• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, July 14, 2011

The food, advertising, media and restaurant industries are pulling out the stops in their fight against federal agencies' proposed voluntary guidelines on marketing food and beverages to children.

The industries, now formally cooperating in a "Sensible Food Policy Coalition," have launched a multi-pronged campaign to scuttle the nutritional guidelines laid out by the FTC and three other government agencies comprising the Interagency Working Group (IWG). Those agencies, which were charged by Congress with studying the obesity crisis and making recommendations to address it, issued their report in March. The deadline for submitting comments on the proposal was Thursday.

The coalition's members include Time Warner, Viacom, PepsiCo, Kellogg and General Mills, as well as the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and "honorary member" the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

Core coalition members spent $6.6 million on lobbying against the proposal in the first quarter of 2011, and have spent nearly $60 million on lobbying in the nutritional arena since the start of the Obama administration, according to a Washington Post report.

The most recent developments point to a decided escalation of the battle.

The news that the coalition -- which has declined to reveal its budget -- had hired President Obama's former White House communications director, Anita Dunn (now with SKDKnickerbocker) to manage its campaign prompted the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a leading proponent of the guidelines, to issue a scathing statement.

Dunn and her firm "should be ashamed of themselves for leading the food industry's panicky efforts to quash the Obama administration's reasonable and voluntary nutrition guidelines proposed for foods marketed to children," wrote CSPI nutrition policy director Margo G. Wootan.

"These standards are voluntary and, lest anyone forget, Congress in 1980 specifically stripped the Federal Trade Commission of its rulemaking authority to police junk food ads aimed at kids," Wootan added. "It's a shame the industry is using such overheated rhetoric to fight reasonable, voluntary nutrition guidelines aimed at reducing kids' risk of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related diseases. Perhaps it's a sign that the food industry's self-regulatory program is not all that they have made it out to be."

The Dunn hire also prompted the Obama administration's ObamaFoodorama blog to write that "a powerful group of food and media corporate giants have the knives out for the Administration's proposed voluntary guidelines for advertising food to children."

The blog reported that another SKDKnickerbocker executive, Alex Slater, confirmed that an HIS Global Insight study issued by the coalition last Friday was Dunn's first salvo.

The report -- which concluded that the guidelines would result in a 20% reduction in ad expenditures that would in turn cause losses of $28.3 billion in manufacturing and retail sales and 74,000 lost jobs in 2011 alone (378,000 by 2015) -- "was timed to coincide with the release of the monthly national jobs report," according to the Obama food blog.

"The Obama Administration's nutrition policy will lose jobs for Americans, is the not-so-subtle message from the coalition," the blog item said, implying that the coalition's members are being intentionally misleading by referring to the guidelines as "regulations" in their report, press releases and interviews.

The blog further reported that Jim Davidson, an attorney working with Dunn, said that the coalition, which began organizing last month, will "do whatever it takes" to get the guidelines withdrawn, and is seeking to influence the general public, as well as Congress. Davidson confirmed that there will be more reports on economic impacts, as well as advertising (there is no coalition Web site to date).

The Obama blog article also duly pointed out coalition members' arguments -- expressed by Davidson -- that guidelines, even if voluntary, from powerful government agencies amount to de facto regulations; that no study has shown that eliminating ads for foods with "certain nutritional content" has any impact on reducing obesity; and that the guidelines will open the doors for lawsuits against media and food companies and allow TV stations and production companies to be cited for violating FTC regulations.

The ANA has now formally filed its own comments on the proposed guidelines. It maintains that the guidelines would require "massive re-engineering of the entire food industry based on nutrition standards that go far beyond any ever approved by a government agency," and that the "sweeping" guidelines would affect adults as well as children, and violate First Amendment rights.

ANA also states that according to the NDP Group, only 12 of the top 100 most commonly consumed foods and beverages in America would meet the IWG's proposed nutrition standards. "The ANA believes it is ironic that many of the same foods that 'fail' the IWG standards meet the FDA's definition of 'healthy' and bear FDA-authorized health claims," stated ANA EVP government relations Dan Jaffe. "They meet the USDA's standards for the WIC program and the food stamp program. This clearly shows how unreasonable the IWG's nutrition standards are."

"Worst of all," contends Jaffe, "there is absolutely no discussion or proof that these massive changes, which would cost billions of dollars if carried out, would have any direct impact on reducing childhood obesity rates."