Extended Draft Essay #1

            Anybody can tell you that America is the fattest country in the world, and it’s only getting fatter. According to the L.A times In 2009 preschoolers saw 56% more ads for Subway, 21% more ads for McDonald’s and 9% more ads for Burger King, compared with 2007. Children age 6 to 11 saw even more: 59% more ads for Subway, 26% more for McDonald’s and 10% more for Burger King (Rochman, Szalavitz, and Park 1). Fast food advertising is at every street corner and you can’t avoid it.  These younger generations are progressively developing a more and more unhealthy diet and lifestyle.  Using rhetorical marketing strategies to control and increase advertisement, fast food corporations continue to target young kids forming the unhealthy and obsessed fast food diet that so many Americans struggle with today.

            Fast food is easy, filling; it’s convenient and inexpensive. Starting at a young age, school and work become extremely time consuming and we find ourselves taking more shortcuts everyday. Day to day problems like this is the reason fast food corporations target kids and they arguably use it to their advantage. Eric Scholosser mentioned in an interview with CBS news that “Fast food chains spend a large amount of marketing to get the attention of children. People form their eating habits as children so they try to nurture clients as youngsters” (Schlosser, 2). Personally, I could tell you from my own experience as an obese child that fast food really started for me in middle school when my free time began to slowly slip away. Another major factor that I saw and still see today is the large quantities of fast food advertising no matter where your going whether that’s from your couch at home or on vacation in a foreign country.  It’s no doubt that fast food is heavy on fat, salt and sugar with little to none nutritional value yet it finds its appeal to almost everyone. In a study done by time health, they reported that “Researchers’ investigations also revealed that of 3,039 possible meal combinations intended for children (such as McDonald’s Happy Meal), only twelve met nutritional criteria the researchers set for preschoolers and 15 met the criteria for older children” (Rochman, Szalavitz, and Park, 1). What makes this statistic concerning is that it almost seems in todays society that easting fast food has become a routine for a majority of households. In the same study researches took this even further to narrow down individuals and the harm they’re doing to themselves.  One-third of children and teens reported consuming fast food at least once a week, and 16% to 17% of adolescents’ caloric intake came from fast food restaurants. On an average visit to a fast-food restaurant, teens ordered 800 to 1,100 calories in a single meal (Thirty percent of which came from saturated fat or sugar), which is half the recommended intake for adolescents. Now that the obesity rate among young children has doubled since 1970, I think it’s important that we as consumers identify the problem. 

            In my opinion, I think it comes from the big corporations like Mcdonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and other chains widely distributed around the world. McDonalds spent 4.2 Billion dollars in 2009 on advertisements to youth alone, which to me is a shocking number for me when I think about how small some of these ads can be (Shapiro, 1).

Think about Mcdonald’s happy meal. Taking a pathos approach to its entire promotion, McDonalds has successful related to young kids on a similar level through these toys and cartoons that are continuing to raise generation after generation in an unhealthy lifestyle. A study reported by Times writer Meredith Melnick explains how wide-spread this has really become; although restaurants like McDonald’s and Burger King pledged to reduce marketing to kids, it’s pretty evident that this isn’t the case. McDonald’s alone has 13 different websites targeted at various age groups; one site, Ronald.com, is specifically designed for preschoolers. Together, McDonald’s family of websites got 365,000 unique visitors aged 12 or younger per month and 249,000 teen visitors (Rochman, Szalavitz, and Park 1).  After I logged on myself to see what this was all about for myself, it really became clear.  Using more than one rhetorical approach, Mcdonald’s has created these websites that are bringing kids in through fun games and activities that underlie the product their really selling you. The problem here is that these marketers are developing thousands of ads a month and each and every one of them are targeted to reach an audience as low as two years old! What’s even worse is the fact that these options are endless in ways to target young kids.

            Today over eight major fast food restaurants have produced Smartphone apps, providing another opportunity to reach young customers, anytime, anywhere. Additionally, marketers are even finding ways to target children directly at school making it inevitable to stumble across one of these advertisements. An estimated twenty percent of public schools sell branded fast food. Probably the most shocking example that I’ve ever come across came from a school in Seminole County in Florida. These students received report cards mailed home from the school in Ronald McDonald envelopes, with promises of a free happy meal for children with good grades.

            The end goal for these marketers is too simply improve their brand name and affinity to kids at an early age whether it’s through a colorful or a toy from your favorite Disney movie. Using some of these different techniques, big corporate advertisers are effectively targeting more and more young kids every day further inflicting this obesity problem were trying to fight here in America. As generations are beginning to evolve with such large quantities of fast good, it’s critical that parenting plays its important role.