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The Center for Science in the Public Interest’s shocking anti-soda PSA raises questions about whether such efforts can turn the tide on consumer behavior. Marketing News asked the ad’s creative team and industry experts to weigh in. By ChristiNe BirkNer | SeNIOr StAff wrIter
cbirkner@ama.org
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rates more than doubled from 1980 to 2014, with more than 1.9 billion adults now considered overweight, the World Health Organization reports. In the U.S., 70% of adults are overweight and 36.5% are obese, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Such sobering statistics, plus efforts by federal and local governments to combat them, have been putting junk food and soda marketers in the hot seat for the past decade. In June 2014, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made headlines for attempting to ban oversized sodas in the city. In November 2014, Berkeley, Calif., became the first U.S. city to pass a law taxing sugary beverages, including sodas, and 30 cities and states across the country have proposed similar taxes, according to Wired.
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oda consumption overall actually is on the decline, with soda industry sales dropping 14% from 2004 to 2014, according to Beverage Digest, a non-alcoholic beverages industry publication. As the landscape for soda brands becomes increasingly inhospitable, companies including Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. and Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo Inc. have diversified their product lines in an attempt to shore up their revenue, adding more water and energy drinks to their portfolios. They’ve also responded to health advocates’ efforts to paint the overconsumption of soda as one of the primary culprits of obesity, launching their own PSA-like ads and campaigns promoting moderation and, in 2014, pledging to cut the number of sugary drink calories that Americans consume by one-fifth in the next decade through educationally oriented packaging and distribution efforts. But the work
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isn’t done for big soda brands, as more antisoda messaging continues to garner consumers’ attention. The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an independent consumer advocacy group that focuses on nutrition, food safety and other health issues, has a history of taking aim at soda companies. In 2012, CSPI encouraged consumers to drink less soda by using Coca-Cola’s own marketing tactics against them. It teamed up with Alex Bogusky, formerly co-chairman of Boulder, Colo.-based advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, to create “The Real Bears,” a PSA that showed Coca-Cola’s polar bear “mascots” experiencing the adverse effects of drinking soda, including tooth decay, Type 2 diabetes and obesity. This year, CSPI tapped Bogusky; Gavin Anstey, co-founder and producer at Denver-based creative agency Lumenati, and
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IMAGES COURTESY OF LUMENATI.
executive producer of the ad; and Mike Howard, CEO and founder of Lexington, Mass.-based creative agency Daughters & Howard, who wrote the ad, to draw attention to the issue of sodarelated diseases again. In June, CSPI launched “Change the Tune,” a PSA remaking Coca-Cola’s 1971 “Hilltop” ad, which featured a song that includes the lyrics: “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it company.” The ad recently re-entered consumers’ consciousness when it was spotlighted in the finale of award-winning AMC series Mad Men this spring—which was fortunate timing, according to CSPI reps. The advocacy group’s PSA, which hit social networks and YouTube as Mad Men fans continued to discuss the advertising brilliance of the iconic Coke spot, uses the same tune but with altered lyrics sung by patients in a hospital
MIKE HOWARD, DAUGHTERS & HOWARD setting suffering from obesity, injecting themselves with insulin to fight Type 2 diabetes and pulling out their dentures after losing their teeth to tooth decay. “I’d like to teach the world about what sugar did to me,” they sing. “Liquid calories gave her diabetes, which really ain’t so sweet.” The ad, which was posted on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, had received 320,000 views as of July. To find out more about the PSA and what its creators hope to achieve, Marketing News caught up with Anstey and Howard, along with Jeff Cronin, director of communications at CSPI. Then we asked marketing experts to weigh in on what it takes to influence consumer behavior and whether CSPI’s approach might do it.
Q
Why did you choose to take the ‘shock value’ tone in this ad?
mike hOWarD: We did some things that could be considered scare tactics, but we looked at them more as truth tactics. It’s a scary thing to think about diabetes and obesity being on the rise, yet
CSPI’s anti-soda PSA shows the potential effects of the overconsumption of sugary beverages. The spot is intended to both change consumer behavior and impact corporate strategy.
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JEFF CRONIN, CSPI
we’re still being marketed sugar water as a source of happiness. Does this particular combination of high-fructose corn syrup, carbonated water, caramel and caffeine somehow equal happiness in
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our minds? No way. It’s less of a scare tactic and more of a dose of the truth. … With ‘The Real Bears,’ Alex [Bogusky] was able to tap into the iconography of the soda industry and use their own words against them. It seemed like the most effective thing to do, in terms of getting attention. … In 1971, when the ‘Hilltop’ ad came out, soda didn’t have the place in the American diet that it does today. It was a treat. You had it every now and then. Now it’s a fixture at dinner tables, which was never the original intention of Coca-Cola. In the ’80s, though, they did advertising about having a Coke with breakfast, so we found real people who were suffering the consequences of overconsumption of sugared beverages and got them to give their take on the [‘Hilltop’] song. JeFF CrOnin: We thought it would be useful to reposition soda as what it is: a major source of dietrelated disease and a major contributor to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. We wanted to use one
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of Coke’s own marketing assets against itself and change the tune about soda. … We don’t have ‘big soda’s’ marketing budget. We have to rely on asymmetrical communication to try to make an impact. This type of messaging worked well with ‘The Real Bears,’ which showed things that the soda industry wasn’t used to responding to, like amputation and erectile dysfunction as side effects of diabetes. That’s about as far away from happiness as you can get.
It’s effective because when you see that people have these conditions, inject insulin or take out their teeth, you’re like, ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ Also, we’re not telling people what to do; we’re suggesting something and presenting it as factual information, and letting them make up their own minds. When you allow people to do that, the results are a lot better.
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Was your ultimate goal to change consumer behavior, or to change the soda companies’ behavior?
JC: Both. We want consumers to drink less soda, and consumers are drinking less soda. Sales of sugary drinks are plummeting, and that’s a good thing. We hope that this and some of our other messaging and policy work that we do on sugary drinks will help drive down consumption even further. We do a lot of advocacy work promoting soda taxes. Mexico passed a tax on sugary drinks, and there are studies that show that that’s helping decrease consumption of sugary drinks there. We proposed warning labels on bottles and cans of soda warning of the risks of diet-related disease, and we’ve helped get soda out of schools in the past few years. It’s part of an integrated campaign to reduce consumption and reduce the toll of soda-related disease. gaVin anStey: CSPI is a consumer advocacy group, so our main message to the consumers was, ‘Be aware of the amount of sugar you’re consuming on a daily basis.’ A lot of people are shrugging sugar off as not a big deal and saying it’s a personal choice, but it’s only a personal choice if people are well-educated and it’s obvious that people aren’t well-educated about the amount of sugar that’s in the products that they consume every day. This campaign should raise awareness that over-consuming sugar is a dangerous thing, and it’s easy to do. The chorus of the song is, ‘Please drink soda less.’ It’s not, ‘Don’t drink soda.’ We’re saying to drink it less, and pay attention. That kind of a message resonates a lot more. …
GAVIN ANSTEY, LUMENATI
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What has the response to the ad been like, so far?
JC: Even people who weren’t familiar with the original ‘Hilltop’ ad have reacted well. I wish we could congratulate ourselves about being clever about the timing [coinciding with the Mad Men finale], but that was really just dumb luck. We were on the verge of being done with the ad [when the finale aired].
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“ e found real people who were suffering the consequences of overconsumption of sugared beverages and got them to give their take on the [‘Hilltop’] song.”
— Mike Howard, Daughters & Howard
Q
When it comes to encouraging positive behavior, where does the onus lie: with marketers and corporations, or with the consumers, themselves?
mh: There’s a combination of factors. The message that we’re putting out there is that it should be the consumer’s responsibility, but I don’t think that’s completely fair. … [Soda companies] say you can counteract these effects by being more active, which they talk about a lot. Coke is constantly coming out with messages about how they clearly label caloric content in their products, and they made some attempts at changing serving sizes. … It’s nice that Coke and other soda companies have made sure that calories are marked correctly on their packaging, but they do that knowing full well that the effects of those calories are different than the effects of calories from a tomato or a piece of fruit. ga: The responsibility lies with everyone. Before we started working on this, when Bloomberg was trying to pass that regulation in New York, I thought it was ridiculous. It’s about personal responsibility. If they want to drink a gigantic soda, they can. But then after we did research about it, I realized that I had no idea that that amount of sugar was in that large of a soft drink. Now that I’m aware of that, I’m 100% in favor of limiting serving sizes. Consumers need to understand what they’re putting into their bodies and be knowledgeable about it, but marketers and companies need to understand that soda is fine every once in a while, but having it every single day adds up to the health effects we’re seeing now.
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To assess the potential impact that a PSA like “Change the Tune” can have on consumer behavior, Marketing News spoke with Philip Graves, author of Consumer.ology, and a Cambridge, U.K.-based consumer behavior consultant whose clients have included the BBC, Virgin Media and HSBC; Leslie John, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, whose research focuses on consumer behavior and health incentives; and Michael Solomon, professor of marketing and director of the Center for Consumer Research at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. EXPERTS WEIGH IN
Q
When it comes to encouraging positive behavior, where does the onus lie: with marketers and corporations, or with the consumers, themselves?
PHILIP GRAVES, author of Consumer.ology and a Cambridge, U.K.-based consumer behavior consultant
I would argue that it’s probably with government, which is a controversial suggestion, particularly in America. Corporations clearly have a conflict of interest and consumers are not capable of taking responsibility. I’m not saying that in a pejorative, judgmental sense. The reality is that a large proportion of our behavior is written by unconscious mental processes. One example is when they tried to introduce the large-size soda ban in New York, people said, ‘If I want to buy a 40-ounce soda, that should be my right.’ People don’t go into the movie theater thinking, ‘I want 40 ounces of soda.’ They go in and think they want a drink or habitually have a drink because they’ve been conditioned to. Then there’s a choice architecture that’s pushed to them, and evolution has determined that we feel drawn toward the larger size as a value. We don’t do complicated math per ounce. We come away from that having a large amount of soda, and, therefore, sugar or sweetener, but not because we wanted to. LESLIE JOHN, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School I think everyone plays a role. … The role that firms can play is in controlling the choice options that are in front of people because we know from lots of behavioral researchers that the choice environment has a huge impact on what people actually chose. Marketers can play an enormous role in reducing portion sizes, in where they place products in stores, or whether they place the unhealthy items at eye level or not. For firms, it’s very complicated because they’re trying to balance people’s welfare with their profit goals, and that can be incredibly complicated if the margins on healthy food are lower than those on unhealthy food. From consumers’ perspectives, even though we’re affected by choice environments, we’re the ones who actually buy the stuff, take it off the shelves, and put it in our mouths, so of course we have a role, as well. MICHAEL SOLOMON, professor of marketing and director of the Center for Consumer Research at St. Joseph’s University
I don’t think you can partition it that way. It’s very much a yin and yang sort of thing. If the product is legal, marketers are allowed to sell it. The smart marketers are the ones who may not necessarily cause the change, but they’re part of the change. Policy implications aside, it’s in their own self-interest to try and stay ahead of where people are going in terms of concerns about health. A great example is CVS exiting the tobacco business, losing $2 billion a year but understanding that, in the long term, it will bring them multiples of that. It was a great thing for society and for consumers, but it was also a smart business move. Coca-Cola and Pepsi know that. They’re scrambling to get out of the sugary drink business. It’s not going to happen in the next year, but when you look at how they’re diversifying, they understand that they’re going to sell a lot more soda in Mexico and Asia than they are here, down the road.
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Q
Are ‘shock value’ approaches, such as the one that this ad takes, effective in encouraging consumers to change their behavior, or to think differently about their eating or drinking habits?
Philip Graves
They can be. It’s a brilliant campaign, psychologically. The challenge that it has is economic. They’re up against so many years that Coca-Cola has been building and reinforcing unconscious associations between their brand and fun and excitement, which is now tied to the experience you have in drinking sugar. [If you] create something that is emotional and hard-hitting, there’s more of a chance that it will be encoded in memory. But can it be done in such a shocking way that it can compensate and overcome the contextual associations that people have with drinking those drinks? … It’s a well-conceived campaign, but I don’t think that, on its own, it has a significant chance of influencing very much behavior. Even if it catches hold through social media, I’m not sure if it can stay in people’s minds and permeate their conscious and unconscious minds sufficiently when, for the past 10 years, they’ve been having soda as a habit. Ultimately, you’ll need a regulated solution. You’ll need to look at what’s been done with cigarettes to see how far you might want to go to address the sugar problem. Leslie John
Changing behavior is really hard, and eating unhealthily is precisely the kind of behavior that’s very hard to change because the immediate benefits are great. You experience the benefits of eating an unhealthy piece of food immediately, and the costs of eating unhealthily are experienced much further down the road. The costs are also not tightly coupled with the actual act of eating, so the setup makes it hard for people to change their behavior. The evidence suggests that advertising is a less expensive way to change behavior, but it’s also a relatively ineffective way to change behavior. By and large, people know that drinking soda is bad for them. Awareness of the problem is not really enough to move the needle. … The ad might change people’s attitudes toward Coca-Cola or make them view these brands less positively, but I’m not very optimistic that it will change people’s behavior. Michael Solomon
“ ou’re already starting to see some campaigns where they say, ‘Drink it in moderation,’ just like the alcohol industry’s ‘Drink responsibly’ ads.”
Fear appeals, like when the guys with esophageal cancer do the anti-cigarette ads, don’t work very well. They only work in moderation. The closer to home it hits, the less likely the person is to process it. Fear appeals get your attention, but when people feel directly threatened, they will find ways, consciously or not, to avoid those messages or rationalize them. Those ‘stop smoking’ ads haven’t been as effective as more coordinated campaigns that use peer pressure, that don’t say it’s bad for your health but, instead, say that other people — Michael Solomon, will look down on you because you’re smoking. All things being equal, that kind of attitudinal campaign is much more St. Joseph’s University effective because it transfers the conversation from a public health group to a group of people who are really going to affect change: a person’s peers, or people they respect. … In the long term, the [soda] industry, itself, is going to play a role in weaning people off of it, when they’re ready to switch, which they’re already starting to do, by acquiring energy drinks and water [brands]. … You’re already starting to see some campaigns where they say, ‘Drink it in moderation,’ just like the alcohol industry’s ‘Drink responsibly’ ads. In the long term, that could be more effective. Encouraging moderation is in their interest because they’d rather sell one than zero. m
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