Methods Fast food menus and nutritional quality - Fast Food FACTS

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■ Messages (or product associations) that imply other benefits of the restaurants and/or their products including fun, cool, physical activity and humor. Reliability assessment. Four coders tested the coding instrument on pages included in the study and refined the instrument to address discrepancies. They then coded additional pages from different websites included in the study and final clarifications were made to the coding instrument. The coders reassessed the content of all websites under consideration. We used Krippendorff’s alpha intercoder reliability statistic to evaluate the coding of all child-targeted fast-food websites. The statistics on our assessment measures ranged between .7 and 1, indicating substantial to perfect agreement.. Coders resolved any uncertainty they had during coding by consensus discussions. Banner advertising on third-party websites Banner advertisements are purchased by companies to promote their products on other companies’ websites. These banners, which are displayed along the border of a webpage, often invoke attention-grabbing Flash animation. They typically feature a particular menu item or line of items, or a special promotion such as the opportunity to win money or other prizes. An effective banner ad is one that induces a large proportion of viewers to click the ad and consequently be redirected to the advertiser’s website. Ad Metrix, another comScore product, monitors the same panel of users as comScore Media Metrix, but tracks any advertisements that are completely downloaded and viewable on a user’s web browser. Ad Metrix, therefore, measures individual exposure to banner ads presented in rich media (SWF files) and traditional image-based ads (JPEG and GIF files). It does not capture text, video, or html-based ads. Ad Metrix also identifies the unique user viewing the advertisement, the thirdparty website on which the advertisement was viewed, and the company sponsoring the advertisement. In addition, Ad Metrix captures copies of the actual ads. The Product Dictionary from comScore was used to determine the banner advertisements of interest. The company provided banner advertisement data for each restaurant in our analysis. For some restaurants, comScore also provided detailed data for specific menu items or promotions. For example, in the case of McDonald’s, comScore provided exposure data for Chicken McNugget banner ads and HappyMeal.com banner ads in addition to data for all McDonald’s banner ads combined. The company provides data for banner ads for any fast food restaurant, menu item or promotion in its dictionary that was viewed at least ten times by comScore panel members on the internet or on a specific publisher site. Data for exposure to these banner ads were extracted from the comScore Ad Metrix Advertiser Report. 41 The company Methods began reporting these data by product category for fast food restaurants in June 2009; therefore, we were able to obtain information for the ten months from June 2009 through March 2010. During this time period, Ad Metrix did not report demographic information about the individuals who were exposed to these advertisements. Consequently, we cannot differentiate between exposure by any specific age group, including children, adolescents or African Americans. Measures available from comScore for each month include total display ad views, or the number of advertisements fully downloaded and viewed on publisher websites; advertising exposed unique visitors, or the number of different individuals exposed to advertisements on a publisher website; and average frequency of ad views per unique visitor by fast food advertiser. This information is available for the total internet and for individual publisher websites. As we could not separate ads viewed by age group, we identified the websites on which the advertisements appeared that were disproportionately targeted to youth (i.e., youth websites). We defined a youth website as a website that met one of two conditions: 1) It was identified by comScore as an entertainment website for youth ages 2-17 years or as a teen community website during the period examined; or 2) the proportion of visitors ages 2-17 years to the website exceeded the total percentage of visitors to the internet aged 2-17 years during the time period examined. Because we are unable to differentiate between ads viewed by young people versus adults, we instead assume that advertising on youth websites will be viewed disproportionately by young people. From the comScore data, we calculated the following measures for each fast food product (including websites, menu items and promotions) for which banner advertising was found. Total numbers were also calculated for all of a restaurant’s products: ■ Average unique viewers per month 42 was calculated by taking an average of the monthly unique viewers of a given product’s advertisements from June 2009 through March 2010. ■ Average number of ads viewed per month was calculated by taking an average of the average frequency of ad views by viewer for the fast food restaurant product each month from June 2009 through March 2010. ■ Percentage of ads viewed on youth websites was calculated by dividing the fast food restaurant product’s total display ad views that appeared on youth websites by their total display ad views that appeared on all websites from June 2009 through March 2010. ■ Total average ads viewed on youth websites per month was calculated by dividing total display ad views on youth websites by the number of months for which data were available. Fast Food FACTS 28
Banner advertising content analysis We also analyzed the content of the banner ads that appeared on third-party websites. Using a comScore Ad Metrix Advertiser report, we obtained copies of all ads appearing between June 2009 and March 2010 that were produced by the twelve restaurants in our analysis. We organized the ads according to comScore’s product category definitions. These categories are specific to each restaurant, and generally relate either to a particular menu item (for example “Happy Meal”), or to a specific website (such as Burger King’s “ClubBK.com”). After ranking the ads according to number of exposed unique viewers, we selected all ads that met one of the following three criteria: 1) the ad was one of the twenty most often viewed ads for its respective company; 2) the ad was one of the ten most often viewed ads within any category related to children, teens, ethnic groups, or dollar/value menu products; or 3) the ad was one of the five most often viewed ads for any other product category. From this list we eliminated duplicate ads whose content exactly matched the content of an ad that was included in the analysis. We used a modified version of the coding manual used for the TV ads, excluding sections that were not relevant to internet ads and adding new codes as appropriate for the medium. The modified coding manual included five categories from the TV coding manual, as well as a new category for engagement techniques: ■ Main product or promotion. ■ Perceived target audience, in particular age and ethnicity groups. ■ Selling points. ■ Engagement techniques. This category included questions about movement within the banner ad (e.g., static versus Flash animation) and interactive features of the ad. Examples of such features are an embedded poll or quiz, a link to order food online, a “rollover” that responds to movements of the viewer’s mouse, a game within the ad or a link to a game, a code to unlock features at an advergaming site, a link to a video, and a link to a social networking site. One research assistant was trained on the coding procedures in a series of practice sessions administered by experienced TV coders who had already established good inter-rater reliability. During each session, both the trainee and the experienced coders coded a sample of advertisements, and then discussed the results. The trainers identified any coding problems or inconsistencies in the trainee’s coding and clarified areas of confusion. This process was repeated until the project manager determined that the new coder had a thorough understanding of the coding procedure, as evidenced by high percent agreement with experienced coders on the practice coding. The research assistant then coded all banner ads. Social media Methods For the purposes of our study, we adopted Kaplan and Haenlein’s definition of social media: “Social Media is a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content.” 43 We examined marketing activities that fast food restaurants engage in on three major social media websites: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. These three are the leading websites in their fields (social networking, micro blogging, and video sharing, respectively) and are used as marketing vehicles for the twelve companies in our analysis. Registration with all three sites is limited to persons aged 13 and older. Facebook is the largest social networking site with more than 500 million users worldwide. 44 Members have their own pages where they can present information about themselves, post links to other sites, upload photos and videos, and write messages. Members connect with other members by becoming “friends,” thereby incorporating them in their network. Similarly, individual Facebook users can become a fan of a brand by clicking a “like” button on the brand’s page. A thumbnail photo of that individual is then visible on the brand page in the “people who like this” section. Any time the brand modifies its page, for example by adding a feature or posting a comment, that activity shows up in the individual’s “news feed,” or personalized Facebook home page. Similarly, anytime the individual interacts with the brand page, this action shows up in the “news feeds” of all of his or her friends. The brand also shows up on the individual’s Facebook page as something that he or she “likes.” A typical brand page consists of a number of tabs, each containing different content including messages from the brand and from fans of the brand, photos, videos, events, polls, quizzes, and applications. Twitter is a micro blogging service that has more than 145 million registered users worldwide. 45 Twitter users publish 140-character messages, called “tweets,” that are posted on their own profile pages. Users can “follow” each other. By doing so, an author subscribes to another author’s tweets. These “followed” tweets then are published on the Twitter home pages of all of an author’s “followers.” Twitter users may also access the tweets of authors whom they follow through their mobile phones, with text messages, third-party Twitter applications, or Twitter’s own mobile platform. While Twitter does have a “promoted tweets” advertising platform that was launched in 2010 with Starbucks as an initial partner, we focused instead on the microblogging pages, as described above, which fast food restaurants can use, free of charge. Fast Food FACTS 29
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Methods Fast food menus and nutritional quality - Fast Food FACTS

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