qubo Creates Nutritional Guidelines for Kids’ Food Advertising

Bilingual TV and Online Kids’ Service Hopes to Attract Makers of Healthy Foods

By P.J. Bednarski -- Broadcasting & Cable, 4/22/2008 5:36:00 PM

Bilingual TV and online kids’ service qubo said Tuesday that it created nutritional guidelines to help its sales staff decide which food advertisers are acceptable for children’s television.

But a spokeswoman said that since qubo began in 2006, it had informal criteria, and no qubo advertiser in the past wouldn’t have passed muster under the new rules.

Goutham Rao, clinical director of the Weight Management and Wellness Center at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and an expert on childhood obesity , helped to form the guidelines, which list acceptable nutritional-intake limits for meals and snacks broken down by calories and grams of fat, as well as saturated and trans fat, sugar, protein, fiber and sodium.

At the moment, qubo has no food advertisers, but it believes the new rules might actually encourage some healthy-type food-makers to advertise on the channel, a joint venture of Scholastic, ION Media Networks, NBC Universal, Corus Entertainment and Classic Media.

At the same time, qubo, teaming up with the Ad Council and U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, produced a series of public-service announcements featuring Olympic Games hopefuls reminding kids to eat correctly.