Internet, please direct your attention to the following piece of hogwash, a glimpse of an ad industry not yet accustomed to subtlety:
For those of you who can’t read the tiny print, the block text underneath the baby reads:
HOW SOON IS TOO SOON? Not soon enough. Laboratory tests over the last few years have proven that babies who start drinking soda during that early formative period have a much higher chance of gaining acceptance and “fitting in” during those awkward pre-teen and teen years. So, do yourself a favor. Do your child a favor. Start them on a strict regimen of soda and other sugary carbonated beverages right now, for a lifetime of guaranteed happiness. – The Soda Pop Board of America
Frankly, Internet, holy crap! That first line in bold really speaks to what I think is the worst part of the advertising industry: ads are not designed to answer our questions about a product, or to provide us with information useful in deciding whether or not to buy a product, ads choose questions that assume desire and preclude choice. In an ad clearly directed toward concerned parents trying to look out for their children’s health, the question “Is soda healthy for my child?” does not exist. Instead, the question is “Am I giving my child enough soda?” the answer, of course, is no.
This ad has everything we’re all familiar with in ads, perhaps a little more obvious: happy customers, a directive from the company (at the top), a prompt for the consumer (we are supposed to ask “how soon is too soon?”), false statements in tricky language that can’t really be traced (“laboratory tests”), outrageous claims that are too vague to be technically wrong (“a lifetime of guaranteed happiness”), it should all sound pretty familiar. Compare with this Gatorade commercial, where the product is presented as an integral part of playing sports, and the company is portrayed as having invented some kind of miracle elixir (it’s just sugar water, right? Green sugar water. Wikipedia was pretty vague on what the heck “electrolytes” are, and I’m far from a biochemist, but they seem to be abundant in, you guessed it, fruits and vegetables). Shake your head and frown, if you dare, at the demise of New York’s sadly quixotic soda tax, which is getting its cavity-free teeth kicked in by as slick and vicious an ad campaign by a very, very wealthy industry.
I digress, Internet, I don’t need to tell you that advertising is insidious, despicable, and manipulative, that it’s always been that way, and that it got that way on purpose. Here’s my point: branding is a part of our lives, and it is a huge part of every choice we make. When I was little, I was (thank God) not allowed to drink soda at the dinner table. I would sit there with my glass of milk, and I remember thinking it was a bit unfair that my dad could choose to have a beer with dinner. This was not because I didn’t like the milk, or wanted to party hard at 8 years old, I am almost entirely certain that it was because of branding. I saw my dad pour the bottle with the label on it, that looked like a glass soda bottle, into a glass, and he could have it at dinner. I wanted to be a grown up and drink a grown up drink with a brightly colored logo. I’m being completely serious, I was a brand-conscious kid from day one, and I’m certain that every kid in this country is too. The end of my story is that my parents took the hard line and told me that soda was unhealthy and I couldn’t have it for dinner, and they kept telling me that until I was old enough to understand it for myself, and at 22 years old I would rather have milk for dinner because it’s delicious. Happy ending. But I’m telling you, Internet, that when kids want sugary food and soda, it has almost nothing to do with the way the stuff tastes. There’s sugar addiction, and that’s it’s own kind of bad news, but the real story here is branding. What would childhood be like in a logo-free house, I wonder? What if the fridge of my childhood was full of plain glass bottles, big reusable ones, so the logos could never get in the house. It’s not so far-fetched, simply buy the stuff at the store, pour it into the blank bottle, and throw the logos out (recycle them and get your 5 cents, of course) I’ve heard of some places that will fill big glass jugs with milk or juice or beer or whatever you keep in your fridge (there should be more of those places). When the logo is gone, you have to call a food what it is. Without the bright red label and the icy-cool pictures on the vending machine, Coca-Cola isn’t Coke, it’s fizzy brown sugar water, and that’s sort of gross. The world is full of branding, and you’ll never escape it, you’ll never protect your kids from it completely, but there is something to be said for parents who eat food and not brands, and for kids who learn that being a grown up means making food decisions based on the actual food, not the exciting label, not the happy looking people in the ads, not the snappy product name, just the food.
P.S. The kid in the ad looks a little creepy. Mouth hanging open, eyes fixed on a point in space somewhere above and past his mother, mind a complete sugar-crash blank. Mom smiles at Jr. with an air of anxious non-comprehension, as if he were telling a joke she does not understand. Weird.
