When Kids Make The Food Ads

What happens when kids design an ad campaign for food? For one thing, it doesn't look much like the ad campaigns aimed at kids but designed by adults.

Juicy fruits, tasty vegetables and other healthy treats are what a group of kids in Seattle, WA hoped to tempt people to buy, and they promoted the idea through their own advertising campaign on city buses.

"Lots of kids just want to eat junk food. They might think it's good for them, but its not," said nine year-old Eunica, who created an ad featuring pineapples and apples, some of her personal favorites.

She and her classmates last year in teacher Trina Anderson's third grade at Thorndyke Elementary School were among the Seattle area students who participate in a healthy food education project called CHANGE. They learned about gardening, healthy eating and advertising.

Their discussions got them thinking about the kinds of foods they usually see advertised on TV. What's typical? According to nine year-old Jada it's "marshmallowy things" and other junk food.

She's right. The vast majority of ads aimed at kids are for junk food—stuff high in fat and sugar and low in nutritional value. "Research shows," said Kristen Harrison, author of a recent study, "that the more they are exposed to such advertising, the more likely they are to buy the advertised foods."

The ads are bright, flashy and attention grabbing. They seem to say: Eat these chips and you'll be popular! Drink this soda and you'll be happy! So the kids decided to use the same bright colors and peppy images to get people to consider healthy foods—the kinds of things we don't normally see advertised at all.

Matthew, 9, "drew random fruits and vegetables;" nine-year-old Jada's ad featured watermelon; Samuel, 10, made oranges, peaches and apples. After creating the ads the kids didn't want their artwork to just hang on the classroom walls. They wanted to spread the word.

"Some of the students suggested it would be cool if these ads could reach the public in their neighborhoods," said Holly Freishta, manager of CHANGE. Taking it to the city buses was really the students' idea.

By this fall, officials at the city's public bus system had agreed to run the ads for two months in several Seattle neighborhoods. The artwork was laminated and some text was put into four different languages to appeal to the diverse community that the buses serve.

The kids who participated said they hoped their ads would entice people to eat more healthy foods and less junk. Ten-year-old Samuel said bluntly, "I think everybody should be healthy and know that if they eat bad foods they might get fatter and sick."

That's not a message that's out there much. But in Seattle it's all around town.