Unhealthy food advertising on social media: policy lessons from the Australian Ad Observatory

Abstract

The World Health Organization and public health experts are calling for urgent restrictions on the online marketing of unhealthy food. The harmful effects of exposure to advertising for ‘unhealthy foods’, including discretionary foods high in fat, salt or sugar, particularly for children, has prompted a proposed policy action in Australia to prohibit all online unhealthy food marketing. We used a novel data donation infrastructure, the Australian Ad Observatory, to create a dataset of 1703 ads promoting top-selling unhealthy food brands that had been placed by 141 different advertisers on 367 individual Australians’ Facebook feeds. We used this dataset to identify any targeting of unhealthy ..