A couple of years ago Deliveroo launched a campaign around the idea of ‘Food. We get it’. The adverts were firmly in the realm marketers call ‘food porn’ – huge juicy burgers, the crispiest of nuggets, cheese melting off the pizza slice. It’s exactly the kind of ad brands won’t be making any more, as they start obeying the HFSS food ad ban from October, prior to it coming into legal force in January.
The ban is comprehensive: identifiable imagery of HFSS products is out, unless it’s a TV ad after 9pm. (And there are no age restrictions, meaning it may soon be harder to view food porn than the other type!)
The question marketers are asking is: what can we do about it? There’s no question brands are braced to take a hit. I was working at Lucozade when the ‘sugar tax’ came in and we saw a double-digit drop in sales, though this gradually recovered. And our data at System1 shows that brands went down the food porn route because it was very effective at driving sales.
The power of food porn
Those Deliveroo ads scored exceptional rankings on two of our three key metrics: spike rating, which predicts short-term sales boosts; and fluency, which measures speed and accuracy of brand recognition. And while those ads were exceptional, food brands and services in general often perform above the norm on these short-term metrics.
Showing food triggers the desire to eat it.
So one of the most effective techniques in the food marketers’ handbook is being taken off the table. Whatever your feelings about the rights or wrongs of this regulation, it’s obviously going to lead to a revolution in the way we sell food products.
To get an idea of the kind of shift that’s coming, we should look at the one score the Deliveroo spots only performed modestly on: star rating, the emotional response measure that predicts long-term impact.
Emotional response is important because it drives longer-term effects, and it’s particularly associated with brand ads. Brand ads have a carve-out under the new legislation – they can still make ads which use brand jingles, assets and colours as long as they aren’t showing the products.
The future of food advertising
So we’ll see more ads like a personal recent favourite of mine, McDonalds’ ‘Raise Your Arches’ – the one where raised eyebrows become a secret office code for “let’s get a Maccie Ds” and before long the whole workplace is marching to a restaurant.
Raise Your Arches was a great bit of creativity – capturing the urge to have a McDonald’s with not a burger in sight. Audiences loved it.
The ad scored a very strong 4.7 star rating on the System1 scale, making it one of the top McDonald’s commercials we’ve tested. A couple of years on, it doesn’t just look like a great ad – it looks like the future of food advertising. This kind of highly entertaining, product-free creativity is exactly what the sector will need if it’s to keep making strong ads within the terms of the ban.
Creativity like this comes a lot easier to a brand like McDonald’s, which has been using its brand assets in clever ways for decades and has huge experience of centering ads on story and emotion, not product. It’s a skill that other brands will need to master quickly.
For brands whose audiences are more on TikTok than TV, the new laws will hit even harder, and we have good and bad news for them too. The good news is that our data shows how working with creators leads to the biggest likely uplift in brand image and recognition. The bad? Most creator videos are product-centric, and brands will need to rethink relationships with creators to make sure their work centres around strong brand assets.
But on old media or new, the new legislation means the same thing: ‘brand’ is about to become food advertising’s most vital ingredient.
Jon Evans, CCO at System1
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