Discursive strategies in child-directed audiovisual advertising of low nutritional value products: Happiness, courage and obesity

Abstract

Spanish children see an average of 9,000 advertising campaigns on television per year, mostly for low nutritional value foods. Given childhood obesity rates, the close relationship between advertising targeting this group and consumption of this type of food, Spain passed the Child-Directed Food Advertising Self-Regulation (PAOS) Code in 2005. This article intends to analyze the discursive strategies used in low nutritional value food campaigns in relation to the contents of the PAOS Code. It uses a mixed method that integrates quantitative techniques to analyze audiences and qualitative ones to study the advertising discourse. Research concludes that, unlike other types of foods, low nutritional value product advertising focuses its discursive strategy on words and semantic fields linked to happiness, action, fun, etc. Conclusions also point to the need to review the contents of the PAOS Code and further involve the Spanish food industry, agencies, and advertisers so that advertising content self-regulation becomes truly effective. The original contribution of this article lies in the theoretical and empirical inputs that take childhood obesity in Spain as a starting point and interrelate it with discursive strategies employed in low nutritional value product advertising aimed at minors and the existing regulatory framework.