Criticizing advertisers’ attempts to market products to young children, a coalition of advocacy groups is speaking out against Pizza Hut’s longstanding literacy program, saying it’s just all about the dough for the company.
Representatives from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood recently asked its more than 11,000 supporters to petition local schools to stop participating in Pizza Hut’s Book It! Literacy Program, which rewards students with food in relation to the number of books they read.
The group’s protests target the increasing prevalence of corporate marketing schools in addition to the fattening food the program awards children, said CCFC cofounder Susan Linn.
“It undermines an essential purpose for schools,” she said. “It’s the antithesis of critical thinking.”
In the past 25 years, corporations’ spending for marketing to children has increased to $16.8 billion from $100 million, according to Linn, who said there is no link between the literacy program and promoting reading.
“It promotes a kind of lifetime brand loyalty, but the problem is there’s no evidence it promotes lifetime readers,” Linn said.
Linn said the CCFC realizes most students and teachers would be opposed to criticism of Book It! – which 22 million students between kindergarten and sixth grade participate in annually, according to the program’s website, though some schools have recently dropped the program, Linn said.
Refuting claims that the program targets students for marketing gain, Book It! Director Leslie Tubbs said the posters in classrooms that track students’ progress do not have the Pizza Hut logo. She added that students now also have the option of choosing the salad bar instead of pizza when redeeming their credit at the end of each month.
The program, which was created in 1985, was developed with an advisory panel that included the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and the National Library Association, Tubbs said, who added the program has been “flooded” with support from teachers, parents and alumni of the program who are aware of the CCFC criticisms.
“We were pretty surprised at the volume,” she said.
Boston University Nutrition Professor Joan Salge-Blake said she is concerned about the poor nutritional value of the food the program promotes because of the effect marketing has on children.
“There should be an equal marketing of healthy food, but banana and carrot companies don’t have the same marketing budget,” she said.
Salge-Blake suggested Pizza Hut and other corporations promote literacy by rewarding reading with time among famous athletes, for example.
“I would read War and Peace for batting cage time with David Ortiz,” she said.
College of Communication sophomore Maura Kinney said she liked the program, but she would have preferred a different prize.
“I loved the program and working towards a goal, but the overall reward was a greasy, fattening personal pan pizza,” Kinney said. “There could definitely be a more substantial prize.”
College of Arts and Sciences senior Katie Glodzik, who participated in the program when she was younger, said it encouraged her to eat at Pizza Hut when she otherwise would not have.
“It didn’t make me read more, because I already read a lot,” Glodzik said. “I guess the [program] is the only thing that ever made me eat at Pizza Hut.
“I only remembered the reading part [of the program],” she added. “I forgot that I got free pizza.”