The advertising story
With support from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Ad Council formed the Coalition for Healthy Children (CHC) to address the obesity crisis in the United States. The Coalition includes members of the food and beverage industry, government agencies and non-profit organizations. The Ad Council developed research-based messages to be used by Coalition members with the goal of changing the behavior of parents and children. The messages focus on making smart choices, balancing food and activity, the importance of physical activity, and portion control. However, parents and children are subjected to many, many messages about food and beverages, some produced and disseminated by CHC members. The questions we were interested in: How did the Ad Council’s obesity prevention messages compare with other messages from food and beverage companies? What was the context — the advertising information environment — in which the Ad Council messages would be placed?
Study goals
The Advertising Story set out to answer this question by assessing how the messages adopted by the CHC compare to the other messages food and beverage companies put forth in their advertising targeting children and parents. The objective of this study was to describe the information environment created by marketing produced and disseminated by food and beverage companies, and to compare and contrast those messages to the messages promoted by the Ad Council’s Coalition for Healthy Children. The study aimed to tell the larger story of how the CHC messages fit into the context of messages children and their parents are exposed to on TV and the Web. The study also aimed to answer the question: What stories do food and beverage companies tell about their products in their advertising? To whom do they tell them? And, are the CHC’s messages being reinforced or undermined by those stories? The purpose of this study was to go beyond the usual assessment of media effects which tend to be superficial — reach and frequency — to understand and interpret the messages in the context of other messages being promoted at the same time to the same audiences. The Advertising Story was undertaken to provide a great deal of information about the range of messages in food and beverage advertising targeting parents and children.
Even so, there are many other avenues through which marketers tout their wares to specifically targeted audiences. For example, some companies will reformulate their products to address obesity; some will put their messages directly on packaging, etc. This study was not able to assess the marketing messages and practices in those increasingly important venues. However, by looking closely at the “flagship” advertising venue — TV spots — combined with an examination of a highly targeting burgeoning new outlet — websites — this study collected current, important information and provide a baseline for future inquiries about marketing messages from food and beverage companies.
Study outcomes
Outcomes from the study included a written analysis answering specific research questions, case studies focusing on certain marketing messages, and a searchable database that houses the raw material used for the analyses (e.g., examples of TV ads and websites), now available to future researchers at digitalads.org.