Watching TV yesterday I came across a new ad for McDonalds which I find a little disturbing in its blatant marketing to young children. As you can see in the video below, the “restaurant” is portrayed as a magical, fairytale place with “good food” that is “grown, picked and born of our land”.
Surprised that fast food companies are allowed to target children so specifically like that, I did a little research and it turns out that there are laws preventing them from doing this… but only during children’s programming. This means that a lot of awful ads like this one slip through the net. The articles below explain the situation, while the third link is to the website of a research institute for fast food marketing at Yale University, which has lots of useful info and statistics from the US.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/18/junk-food-children-marketing-who-tv
http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=21174