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Study: Verb campaign pleases media industry

File this one under News of the Weird:

Health Journal: Hip government exercise campaign looks for its next move

The story is about the apparent success of the Center for Disease Control's "verb" ad campaign -- designed to fight obesity among children and teens. A recent study in the journal Pediatrics found that kids who had seen the Verb campaign "reported one-third more physical activity during their free time than kids who hadn't."

Funny. When I showed a couple of Verb commercials (including this one) to high school students a few years ago, all of them recognized the spots -- but not a single one of them had any clue what they meant. The commercials were inscrutable. Of course they were. Verb is an anti-obesity campaign that conceals the primary causes of obesity practically by necessity. Why? Because Verb's partners are a veritable who's who of the "obesity lobby" -- AOL Time Warner, Viacom, Primedia, and the ad agency Frankel, which also does work for McDonald's.

But back to the article at hand. As part of the campaign, Verb people have been distributing yellow balls to kids and asking them to log into Verb's "tween" website to discuss what they did with it.

One of the bloggers is 9-year-old Drew from Monroe Township, N.J. "I shot the ball in the basket, got the rebound and threw it to my mom."

Ten-year-old Peyton from Poland Spring, Maine, got his yellow ball from a brother, who had received it from a friend. "I have had a lot of fun playing with it in my front yard," wrote Peyton. "One day I was practicing my soccer skills with it and the next day I had it in the pool with me. I am now going to pass my yellow ball on to my other brother. This has been fun."

Really? I can't imagine real kids saying the above unless they either suffered from Down's Syndrome, were in a hostage situation, or were required to write about Verb for school.

The proof, however, is in the pudding. Do we want kids out playing ball, shooting hoops, and running around -- or sitting at a computer discussing it?