Advertisements of soft drinks

Since the origins in the late nineteenth century, the soft drink industry had enjoyed steadily increasing sales, and during the 1920s, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola became favorite thirst quenchers among Americans of all ages.

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.
Advertisements of soft drinks

Fast food advertising

The scope of marketing expenditures in the United States is very large. During the 1920s, White Castle, the first fast food chain, advertised in newspaper. It was slow to value radio advertising but did have promotions on radio during the 1930s.

The majority of the ads were for candy, snack, sugared cereals and fast foods and most of its advertising was targeted at working class. This changed during the 1950s, when White Castle sponsored a children’s television show, The Cactus and Randy Show.

Fast food industry gas utilized a variety of approaches in order to attract the junior consumer and create an international children’s market.

Marketing research (2005) conducted by Nickelodeon suggests that nearly three quarters of children and youth report that they decide on their own what they eat for breakfast most or all of the time.

McDonald’s created child oriented characters, such as Ronald McDonald and began offering meals made especially for children, such as Happy Meals with toys and the creation of playground for children.

Ronald McDonald, the McDonald’s corporate clown icon started appear on local Washington, D.C. television commercials beginning in 1963.

Through extensive advertising, McDonald’s became the nation’s largest fast food chain during the 1970s.

Food marketing to children now extends beyond television and is widely prevalent in the internet; it is expanding rapidly into ubiquitous digital media cultures of new techniques including cell phone, instant message, video games and 3D dimensional virtual worlds.

Fast food advertising