US public health campaign gets kids off the couch

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A US government marketing campaign urging tweens to become more active has gotten results, according to a new report.

Children familiar with the "VERB: It's what you do" campaign exercised four times a week, compared to three times weekly for their peers who'd never heard of it, Dr. Marian E. Huhman of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia and colleagues report.

In fact, the more often kids saw messages from the VERB campaign, the more active they were.

Targeted to 9- to 13-year-olds, the campaign was launched in 2002 with a $194 million, two-year appropriation from Congress. The CDC enlisted top marketing and advertising agencies to design the program, which included TV, radio and print ads and promotions within schools and communities and on the Internet.

"We had the best kid marketers applying the same tactics that are used to sell games and food to kids working on this campaign," Huhman told Reuters Health. Messages focused on making activity and exercise seem fun and "cool," she added. "Our study suggests they responded to it just like they respond to advertising for cereal and games."

To examine the effectiveness of the campaign, Huhman and her colleagues surveyed 2,257 parent-child pairs before the program began, and at 1 and 2 years into the program. After the first year, the researches found, the program seemed to be having effects on younger children and girls only. In the second year, the campaign shifted its focus to include older kids and boys.

At two years, 19 percent of the children reported no exposure to the campaign, 16 percent saw VERB messages less than once a week, 22 percent saw them about once weekly, 25 percent saw them several times a week, and 17 percent saw the messages every day.

The more exposure the children reported, the more physically active they were in their free time, the researchers report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Among children who knew about VERB, 61 percent were active the previous day, compared to 46 percent of those who didn't know about the campaign. Kids who knew about VERB reported 3.9 free-time exercise sessions a week, compared to 3 sessions weekly for kids who didn't know about the campaign.

The findings show, Huhman said, that "Madison Avenue marketing methods can be successfully applied to public health goals."

The small increase in activity the study identified could make a very big difference in the overall health of millions of American kids, she added. "That's a huge win for public health."

SOURCE: American Journal of Preventive Medicine, January 2006.