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The Federal Trade Commission announced the results of a comprehensive study of food and beverage industry marketing expenditures and activities directed to children and teens. The study, A Review of Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents: Follow-Up Report gauges the progress industry has made since first launching self-regulatory efforts to promote healthier food choices to kids.
It serves as a follow-up to the FTC’s 2008 report on food marketing requested by Congress. The report provides a picture of how food companies allocated $1.79 billion on marketing to youth ages 2-17 in 2009. The FTC found that overall spending was down 19.5 percent from 2006, with most of that decrease coming from less spending on television ads to youth. At the same time, food companies stepped up their spending to market to children and teens in new media, such as online, mobile, and viral marketing, by 50 percent. New to this report is a detailed analysis of the nutritional profile of foods marketed to youth. The analysis suggests that industry self-regulation resulted in modest nutritional improvements from 2006 to 2009 within specific food categories heavily marketed to youth, such as cereals, drinks, and fast food kids’ meals. According to the report, food company participation in self-regulation has increased, but some companies with significant marketing to children still have not joined the effort. The entertainment industry lags farther behind. With a few exceptions, media companies have not limited licensing of children’s characters and placement of ads during children’s programming to more nutritious foods.
FTC Releases Follow-Up Study Detailing Promotional Activities, Expenditures, and Nutritional Profiles of Food Marketed to Children and Adolescents A Review of Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents: Follow-Up Report (read the report)
It’s not really surprising but over half of Americans don’t have or use a land line, according to data published late last week by the Centers for Disease Control.
The study tracks the demographics of land line telephone use and was designed to help the CDC adapt its data collection programs, which relied heavily on calling land lines. While the pitfalls of relying on landlines for surveys is well known, the report has some worthwhile stats on the demographics of landline telephone use. The survey found that more than one-third of American homes (35.8 percent) had only wireless telephones during the first half of 2012 while 15.9 percent of all households had both landline and wireless telephones but received all or almost all calls on the wireless phones. This means 51.7 percent of U.S. homes don’t have or didn’t use their landlines in the first half of 2012. That’s a 1.8 percent increase from the same period a year ago.
Over half of American homes don’t have or use their landline
Do you remember when Verizon actively disabled Wi-Fi radios on its handsets? Or even when most handsets didn’t have Wi-Fi radios? While it seems imaginable that we might go back to those days, some predict that in 2013 Wi-Fi’s popularity could provoke a fight between users and carriers. According to analyst firm, Informa: “There will be a shift in operator sentiment away from public Wi-Fi as it becomes evident that the growing availability of free-to-end-user Wi-Fi devalues the mobile-broadband business model. Mobile operators will respond by articulating the value of their cellular networks better, but others not affected by this trend will double down on their public Wi-Fi investments to continue to propel the deployment and monetization of Wi-Fi.”
2013: The year carriers choose whether Wi-Fi is friend or foe
Christmas Day was huge — not just for present-hungry kids, but also for app developers and device makers. App analytics firm Flurry has tallied up the numbers from Christmas and found that downloads and activations shattered previous records, showing how people love their apps and are increasingly embracing tablets.
Device activations on Flurry’s network hit 17.4 million units, up 332 percent over the first 20 days in December, which represented a baseline of activity. That blew away last year’s mark of 6.8 million new device activations on a single day, said Flurry. Tablets were apparently the hot gift item, grabbing 51 percent of mobile device activations. This was the first Christmas that tablets edged out smartphones for activations. During the first 20 days of December, smartphones were activated four times more often than tablets. Flurry noted that the most popular devices were iPads, Apple iPad Minis and Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7-inch tablets, and that Amazon in particular had a good Christmas, increasing its tablet activations by several thousand percent over its baseline during the first half of December. The big increase in Christmas tablet sales may reflect the falling price points of tablets, which are becoming more affordable with smaller 7-inch models. With all those new devices, it’s no surprise that app downloads soared on Christmas Day. Flurry said there were 328 million app downloads that day, up 112 percent over the baseline. That flew by last year’s record of 242 million app downloads. The download parade was steady all day long, hitting about 20 million downloads an hour at 11 a.m. local time and remaining steady all the way through 8 p.m.
Christmas Day: tablet activations outpace smartphones
[Commentary] Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Steven Waldman laments that the media ownership debate is "stuck in a bit of a 1980s time warp." Well, gag me with a spoon.
Waldman, a respected former Federal Communications Commission official who authored the agency's exhaustive "future of media" report, dismisses the latest moves by the FCC to eliminate longstanding limits on how much media one company can own in a single market as "hardly radical." What else would you call eliminating the only rules that would prevent Rupert Murdoch from adding the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune to his media empire? Terrible? Apocalyptic? Insane? How about just plain wrong? As Charlie Pierce recently wrote in Esquire about the phone-hacking and Petraeus-backing head of News Corp.: "There is simply no reason for any country anywhere in the world ever to do favors for Rupert Murdoch ever again." Yet that's exactly what the FCC is proposing to do. For a guy who has spent so much time thinking about the crisis in journalism, Waldman seems strangely oblivious to how we actually got into the current mess.
Hey, CJR; Let's Do the Time Warp Again!
The American Cable Association has joined other Washington trade groups in pledging its support for a discussion on the causes and cures of the kind of violence that took the life of schoolchildren and teachers in Newtown (CT).
"Everyone at the American Cable Association -- members, board and staff -- was devastated by the tragedy at Newtown, Conn.," said ACA president Matt Polka. "Our members live and work and provide service in thousands of towns across the country that are just like Newtown," he said. ACA represents hundreds of medium-sized and smaller cable operators and telecoms across the country. "We stand willing to participate in any discussion, public or private, that might help curb the type of horrific violence that occurred last week," said Polka.
ACA Ready to Work Toward Curbing Violence
National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre blamed the media, the entertainment industry, video games, gun-free school zones and several other factors for the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown (CT). He did not blame his own organization nor the availability of guns.
"In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year," LaPierre said. "A child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18. And throughout it all, too many in our national media … their corporate owners … and their stockholders … act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators," LaPierre continued. "Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonize lawful gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws and fill the national debate with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action and all but guarantee that the next atrocity is only a news cycle away." LaPierre's effort to blame the massacre on factors other than guns struck many members of both the progressive and mainstream media as tone-deaf, according to a flurry of responses on Twitter, where the news conference was trending nationwide.
NRA President LaPierre blames media, others for Newtown shooting
In December 2012, the White House Earlier reached a milestone with the news that its videos have been viewed more than 100,000,000 (that's one hundred million!) times since it launched the official White House YouTube channel on Inauguration weekend in 2009. Two of the most watched videos of all time were posted in the first week of President Obama’s term. Since then, viewers have had a chance to follow the President, the First Family and the Obama Administration on YouTube via almost daily video updates, including the President’s weekly address, on demand versions of all of his speeches and remarks at public events, video of events that take place at the White House like our Champions of Change celebrations, plus behind the scenes looks at everything from preparing for the holiday season and planting the Kitchen Garden each year, to West Wing Week, an up-close review of the President’s schedule.
A Digital Milestone in 2012: 100,000,000 Video Views
The U.S. military is ramping up preparation for cyber wars of the future that will be waged over computers instead of traditional combat zones. In this world, some of our best technological advances look more like vulnerabilities. We’ve figured out how to network bank accounts, streetlights and power grids, how to connect real-time transit data to riders anywhere, or medical records in one hospital to doctors across town. Each of these technologies, though, could just as easily invite cyber attack, with particularly grim implications for major cities. But for all of these high-tech high stakes, the latest training tool to defend urban infrastructure is a decidedly low-budget innovation: It’s a model-train town, built with parts from the local hobby shop, sitting in an office in New Jersey. The 6-by-8-foot miniature CyberCity has just been built by the SANS Institute, which leads information-security training for military, government, and civilian officials. For the past few years, SANS has been running NetWars computer simulation training games for the military. Officials, though, wanted a program that would really capture the “kinetic effects” of cyber warfare.
A Tiny City Built To Be Destroyed By Cyber Terrorists, So Real Cities Know What’s Coming
Experian Marketing Services analyzed the top 1,000 search terms from Hitwise data for 2012, and Facebook was the top-searched term overall in the US. This is the fourth year that the social networking Website has been the top search term overall, accounting for 4.13 percent of all searches, a 33 percent increase from 2011.
Four variations of the term “facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 5.62 percent of US searches overall, a 27 percent increase from 2011. Among the top 10 terms, the top two terms stayed the same with facebook the top search term and “youtube” ranked at number two. The search term “craigslist” moved up from the fourth spot in 2011 to the third spot in 2012. “Facebook login” was the fourth most-searched term in 2012, followed by “facebook.com” and “yahoo.” The search term “amazon” moved into the top 10 terms for the first time. Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking–related terms dominated the results, accounting for 6.03 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 44 percent compared with 2011. When combined, common search terms for Facebook — e.g., facebook and facebook.com — accounted for 5.84 percent of all searches in the United States among the top 50 terms, which represents a 27 percent increase compared with 2011. YouTube terms accounted for 1.67 percent, representing a 23 percent increase compared with 2011. Google terms (including YouTube) accounted for 1.91 percent — an increase of 20 percent compared with 2011. Yahoo terms accounted for 0.79 percent — an increase of 34 percent compared with 2011.
Facebook was the top search term in 2012 for the fourth straight year