Monitoring the nature and extent of children’s exposure to this marketing is critical in policy development and implementation. This review summarises contemporary approaches to monitor the nature and extent of food marketing to support policy reform. RECENT FINDINGS: Monitoring approaches vary depending on the stage of progress of related policy implementation, with resource implications and opportunity costs. Considerations include priority media/settings. marketing techniques assessed, approach to classifying foods, study design and if exposure assessments are based on media content analyses or are estimated or observed based on children’s media use. SUMMARY: Current evidence is largely limited to high-income countries and focuses on content analyses of TV advertising. Ongoing efforts are needed to support monitoring in low-resource settings and to progress monitoring to better capture children’s actual exposures across media and settings.