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Record W4414646559 · doi:10.1186/s12889-025-24281-z

The power of product: how food advertising affects children’s perceptions of child and non-child targeted food advertising?

2025· article· en· W4414646559 on OpenAlexafffund
Julia Soares Guimarães, Meghan Pritchard, Soulene Sabir, Lana Vanderlee, Tim Ramsay, Charlene Elliott, Monique Potvin Kent

Bibliographic record

VenueBMC Public Health · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicConsumer Attitudes and Food Labeling
Canadian institutionsUniversity of CalgaryUniversité LavalUniversity of Ottawa
FundersCanada Research Chairs
KeywordsPerceptionThematic analysisProduct (mathematics)Food marketingFocus groupBiostatisticsPublic healthProduct typeChildhood obesity

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: Food advertising shapes children’s preferences for unhealthy foods, contributing to poor diets and increased risk of obesity and non communicable diseases. This study explored children’s perceptions of child and non-child-targeted food advertising. METHODS: Open-ended online interviews with 17 participants, recruited through convenience sampling, were conducted where children were prompted with four advertisements (ads): a child-targeted and non-child-targeted ad for both healthy (plain milk) and unhealthy (chocolate) foods. A thematic analysis was conducted. RESULTS: Most children expressed positive perceptions of the ads, and the reasons children described liking the ads included: (i) people in the ad eating the product, (ii) positive emotional appeal, (iii) pre-existing affinity with the product, and (iv) visibility of the product. However, most children expressed “negative purchase intent” to all ads due to a pre-existing aversion to the product. Many children who expressed pre-existing affinity with the product still expressed negative purchase intent because they preferred other brands or flavours of the product. Most children considered the type of product over the marketing techniques when asked about perceived targeted audience. The main themes found were: (i) product for everyone, and (ii) product for people that like the product. CONCLUSIONS: Children’s perceptions, purchase intent and perceived targeted audience did not change between child-targeted and non-child-targeted ads. This study underscores the critical role of the product itself in influencing children’s responses to ads. It highlights the need for public policies and advertising regulations to focus on restricting promotions of unhealthy products rather than solely addressing marketing techniques or target audiences.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.009
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.015
Threshold uncertainty score0.029

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.009
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0030.002
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.271
Teacher spread0.260 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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