ITV, Channel 4 and Sky are set to launch an ambitious health and wellbeing initiative to promote the importance of healthy eating and exercise for kids in a new three-year partnership.

With an airtime investment of £10m, the UK’s leading commercial broadcasters aim to reach 90% of UK children and help tackle children’s obesity by showcasing advertising campaigns such as Eat Them To Defeat Them and The Daily Mile.  The three main TV sales groups will launch multiple major on-air campaigns from January 2020 with the aim of helping 10 million kids lead healthier lives. Across ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, the broadcasters will build on the success of the Eat Them To Defeat Them campaign, which has previously run solely on ITV, with an ambition to change behaviour in the long-term and across all communities in the UK. The new Eat Them To Defeat Them campaign will launch first, in February 2020.

ITV, in partnership with INEOS, launched The Daily Mile’s first TV advertising campaign in April 2018 alongside editorial support in ITV programmes. Since ITV began supporting the campaign, which encourages primary school children to get outside and run, jog, walk or move for 15 minutes every day, over 4,500 additional schools have signed up across the UK - a 237% increase on the schools taking part before the TV campaign. Over a million additional school children now take part, up from 423,000 kids before ITV’s involvement and primary school children running the Daily Mile will burn between  an extra 30 and 80 calories per day depending on their age and pace. 

“Sky has a long history of encouraging people of all ages to get involved in sport and live healthy lives, from our Sky Sports Scholars to inspiring millions of people to start cycling through Team Sky. We will further build on this work by partnering with ITV and Channel 4 in this campaign.”

_{Stephen van Rooyen, CEO UK & Ireland, Sky}

The Eat Them To Defeat Them campaign, a partnership with Veg Power and ITV, launched on ITV in February 2019. Econometric modelling showed a 2.3% uplift in veg sales attributable to the campaign. That's the equivalent of an extra portion of vegetables a week for every household with kids in the UK. Over 650,000 kids said the ads had made them eat more vegetables.

In the last 10 years, the purchasing of vegetables has fallen and the UK is eating the same amount of vegetables as we did in the 1970s. But it’s amongst children that the problem is particularly acute.  Only 1 in 5 primary school aged children eat the recommended portions of vegetables every day, and only 5% of children aged 11-16 years.