CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Childhood obesity is on the rise, and commercial marketing sells kids on things that encourage it: soft drinks, fatty foods, video games, the Internet, TV.
With money and the right approach, however, social marketing can sell kids on getting outside and getting active, according to Marian Huhman (WHO-mun), a professor of communication at the University of Illinois. Her findings are based on recently published results on a five-year national campaign aimed at “tweens” aged 9 to 13 years old.
The campaign was known as VERB and was run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2002 to 2006. VERB in this case was not an acronym; instead it was chosen because it connotes action. Huhman, who joined the U. of I. faculty in January, was part of the CDC team that developed VERB and oversaw its evaluation. She was the lead author of six on a study of the campaign published online July 16 by the American Journal of Public Health.
The message of VERB was one of fun and friendship associated with physical activity, of making it cool, Huhman said. It did not focus on what kids should or shouldn’t do, on the benefits of exercise (a word not even used), or the dangers of obesity, she said.
“We were just trying to get them to go outside and pick up a jump rope or play hopscotch or ride their bikes or run around in circles,” she said.
With extensive congressional funding, VERB was able to use the sophisticated techniques of commercial marketers, to conduct extensive research, use professional actors, and buy the necessary media, mostly through TV, to reach a substantial proportion of the national target audience.
One result was surprising early success in building the VERB brand, Huhman said. Advertisements began in June 2002 and ran through the summer, when children are watching more TV. By the end of the first year, in late spring of 2003, phone surveys showed 67 percent awareness of VERB, prompted and unprompted, among the target group cohort. And those numbers would continue to improve.
“We know that if the brand is good it has enough legs that it can have a lot of different kinds of messages coming off of it, a lot of different promotions,” Huhman said.
And the campaign did build from that awareness, adding on school- and community-based programs and promotions, and partnerships with national organizations. The VERB Web site would have more than 1 million children registered by the final year, and Huhman has students in her college classes who still remember the campaign. The evidence seems to show “they liked it a lot,” Huhman said.
But was it effective? In public health and social marketing campaigns, the funding is rarely available to test that, Huhman said. All that campaign organizers can often say is that they reached the audience by buying advertising time in appropriate places.
In the case of VERB, whose funding totaled $339 million over five years, researchers were able to fund the large nationwide annual phone surveys that were required. The first of three nationally representative cohorts of children 9-13 years of age were interviewed for the first time in 2002 and then followed up on in successive years. A second cohort was added in 2004 and a third in 2006. Surveys continued with all three, even as children aged out of the target group.
One finding was a “dose-response” effect showing that children’s reports of free-time physical activity showed a significant positive association with campaign exposure.
“We found that the more the tweens saw the advertising, the more physically active they were,” Huhman said.
That was demonstrated most dramatically in the results from the 2006 survey and among children in the first cohort, who by that time were 13-17 years old and who had had the potential for the most exposure to VERB, Huhman said. Those in the cohort with no exposure to the campaign reported two sessions of free-time physical activity in the week before their interview. Those who reported seeing something about VERB every day reported almost five sessions.
“Behavior change is really hard,” Huhman said, “so getting behavioral effects among a large population is a big deal.”
The 2006 research also found that children still in their tween years (ages 10-13 for the survey) showed statistically significant dose-response associations with physical activity and three psychosocial outcomes, Huhman said.
The more they saw the campaign, the more likely they were to have been physically active the day before the survey, and the more likely they were to believe in the benefits of being physically active, in their self-efficacy (or capability) to be physically active, and in social influences (or the influence of peers) on their physical activity.
For parents seeking to encourage their kids to be active, Huhman, a former nurse, suggested that just getting them outside can be significant. “Throw your kid outside, because kids at this age, if you put them outside, or if you put them in kind of a free environment, they will start running around and having spontaneous bursts of activity – they’re kind of wired to do that.”
Parents also can make a point of being physically active with their children, Huhman said, whether it is hiking excursions or just involving them with chores.
