marketing

Learning Junk Food Marketing Manipulates, Teens Consume Less

- Adam Clare
a couple, bicycles

Healthy eating can be a challenge when millions of dollars are spent everyday trying to convince us to eat junk food. It turns out that telling the truth to teens may help them eat healthier. Informing teens about the financing and exploitation that goes into big food gets them to think critically about the marketing and rebel against it. Plus, starting healthy eating practice in the teenage years sets them up for a lifetime of health.

In the study, “A Values-Alignment Intervention Protects Adolescents from the Effects of Food Marketing,” published today in Nature Human Behaviour, Chicago Booth’s Christopher J. Bryan, University of Texas at Austin’s David S. Yeager, and Booth PhD candidate Cintia P. Hinojosa find that reframing how students view food-marketing campaigns can spur adolescents, particularly boys, to make healthier daily dietary choices for an extended period of time. The method works in part by tapping into teens’ natural desire to rebel against authority.

Among the two biggest findings in the experiment: The intervention produced an enduring change in both boys’ and girls’ immediate, gut-level, emotional reactions to junk food marketing messages. And teenage boys, a notoriously difficult group to convince when it comes to giving up junk food, started making healthier food and drink choices in their school cafeteria.
“One of the most exciting things is that we got kids to have a more negative immediate gut reaction to junk food and junk food marketing, and a more positive immediate gut reaction to healthy foods,” said Bryan.

Read more.

An Ad Campaign That Sells More Than a Product

- Adam Clare

It can be hard navigating the world as a person with a disability, be it mental or physical, and it can be even harder to make friends. Unfortunately there is a lot of social stigma around people who look different, fortunately in the UK a company launched an ad campaign to sell chocolate and social acceptance. The ads are in support for the Paralympics which are currently underway in Brazil.

All three spots are based on real-life stories from disabled people. Another spot concerns a woman in a wheelchair who ran over another guest’s foot at a wedding. In the third, a disabled woman laughs with a friend about an embarrassing moment with her new boyfriend.

Cat Collins, strategy partner at AMV BBDO, explained in a statement: “Rather than creating distance by putting disabled people on a pedestal, we believed we could achieve more by showing disabled people simply as … people. For Maltesers, that meant seeking out the hilarious stories from their lives that they look on the light side of, just as the characters in the rest of our campaign do. It meant using a powerful weapon to break down discomfort, division and prejudice — a good laugh.”

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A Fine Example of Culture Jamming

- Adam Clare

The Yes Men are at it again and this time with Greenpeace to show how efficient Shell is….at killing all of us.

They created a website called Arctic Ready that looks like Shell is looking for crowd sourced advertising content, and of course, people around the net have submitted some pretty great messages.

Shell

Here at Shell, we’re committed to online social media. After all, it’s the fuel that lubricates the engines of internet communication.

In June, thousands of you demonstrated this by explaining, online, how Arctic energy production will transform the world and possibly provide affordable fuel for several years.

Today, we want to take the Arctic Ready message offline, directly to the drivers who benefit from Shell’s performance fuels. That’s why we’re launching a new campaign (deadline this Thursday!), from which the best ads will be printed and posted in strategic locations worldwide. With your help, we at Shell can tell the world how pumped we are about Arctic energy, and take the Arctic Ready message to Arctic-enthused drivers everywhere.

So take a moment to add your own slogan to our beautiful new collection of images. The next place you see it might be your own rearview mirror.

Because tomorrow is yesterday, accelerated.

Let’s go.

Arctic Ready

Vancouver Reduces Sexual Assaults by 10% Using Male-Targeted Ads

- Adam Clare

It’s unfortunate that we still need ad campaigns to remind women to be safe from sexual assault, it’s even more unfortunate that we target these campaigns at women when men cause the vast majority of assaults.

In Vancouver they launched a campaign targeted at men called ‘Don’t Be That Guy’. After running the campaign, which told men not to take advantage of women, the sexual assault rate dropped 10%!

The poster is one of three that went up at bars and around the city last summer as part of a campaign to chip away at the increasing rate of sexual assaults in recent years in Vancouver.

Six months later, Deputy Chief Doug LePard says the Don’t Be That Guy campaign has contributed to a turnaround in statistics on sexual offences in Vancouver.

The rate dropped in 2011 by about 10 per cent, the first time in several years it had gone down.

Hopefully we’ll see more public safety campaigns targeted at people who commit the crimes rather than those that are victims.

Read more here.

A Really Good Ad Campaign

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

People For Good wants to remind you to do good things everyday. Throughout Canada mysterious ads have appeared promoting People For Good and it turns out it’s a few marketers who wanted to take a break from selling things and wanted to sell good ideas.

People For Good’s website is filled with small very easy to do actions that apply to almost everyone. Check it out and do some good!

“The genesis of this was about wanting to do something positive and socially responsible and taking stock of what we do for a living. And what we do for a living is changing attitudes and behaviours.”

The campaign, in which the messages started to appear on billboards in late June, is under way in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal and Halifax, and is slated to run until Aug. 21.

…

“The reaction we’ve had has been outstanding,” says Sherman, who won’t reveal how many millions of ad space was donated.

“I hope that aside from encouraging every Canadian to do a good deed or something nice, I hope we can also inspire other people in other industries, in other companies, to take stock of what their collective can do and try and use some of the energy… to do something socially responsible,” said Sherman.

Read the rest of the article here.
Go to the People For Good website.

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