British Heart Foundation - How junk food companies target your kids

Junk food companies design their websites to attract children and get them familiar with the brand. They ultimately want your kids to buy their junk food. Online marketing is unregulated. They use bright colours, loveable characters, games, and competitions to market directly to kids, often without them even realising it.

Here are some examples...

IRN-BRU offers the chance to win a month's supply of the sugary drink. All you have to do is send in a photo showing how nuts you are about IRN-BRU. There's also a wacky game called Gasping Grannies where you can catapult giant cans of IRN-BRU at a suitcase. The humour on this site is aimed at children, to get them to associate the high sugar drink with being cool. Contrary to its name, the fizzy drink is not a source of iron but it does contain high amounts of sugar as well as caffeine and colouring.

McDonald's Kidszone is part of the McDonald's website where children are able to shoot the McDonald logo in a Space Invaders style game. This encourages children to become familiar with the logo and encourage them to buy burgers and fries and become lifelong consumers of their products at the same time.

Nestlé's Fantasy world of fun is their website for children. The first game children come across asks them to guide a cartoon character through the forest picking up Cookie Crisps. What looks like a cute game is actually a way of programming your children to reach out for a high sugar breakfast cereal every time they see it. There's also a rabbit cartoon encouraging children to download the website onto their desktop - making sure that they come back again and again.

Planet Haribo points out that we all love Haribo sweets and offers to help you with your cravings by providing the Haribo club. For 2.99 and a lot of personal details, you can get a membership card, a soft toy and Haribo sweets delivered to your door up to five times a year. The club idea is meant to make children feel part of something, so that they build an ongoing relationship with the brand. And by gathering your children's personal details, the company can target them with new advertising campaigns for yet more high sugar sweets, whenever they want.

Pom-bear's world of fun is where you'll find teddy shaped potato snacks singing and dancing, and telling you about the great prizes you can get for texting in a response. The aim of this site is obvious - it's to make very young children want a high fat, salty snack.