Summary
- Advertising watchdog warns ECB over junk food campaign
- ECB sponsorship with KP Snacks criticized
- ECB issues apology and says it wasn’t intentional
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) signed a sponsorship deal with KP Snacks to promote its popular Hundred domestic competition.
KP Snacks is the parent company to a number of popular snacks in the UK which include Butterkist and Hula Hoops.
The Hundred is a new tournament that the ECB has put together to make cricket even more entertaining than the T20 format. The 100 was designed keeping the younger generation in mind as the ECB wanted to get more kids involved in the game.
With the Premier League receiving criticism for tying up with sponsors from the gambling industry, the ECB wanted to go the other way and make sure that its programming during the Hundred was more family friendly and hence it signed on KP Snacks as a partner. KP Snacks decided to use its different brands to sponsor different teams in the Hundred.
However the partnership between KP Snacks and the ECB has received criticism as some parties feel that the ECB is promoting junk food consumption amongst children even as the UK looks to battle rising obesity rates with young people.
KP Snacks is promoting its brands heavily during the Hundred competition via multiple promotional campaigns over Instagram and email.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which is the advertising watchdog in the UK said that it received two complaints from Food Active and Children’s Food Campaign highlighting the fact that the KP Snacks campaign during the Hundred had violated ASA regulations as it promoted foods high in fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) to children under 16.
The ASA investigated and found that the KP Snacks campaign had two violations. The first was an Instagram ad that promoted toffee popcorn from Butterkist as it had 51gms of sugar per 100 gms and the second was a co-branded email promotion using cartoon style graphics to give away 1,000 cricket balls and bats.
The email campaign was sent to 29,276 email recipients and 326 of those emails belonged to individuals below 16 which is a breach of advertising rules. The ASA has warned both the ECB and KP Snacks from targeting children with HFSS products.
The Hundred released a statement and apologized for the same saying it was an internal error from their side while KP Snacks is yet to respond!
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