Brands Marketing Unhealthy Food to Children Via TikTok Influencers:Study

With the rising reputation of social media platforms, companies have additionally learnt to faucet into the huge attain that these web sites and functions provide. Now, analysis means that manufacturers are utilizing TikTok customers to advertise their unhealthy meals and drinks whereas turning them into model ambassadors. The researchers concluded, after analysing the video content material posted on TikTok. They highlighted that kids utilizing the platform are uncovered to quite a lot of unhealthy meals loaded with salt, sugar, and fats by means of on-line advertising and marketing. The analysis confirmed that this publicity impacted the meals preferences, consumption, buying, and requests of the viewers. 

In the study, revealed in BMJ Global Health, researchers have confused that whereas the platform enjoys important reputation amongst kids, no analysis earlier than them tried to look at the affect of unhealthy meals advertising and marketing on TikTok customers.

They started by scanning round 539 situations of video content material posted by 16 main meals and non-alcoholic manufacturers on their TikTok accounts. This was based mostly on world model share as of June 30, 2021. The researchers additionally assessed the content material generated by customers in response to the hashtag challenges given by the manufacturers.

As this was an observational examine, it’s price noting that it could actually’t set up causality. The researchers additionally acknowledged that thesampled user-generated content material might not have been consultant of a branded hashtag problem, and so they weren’t capable of measure kids’s publicity to manufacturers’ promotional actions or to user-generated content material.

However, the researchers note that “brand activity has rapidly increased—with most videos posted in the 6 months preceding data collection—and includes instigation of branded hashtag challenges that encourage user-generated content featuring brand products, brand-supplied videos or branded effects.”

The most common marketing strategies adopted by these brands, which had followers ranging from 14 million to 1.6 million, were branding videos, product images, engagement, and celebrities and influencers.

The engagement strategy involves amplifying brand hashtag challenges that are aimed at encouraging users to create content featuring products, videos, or branded effects such as stickers, and special filters of the brands. It was observed that the collective views amassed by user-generated content from single challenges ranged between 12.7 million and 107.9 billion. In most of the sample videos, the sentiment was found to be positive.

“Analysis of a sample of brand-relevant user-generated content created in response to these showed that branded hashtag challenges are effectively turning users into, in TikTok’s words, ‘unofficial brand ambassadors,” the researchers mentioned.

They additional underlined that the substantial attain of influencer advertising and marketing was alarming because it has been seen that the elevated publicity to unhealthy food-related content material has led to a rise in vitality consumption from each junk and different meals.