Category Archives: Advertising

Priming Effects of Television Food Advertising on Eating Behavior

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A 2009 study by Jennifer L. Harris, John A. Bargh, and Kelly D. Brownell of Yale University published in Health Psychology and titled Priming Effects of Television Food Advertising on Eating Behavior poses some interesting questions about whether exposure to food advertising stimulates the appetite even when you are not hungry. The study sheds light on how exposure to food advertising may contribute to the obesity epidemic which both a U.S. Surgeon General and World Health Organization have labeled a leading cause of death, disease and disability. WomanEatingBurger

The study tested the hypothesis that exposure to food advertising during TV viewing contributed to obesity by triggering the urge to snack on available food.

The researchers studied two groups: elementary-school-age children and adults.

Children watched a cartoon that contained either food or non-food advertising and received a snack while watching.

Adults watched a TV program that included food advertising that promoted:

  • Fun product benefits
  • Nutrition benefits

They also measured a control group that saw no food advertising. The adults then tasted and evaluated a range of healthy to unhealthy snack foods in an apparently separate experiment.

For both children and adults, they measured the amount of snack foods consumed during and after exposure to the advertising.

They found that:

  • Children consumed 45% more when exposed to food advertising.
  • Adults consumed more of both healthy and unhealthy snack foods following exposure to snack food advertising compared to the control group.

They concluded, “In both groups, food advertising increased consumption of products not advertised. This effect was not related to reported hunger or other conscious influences.” They say that their experiments “demonstrate the power of food advertising to prime automatic eating behaviors and thus influence far more than brand preference alone.”

My take: People overeat for many reasons. This study shows the power of television to stimulate the appetite is one of them. However, it doesn’t address how much television contributes to overeating compared to other causes. That’s not criticism, just an observation about the study’s scope.

Speaking as someone who suffered serious health consequences from overeating and who recently shed 80 pounds, I found that my obesity was largely related to eating too many high-calorie meals at restaurants.

The meals were both over-portioned and high in fat. I began losing weight simply by becoming more aware of the caloric content of my foods through a 99-cent iPhone app. It helped me make healthier food choices. I also began vigorously exercising for an hour each day. I still watch just as much television as I always have.

I suspect that the priming effect discussed in this study is a contributing cause to obesity but not the main cause. Insofar as television influences food choice, we should also not forget that it can influence food choice in a positive direction. In my opinion, the largest factors contributing to obesity are lack of conscious thought about:

  • How many calories we consume each day
  • How poor food choices can negatively impact health.

All that food on television may look appetizing, but after $250,000 bypass surgery, believe me, a 99-cent iPhone app looks far more appealing.

Ramifications of Internet Anonymity

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One of the signature characteristics of the Internet is anonymity. The widespread use of screen names and the difficulty of verifying the identities behind them makes the Internet a playground for frauds, cheats, and predators.

Of course, there are plenty of honest people on the Internet, too. The Internet has opened up new markets, created global awareness on a scale never seen in history, and boosted the productivity of businesses worldwide.

My point is that anonymous communications from the dark side of humanity taint the credibility of the medium and poison the waters for the rest of us. They undermine people who use the Internet for good and legitimate purposes. There don’t seem to be many ways to stop the hoaxsters.

In 2006, a 13-year-old girl named Megan Meier committed suicide after a case of cyber-bullying on a popular social networking site. Allegedly, the mother of a rival girl at Megan’s school created an account on the site for a fictitious boy named Josh. Her intent allegedly was to get Megan to reveal details about herself that could later be used to humiliate Megan. The ensuing cyber-bullying had tragic consequences. Megan hung herself. Numerous suicides related to cyber-bulling have been reported since.

Internet anonymity does not always contribute to such tragic consequences. Some cases are simply highly embarrassing.

This month, Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o, who led the Fighting Irish to the BCS championship game this year and finished second for the Heisman Trophy, said in a statement that he fell in love with a girl online last year who turned out not to be real. Te’o said during the season that his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died of leukemia in September on the same day Te’o’s grandmother died, triggering an outpouring of support for Te’o at Notre Dame and in the media. All the details are still not clear, but the story is making national headlines.

Elaborate and highly publicized hoaxes such as these undermine the credibility of the medium. I’ve often likened the Internet of today to the Wild West. Pretty much anything goes.

This is a shame. At a time when people trust advertising less and the credibility of traditional news sources has trended down for more than a decade, who can you trust?

Marketers have begun to rely on online reviews as references, but many of those can’t be trusted either. My company has been approached by others to get us to create fictitious product reviews favoring one company and slamming its competitors. Even though the business would have been lucrative and easy, we turned it down.

How many times have those online reviews sucked me in? Last week, I upgraded the security system at my office to one that supposedly allowed me to monitor my cameras over the Internet. The system had glowing 5-star reviews online, yet when I loaded the app on my iPhone and iPad, it was very buggy. It works only about half the time for reasons I cannot understand.

Kinda makes one wonder about the integrity of that online review process!

 

Counterfeiting the Currency of Advertising

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This is a corollary to yesterday’s post about research which found that three out of four people believe claims found in advertising are exaggerated.

Words and images are the currency of advertising. The U.S. Government won’t let people counterfeit its currency. But advertising industry professionals seem to have no problem counterfeiting theirs.

When industry professionals exaggerate, make false claims, or misrepresent the capabilities of a product or service, they don’t serve their clients’ best interests or their own.

False advertising may get people to purchase a product or service once. But the inevitable disappointment they feel can ruin the client’s reputation. The purchasers not only feel disappointed in the performance of the product or service, they feel they have been lied to. Trust is lost with the relationship.

False claims and impressions also counterfeit the currency of the industry. They undermine the industry’s credibility and the return that honest advertisers hope to gain from their investment in advertising.

Governments won’t let people counterfeit their currencies. Why do ad industry trade groups not raise a bigger stink about people who devalue their currency?

Credibility of Advertising

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More than three in four consumers say most of the claims that brands make in advertisements are exaggerated, according to a study by Lab42.

Specifically, among surveyed consumers, 57.4% say advertising claims are “somewhat exaggerated,” and 19.0% say they are “very exaggerated,” Lab42 reported.

Only 2.8% of consumers surveyed say the claims in various ads are very accurate. For the full report, click here.

How did we come to this sad, sorry state of affairs? How did a whole industry undermine its own credibility without raising alarms? Here’s my personal take. The advertising industry I joined as a young man (at Leo Burnett in Chicago in 1972) was much different than the industry today. It seemed every commercial I wrote was scrupulously reviewed by agency lawyers, industry associations, and government regulators. Likewise, research ruled.

Commercials were tested, refined and retested in animatic form before production. Then commercials were tested again in finished form after production. Commercials were more trusted then and felt more compelling. They worked. Even clients believed … in the process.

Then during the Eighties, creatives revolted. They felt straight-jacketed.  They argued that:

  • Research forced everything into the same expected mold.
  • Lawyers sapped the fun out of commercials.
  • Advertising was failing to differentiate brands and make them stand out.
  • People didn’t watch TV to look at the ads; they watched it to be entertained.
  • Advertising needed to be more entertaining to succeed.

At that point, the race for eyeballs had begun. The creative development process was more about eye-candy. Writers and art directors argued that if people weren’t watching, there was no way the commercial could succeed. Of course, they were right.

But that logic contained several fatal flaws:

  • It assumed that people weren’t attending to commercials.
  • Gaining attention is only the first battle for customers’ hearts.
  • Unless advertising also manages to convert that awareness into interest and preference, it has failed.

While the Nineties were certainly a fun period to be in advertising, the industry was sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The eye-candy theorists failed to realize the devastation that unregulated, unpersuasive advertising would wreak on the industry.

Today, that eye-candy leaves many with a bad aftertaste. Perhaps it’s time for the pendulum to begin switching back. Better yet, perhaps it’s time for agencies to evolve to a higher level and to understand some basic truths.

In many cases, advertising makes people aware, but fails to gain interest. Therefore, prospects don’t seriously consider the client’s product or service. Said another way,  prospects don’t put the client on their shopping lists.

The process looks like this. Information needs increase at every level.

  1. Before people will purchase a brand, they must prefer it.
  2. Before people will prefer a brand, they must be interested enough in it to put it on their shopping lists and explore it further.
  3. Before people will be interested in a brand, they must be aware of it.

The battle for dollars takes place on four levels, not just one. Awareness, interest and preference come before purchase. Overlooking any of those steps is fatal to a sale.

And trust is essential to every single one of them. If people don’t trust you, they won’t do business with you. People don’t buy from advertising they don’t trust, and they certainly won’t buy from companies they don’t trust. Exaggeration for the sake of eyeballs does not serve clients well.