Cancer Council WA is calling for tougher restrictions on junk food and drink advertising to children after its own campaign was blocked by social media giants Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
The social media platforms blocked Cancer Council WA’s latest LiveLighter public health campaign on raising awareness of the health impacts of sugary drinks consumption.
This action by the social media platforms coincides with a report released last Friday from World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) that highlights that many countries around the world are failing to protect children from the effects of junk food marketing on their health.
Global childhood obesity rates are on the rise, with one in four Australian children either overweight or obese.
The WCRF report details the significant impact marketing has on what children want, buy and eat, with research showing that seeing 4.4 minutes of food advertising can lead to children eating 60 more calories a day.
Eating as little as 46 extra calories each day can lead to excess weight in children.
LiveLighter, which is run by Cancer Council WA and funded by the Department of Health, partnered with the Australian Dental Association of WA (ADAWA) for the new campaign titled ‘Sugary Drinks are a Rotten Choice’.
Launched a fortnight ago, the new campaign illustrates how sugary drinks lead to serious tooth decay and weight gain which causes chronic disease and 13 types of cancer.
The social media platforms blocked the first iteration of the campaign, titled ‘Thirsty’, which featured videos of young people with tooth decay, resulting in a complete re-design of the campaign.
Facebook and Instagram provided Cancer Council WA with the following statement:
“This creative can’t run because it contains images which imply or attempt to generate negative self-perception in order to promote diet, weight loss, or other health related products. Ads may not show body depictions that are potentially offensive, unrealistic, or degrading to the user. Images like this tend to promote a negative user experience.”
It’s not the first time that a Cancer Council WA campaign has been blocked on social media, with recent examples such as LiveLighter’s “grabbable gut” campaign, SunSmart ads with images of skin spots and Find Cancer Early ads about “blood in your poo” also rejected.
The creative for the new campaign was subsequently revised and placed on outdoor channels such as digital billboards, train interiors, bus sides and smart cars across WA, and a much softer approach used for social media platforms.
“We are frustrated that yet again our organisation’s important health messages have been rejected by several major online platforms, yet junk food and sugary drink companies that are fuelling a global obesity epidemic have free rein on those same platforms," Cancer Council WA LiveLighter manager Kelly Kennington says.
“This is an important public health campaign because we know that excess sugary drink consumption increases the risk of oral diseases such as tooth decay, as well as the long list of chronic diseases that are impacting on the health of Western Australian families.
“Children and young adults are heavy users of social media which means they are bombarded with unhealthy advertising, yet we can’t use social media to advertise to their parents effectively.
“Our spending for this campaign is minimal compared to the promotional budgets available to junk food and sugary drink companies, which is why we rely on avenues such as social media platforms to inform people of the health risks associated with the consumption of sugary drinks and counter-act some of heavily resourced junk food and drink industry.
“Not only are we up against a powerful marketing force online, these companies have almost no restrictions on how they can advertise to kids, including advertising on government-owned property such as public transport and billboards, and even on school buses.”
A Facebook spokesperson told AdNews that its advertising policies have stricter guidelines than its community standards due to paying for distribution to the social media site's members.
“We recognise the important work of the Cancer Council in the prevention, education and treatment of cancer in Australia," the spokesperson says.
"Our Community Standards outline what is and isn't allowed on our free services, however, when it comes to ads on Facebook we have a higher set of standards for what content can be included in an ad.
"Our Advertising Policies are more restrictive because they take paid distribution to appear in people’s News Feeds and clearly state that ads must not contain text that focuses on someone’s personal attributes, including their physical or mental health condition.”
The new Cancer Council WA campaign runs for six weeks from Sunday January 19 to coincide with summer slushie and sugary drink advertising onslaught.
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