Soft drink companies, such as the Coca-cola Company, PepsiCo, and Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc. engaged in massive advertising though billboards and print sources, such as newspaper and magazines, during the early twentieth century.
Between 2001 and 2002, 60% of US middle and high school sold soft drinks in vending machines and more than 240 US school district had exclusive contracts with soft drink companies and received funding based on the number of beverages sold and extend of the marketing allowed (advertisements in hallways, on book covers, and in auditoriums, gymnasium and school athletics fields).
Today, soft drink manufacturers spend billions of dollars annually on advertising. In the United States alone, these marketing efforts generated more than $57 billion in sales in 5 years ago. Advertisements have associated soft-drinks with new tastes and new status. Drinking the beverage makes the consumer feel young, sexy, strong, smart, cool, athletic and fun-loving.
Coca-cola paid the Boys & Girls’ Clubs of America $60 million in 1998 to market its brand exclusively in over 2,000 facilities. And ads selling soft drinks now run on the commercial television network with programming shown in classrooms almost every day to eight million middle, junior and high school students.
These companies place advertisement in prominent locations in school – on school buses, on posters in hallways and on calendars book covers and even mouse pads.
Soft drinks manufactures have spent as much as 25 percent of their entire revenues on advertising, much of it targeting youth. In 1998 the Center for Science in the Public Interests study, Liquid Candy, reported that soft drink companies had targeted schools for their advertising and sales of their products.
It is also reported that’s soft drinks provided more than one-third of all refined sugars in the diet’.
Teenagers drink twice as much carbonated soda as milk; as a result only 19 percent of girls get the recommended amount of calcium.
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