The article I found was in the International Journal of Advertising titled, On the Need for Advertising and Public Policy Research by Charles R. Taylor. Charles Taylor is a Professor of Marketing at Villanova University in Villanova, Philadelphia. Charles Taylor’s main point and concern in this article is the need for Advertising scholars to perform impartial research in the public policy area.
Taylor begins his editorial with examples of advertising regulation and affects of advertising on society with the topic of the obesity epidemic and advertising’s role in it. Taylor’s first reference is from an article written in The Australian which states, “Restricting television advertisements for junk food aimed at children would be one of the most cost-effective public health measures governments could make, yielding huge savings from preventing fat kids turning into sickly adults.” Another article that supports this claim is referenced is in the Journal of Obesity by authors who are on the Faculty of Health, Medicine, Nursing and Behavioral Sciences at Deakin University. A study done by Anne Magnus and Michelle Haby show that a range of “21 to 57% of all childhood obesity is being caused by junk food advertising in the U.S.” (Taylor, 601). Taylor then gets to his main point and states how all of these articles may be produced by intelligent doctors, researchers for the public health and so forth, but not one of these articles and/or estimates produced were from a “doctor-ally trained in advertisement, marketing or communications” person. After Taylor did an examination of the studies, he found obvious flaws and troublesome assumptions made by these authors. Taylor then gives mention of Tim Ambler’s critique of the Hastings Study where he gave 2 main conclusions; 1) “Studies of branded food and beverage promotions conducted outside the appropriate socio-economic