Counter-advertising to combat unhealthy food marketing will not be enough commentary on "Can counter-advertising reduce pre-adolescent children's susceptibility to front-of-package promotions on unhealthy foods? Experimental Research.".

Youth-targeted food marketing is ubiquitous (Harris et al., 2009a). Children are marketed to when they watch television and movies, when they play video games, and when they use the Internet. They are advertised to while in school. They see billboards on the street and marketers text them advertisements and offers. Even attending sporting events means exposure to advertisements via event sponsorships. And of course marketers make their final efforts to influence children and their parents at the point-ofpurchase by creating engaging packaging and using in-store promotions (Center for Science in the Public Interest, 2003; Harris et al., 2009a). Unfortunately, there is an imbalance in these marketing messages. The foods most heavily marketed towards children are the less healthy foods (Harris et al., 2009a; Powell et al., 2007; Montgomery and Chester, 2009; Cowburn and Boxer, 2007). This is cause for concern because food marketing has been shown to increase children's preferences for advertised foods, requests made to parents for those foods, and short-term consumption behavior (Cairns et al., 2013; Harris et al., 2009a; Harris et al., 2009b; Institute of Medicine (2005); Roberto et al., 2010). Further, unlike adults, children have difficulty understanding the persuasive intent of advertising (Harris and Graff, 2012; Pomeranz, 2010), and so are unlikely to view it skeptically. From a public health perspective, there are three primary ways to address concerns about child-targeted food marketing. First, the food industry can try to self-regulate, and there have been examples of such efforts. The second approach is through policies that would mandate reductions in child-targeted marketing. The third way is to use counter-advertising strategies to help parents and children defend against advertising messages. The food industry has engaged in some self-regulatory actions, such as creating nutrition standards for foods that can be marketed to children (see Council for Better Business Bureaus; Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity), but many of these efforts have been