Nailed it! media interview on junk food ad bans
The issue: Junk food, health promotion
This example comes from: Food for Health Alliance
Strategic context: Food for Health Alliance campaigns for government action to protect Australian children from unhealthy food and drink marketing.
The values it’s priming are: Benevolence (mature love, responsible)
What we love about it: Jane Martin is one of Australia’s most experienced users of values-based messaging in the health promotion space. In this ABC radio interview about the UK junk food ad ban she responds brilliantly to the predictable ‘parental responsibility’ question.
Here’s what she does particularly well:
- She puts the junk food industry and marketers front and centre in the frame (to shift focus away from parents as the problem)
- She frames the issue as a choice between children’s health or industry profits (our research shows the vast majority of Australians will support the former)
- She names specific examples of how marketers are manipulating children (to help audiences picture the harm and feel the anger)
- She names the responsibility governments have to step in to fix the problem (to shift focus away from parents as the solution)
- She avoids calling it a ‘ban’, but instead calls it ‘responsible and clear rules’ (to avoid triggering automatic rejection from many persuadable people)
*These tips are straight out of the Healthy Persuasion message guide we developed with VicHealth six years ago. This first of its kind evidence-based guide wouldn’t have happened without a strong and independent VicHealth that was free to take on the commercial determinants of health. Sign our petition to save VicHealth here.