• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, August 13, 2007

The Federal Trade Commission wants to know what advertisers have in store for kids. So it subpoenaed documents from 44 food and beverage companies, including McDonald's, Burger King, Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, Dole, Kellogg and Procter & Gamble, the commission announced last week.

The subpoenas come as the FTC gathers information for a report on the state of children's advertising for publication this November.

The information being sought includes budgets and strategies for all kinds of media, including TV, radio, print, outdoor and the Internet. In the area of media strategy, the FTC is seeking all demographic targeting information, including audience age cohorts and gender.

The FTC report, originally due in September, has been delayed two months so its authors can take into account a number of substantive changes by leading food and beverage advertisers in their children's marketing strategies. Announced in July, these voluntary reforms followed a much-publicized decision by Kellogg to drastically reduce advertising for unhealthy products targeting kids.

The Kellogg decision, in turn, was made under pressure from children's health advocates, who blame poor nutrition for the wave of childhood obesity now affecting America's young people.

One advocacy group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, brought a lawsuit against Kellogg in the state of Massachusetts that would have levied a $100,000 fine every time an ad for an unhealthy cereal brand was seen by a child under the age of 12. Kellogg undertook its voluntary reforms to settle this lawsuit.

Michael Jacobsen, the head of CSPI, said in a July interview that the organization was prepared to bring similar lawsuits against other big food and beverage companies if they didn't act to change their marketing strategies. The CSPI has also aggressively lobbied members of Congress, using the threat of drastic legislative remedies to spur food marketers to action.