Soda Marketing and the American Teen

When you're trying to get people into healthy habits - be it a more nutritional diet, creating exercise routines, etc, most of the focus is going to be on an ad campaign promoting these goals.   Some focus will be on discouraging sugary food and drinks, loafing on the couch, video games and so on.  Recently, healthy initiatives have to expend more and more  effort into pushing against this seemingly implacable structure that is the snack industry. 

But no one really considers that it might start pushing back.

The trap that a lot of grass roots movements fall into is assuming that they're working against a static opponent - like hacking at the trunk of a towering, ancient tree.  The tree doesn't  whip its branches at you a la the Whomping Willow of the Harry Potter series.  But just because something is as big and solid and stationary as a tree and  took a long time to get that way, doesn't mean it cannot react.  Multi -billion dollar industries can certainly do a very good Willow impression if they're pushed too far, and smaller movements often don’t know what's happening until it's all over. 

In this case, the likes of Kraft and Pepsi Co. have started swinging with their own marketing campaign, though many probably wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary.  Why?  It's the same reason people standing in Times Square can't see New York.

In the last two years, the exposure of teens to sugary drink advertising has increased dramatically.  This indicates that the industry has responded to the rising awareness of the health risks of sugar sweetened food and beverages.  They have narrowed their focus and concentrated on teens from certain socioeconomic backgrounds.  Different companies go after different parts of the 12-17 year old demographic and marketing analysis shows that Hispanic and African American youths in urban areas are often the primary targets. 

The targeted populations are usually less knowledgeable about the risks of those foods and less educated about their impact on health and obesity.

A study by our favoritecollege-based healthy diet group recently found that television ads for teens promoting full calorie sodas effectively doubled between 2008-2010.  Of this, African American teens saw more so called "energy boosters" such as Vitamin Water, 5-Hour Energy and Sunny-D on TV by about 100 to 150 percent than their counterparts in white suburbia.  For Hispanic consumers, Coca-Cola accounted for up to 39 percent of sugary drink ads on Spanish language TV, and teenagers watching these networks saw as much as 99 percent more adds for sugar sweetened beverages overall.

Television is only a fraction of the industry's advertising platform though - these statistics say nothing about the websites, radio, smartphone apps or dozens of other ways to reach a consumer.  Visitors for MonsterEnergy.com  were 2.5 times more likely to be  teenagers than all other visitors combined.  Though in the battle for internet supremacy, Facebook is still the most coveted prize of all - Coca-Cola was considered the most popular brand on Facebook with 30 million fans  while Red Bull was close behind in 5th place.  The soda giant also found that 39% of teens downlaoded its phone apps.