What else could they be getting wrong?
The charismatic Don Draper of Mad Men may have helped to shed a bit of light on how the advertising industry worked in the 1960s but much of how it works today remains a mystery to most. Looking over advertisements from the last seventy years, it’s quite obvious how much has changed. One ad from 1948 recommended the cigarette brand smoked by doctors. Another one from 1969 thought they were doing us a favour by recommending sugar as a way to curb appetite and eat less. Both these ads seem alarmingly inaccurate to the health mentality recognized today, yet they served as reputable recommendations at the time. Knowing that, it begs the question: what could we be getting wrong now?
One doesn’t even have to go as far back as the 1940s to see there has been a major change in the focus of food advertising. Ads from 1988 recommending “the freshness of frozen orange juice, from concentrate” have since been replaced by phrases like “never frozen, not from concentrate, organic natural ingredients,” which suggests a shift in what we see as healthy and what we now know not to be. The idea of organic, natural, vegan, and vegetarian foods are all very popular in advertising currently. However, after previously getting it so wrong with things such as smoking, skepticism about the validity of claims posed in today’s ads is understandable.
A major reason for the shift towards new and improved healthy food in advertising is the growing knowledge about the necessity to make big changes in order to combat increasing rates of obesity. It may be interesting to learn that many health professionals see that unhealthy advertisements marketed towards children is a leading cause of unhealthy food consumption, and part of the problem behind the growing obesity numbers. A Time Magazine article even goes as far as saying that obesity is a larger problem than the risks of tobacco, and recommends substantial governmental policing.
It’s clear that as consumers we need to be more informed about what we purchase instead of relying on the information displayed to us by advertising firms. After all, the main focus is to sell a given product. It will be interesting to see if in the future, similar tactics will be employed to curb junk food sales similar to the ones used to curb cigarettes. Perhaps images on the sides of pop cans depicting the horrible affects of high fructose corn syrup are on the horizon.