Advertising Age says it best in their headline: KELLOGG MOVIE BODES ILL FOR ADS TO KIDS. The Kellogg company has instituted a policy to only market the healthiest 50% of their cereals on kid’s programming.

It’s a move that ratchets up pressure on the other 10 marketers in the so-called Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, which account for more than two-thirds of the food and beverage ads kids see. They are feverishly working to meet or beat a July 18 deadline to announce responsible - marketing pledges of their own at a government kids’-obesity forum.

Titans in the initiative, such as Hershey, McDonald’s and General Mills, have already committed to devote at least half their TV, radio, print and internet marketing to kids under 12 to furthering “the goal of promoting healthy dietary choices and healthy lifestyles.”

This noble gesture has two immediate obvious fallouts: it means that no one will ever see an ad for Lucky Charms again, and it takes 50% of Kellogg’s advertising money out of play. That last one is admittedly less certain, but I don’t think they’re expecting Corn Flakes to get the same bang-for-buck out of THAT’S SO RAVEN as Fruit Loops would have. Mark Baynes, Kellogg’s chief marketer for North America, discussed the possibility of altering the less-healthy cereals into more non-obesity-encouraging foodstuffs.

“The challenge now is: Can we reformulate without too much a trade-off in taste?” he said. “If we can, we will, and [continue] advertising to children in much the same way we do now. If we can’t reformulate our product and there is too much of a trade-off, we have to find a new target audience to make the brand relevant or, if we can’t, stop advertising it all together.”

And if they can’t:

Kellogg alone spent some $44 million on Nickelodeon advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence (excluding Nick at Nite) and $22 million on Cartoon Network… Nick will be like “a used Edsel no one is buying,” said Steve Gardner, chief litigation officer at CSPI (the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood), before hastening to add that kids’ food marketers could still advertise on the network — just with more-healthful products.

Sure it’s possible the junk cereal void will be filled by crappy toy advertising, but nothing is certain. So it’s possible we could lose Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Saturday Mornings. That will force children to stop watching cartoons and what, go out and play? Who is THAT going to benefit?

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