Britain’s HFSS marketers have been busy preparing for October’s new junk food restrictions with an onslaught of extra advertising. The Observer reports that food brands been spent an extra £420m on advertising in 2024, up by 26% on the previous year.
And consumers responded: they bought an extra 45.4m packets of crisps, cakes and chocolate from the top-selling brands. From October, there will be a 9pm watershed for TV ads of HFSS products and a total ban online. OOH, audio and – crucially – influencer partnerships are not affected.
The figures, from WARC, at least prove that advertising works. And we know that advertising is clever enough to swerve the HFSS bans by making ads that focus on healthier options, which could work for fast food restaurants – it’s hard to put a healthy spin on a bar of chocolate or a packet of biscuits, although most big crisp brands have lower fat options.
Another trick is to focus on branding rather than product, a tactic that has been officially endorsed by junior health minister Ashley Dalton, who said that she did “not expect the perception or association of a corporate brand with less healthy products to automatically bring an advert into scope of the restrictions”. Cadbury’s Gorilla would probably pass as long as you cut out the pack shot at the end.
For this reason, among others, the new restrictions are unlikely to end the obesity crisis. Industry bodies have been claiming for years that restrictions will have little effect, showing an alarming lack of faith in the power of advertising. But the tone has shifted now to a more convincing threat that the ban will result in hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenue that the advertising and TV industries an ill afford.
