Free Television and Digital Television: Food Advertising to Children in Thailand

Advertising is a marketing activity and plays an important role in most businesses, especially in forprofit businesses [1]. It also is a marketing tool used by businesses to affect sales growth and stimulate demand. Today, snack and beverage firms compete with one another to increase their firms’ profit and market shares, thereby fuelling competition. The marketing of these products induce consumption values among teenagers in accordance with the teenagers’ preference. For example, food industries try to use promotion techniques, such as exchange purchased packages for toys, including dolls, robots, give‐aways, colorful packaging, or popular cartoon characters, to attract children and occasionally use children as a product presenters to further incentivize children's consumption [2]. Euromonitor, the marketing research organization, found that sales are driven by snacks targeting children and adolescents aged 5‐24 years old [3]. In addition, Thai clamp‐down on snack food ads loom survey in 2004 found that the main factor promoting enormous snack consumption among children was the influence of television advertising as television was the main channel for advertisement. Moreover, the survey found that 67 varieties of snack advertising broadcasted on television were found in the morning programs during the weekend (7:30‐10:30) to which children were exposed the most[4].