Why Public Health Keeps Losing to Big Brand Advertising
It’s 7:00 AM on a drizzly London morning. A seven-year-old sits at the breakfast table, eyes on the TV as he eats cereal. In minutes, he’s bombarded by cartoon mascots pushing sugary cereal and a jingle for a fast-food sandwich. By the time he’s swallowed the last spoonful, he’s seen more logos and catchy slogans than any public health message all day. In the battle for attention and appetites, public health is getting outgunned before breakfast. And big brands know exactly what they’re doing.
The all-out sensory siege
Big brands wage a sensory war on consumers. Advertisers deploy cues across sight, sound and smell to make us crave products without thinking. The sizzle of bacon in a fast-food advert, the bright red and yellow of a takeaway logo, a catchy soft-drink jingle, none of it is accidental. These sensory triggers create emotional associations that bypass our rational defences. Even mundane details like the sting of a minty mouthwash or the scratch of a marker pen have been used to intensify a brand’s impact on our minds. By appealing to our senses and memories, sensory marketing primes our desires before we even realise it.
Your brain on food ads
Neuroscientists find that even fleeting food cues, whether a glimpse of gooey pizza or the crackle of a fizzy drinks can opening, light up the brain’s reward centres. In one fMRI study, children watching food commercials showed significantly higher activation in brain regions tied to motivation and pleasure. The brain begins releasing dopamine at the mere suggestion of sugar and fat, conditioning us to want the real thing.
One report noted that while teenagers watched fast-food adverts, areas linked to reward and attention surged with activity, and the teens later remembered the food commercials far better than the non-food ones.
Hooking kids young
Children are particularly vulnerable to these tactics. Young kids do not even understand that adverts are trying to persuade them, and their brains are wired to seek instant rewards without the brakes of self-control. Research shows the brain’s reward regions in children develop earlier than the regions for impulse control, biasing them towards “I want it now” responses.
A major UK meta-analysis confirmed that junk food ads act as a physical ‘cue to consume,’ triggering children to eat significantly more immediately after watching them. Brain scans confirm that familiar food logos trigger more reward activity in children than in adults. By the time they are in primary school, many children can sing a fast-food jingle or recognise a fizzy drink logo before they can read. Early brand loyalty formed long before they understand what “advertising” even means.
Playing the variable reward game
Beyond sensory tricks, brands use variable rewards to hook us. A long-running fast-food prize promotion built around collectible game pieces is a masterclass in this strategy. Every meal comes with a chance-based reward: most give small instant wins, but a lucky few offer the possibility of a big prize. It is essentially a lottery built into your lunch, exploiting the psychology of unpredictable rewards that B.F. Skinner documented decades ago.
We get a dopamine rush from the chance of winning, which keeps us buying again and again.
Soft-drink companies have played similar games with surprise vending machines that randomly hand out gifts along with a purchase, creating moments of unexpected joy for customers. These tactics blur the line between marketing and entertainment, training consumers to habitually engage with brands for the next reward hit. Public health messaging, by contrast, rarely offers such instant gratification.
David vs. Goliath in ad spending
No matter how clever a health campaign is, it is hard to compete with the sheer flood of messaging from big brands. Junk food companies outspend public health efforts by orders of magnitude. In the UK, for instance, leading snack and fast-food brands spend around £143 million a year on advertising, while the government’s healthy eating campaign manages just £5 million. That is a 27-fold difference in voice and visibility.
Airwaves, billboards and social feeds are saturated with tempting imagery of burgers, crisps and fizzy drinks, drowning out the faint whispers of “please eat your greens.” It is estimated that children might see 20,000 commercials in a single year, many of them for food, whereas they will see only a handful of public service adverts about the importance of a well-balanced diet, if any at all.
The levers that actually change behaviour
So what can public health do? First, stop thinking of this as a matter of individual choice. This is a question of environment, regulation and power. When corporations flood our surroundings with calorie-dense cues and use psychology to hardwire cravings, asking people to “choose wisely” is a fig leaf.
Second, we must regulate branding the same way we regulate ingredients. The UK’s HFSS (high fat, salt, sugar) restrictions were designed to limit junk food advertising, but loopholes remain. Chief among them is the “brand exemption,” which allows companies to advertise logos and slogans even when products themselves cannot appear.
Some major high-street fast-food chains did not merely take advantage of this loophole; they built an entire national campaign around it. Thus restrictions can be sidestepped by using promotions based around “secret” menus, drawing on internet rumour and fan speculation. Outdoor adverts, bus shelter roofs, kiosk screens and glitchy in-store displays offer tantalising hints of the food without ever showing it. Logos alone are all that is needed. The brain filled in the rest.
This kind of semiotic sleight of hand is only possible because branding is still treated as neutral under policy. But it is not. Branding is an active ingredient, as potent in its effects as salt or sugar, driving cravings and reinforcing habits in ways we can measure in neural responses and population health.
Third, we need upstream interventions: limits on outdoor advertising in deprived areas, tighter controls on packaging and mascots, and fiscal policies that level the playing field. France taxes ultra-processed drinks. Chile mandates warning labels. These are not nudges. They are the structural levers that public health needs to pull if it wants to rebalance the scales.
Because until we match the reach and cunning of the commercial playbook with an equally bold regulatory one, we are not in a contest.
We are in a rout.
About the author: Dr Philip Broadbent is a Public Health Doctor & Multimorbidity PhD Fellow at the University of Glasgow
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Outgunned Before Breakfast
by Philip Broadbent Feb 11, 2026Why Public Health Keeps Losing to Big Brand Advertising
It’s 7:00 AM on a drizzly London morning. A seven-year-old sits at the breakfast table, eyes on the TV as he eats cereal. In minutes, he’s bombarded by cartoon mascots pushing sugary cereal and a jingle for a fast-food sandwich. By the time he’s swallowed the last spoonful, he’s seen more logos and catchy slogans than any public health message all day. In the battle for attention and appetites, public health is getting outgunned before breakfast. And big brands know exactly what they’re doing.
The all-out sensory siege
Big brands wage a sensory war on consumers. Advertisers deploy cues across sight, sound and smell to make us crave products without thinking. The sizzle of bacon in a fast-food advert, the bright red and yellow of a takeaway logo, a catchy soft-drink jingle, none of it is accidental. These sensory triggers create emotional associations that bypass our rational defences. Even mundane details like the sting of a minty mouthwash or the scratch of a marker pen have been used to intensify a brand’s impact on our minds. By appealing to our senses and memories, sensory marketing primes our desires before we even realise it.
Your brain on food ads
Neuroscientists find that even fleeting food cues, whether a glimpse of gooey pizza or the crackle of a fizzy drinks can opening, light up the brain’s reward centres. In one fMRI study, children watching food commercials showed significantly higher activation in brain regions tied to motivation and pleasure. The brain begins releasing dopamine at the mere suggestion of sugar and fat, conditioning us to want the real thing.
One report noted that while teenagers watched fast-food adverts, areas linked to reward and attention surged with activity, and the teens later remembered the food commercials far better than the non-food ones.
Hooking kids young
Children are particularly vulnerable to these tactics. Young kids do not even understand that adverts are trying to persuade them, and their brains are wired to seek instant rewards without the brakes of self-control. Research shows the brain’s reward regions in children develop earlier than the regions for impulse control, biasing them towards “I want it now” responses.
A major UK meta-analysis confirmed that junk food ads act as a physical ‘cue to consume,’ triggering children to eat significantly more immediately after watching them. Brain scans confirm that familiar food logos trigger more reward activity in children than in adults. By the time they are in primary school, many children can sing a fast-food jingle or recognise a fizzy drink logo before they can read. Early brand loyalty formed long before they understand what “advertising” even means.
Playing the variable reward game
Beyond sensory tricks, brands use variable rewards to hook us. A long-running fast-food prize promotion built around collectible game pieces is a masterclass in this strategy. Every meal comes with a chance-based reward: most give small instant wins, but a lucky few offer the possibility of a big prize. It is essentially a lottery built into your lunch, exploiting the psychology of unpredictable rewards that B.F. Skinner documented decades ago.
We get a dopamine rush from the chance of winning, which keeps us buying again and again.
Soft-drink companies have played similar games with surprise vending machines that randomly hand out gifts along with a purchase, creating moments of unexpected joy for customers. These tactics blur the line between marketing and entertainment, training consumers to habitually engage with brands for the next reward hit. Public health messaging, by contrast, rarely offers such instant gratification.
David vs. Goliath in ad spending
No matter how clever a health campaign is, it is hard to compete with the sheer flood of messaging from big brands. Junk food companies outspend public health efforts by orders of magnitude. In the UK, for instance, leading snack and fast-food brands spend around £143 million a year on advertising, while the government’s healthy eating campaign manages just £5 million. That is a 27-fold difference in voice and visibility.
Airwaves, billboards and social feeds are saturated with tempting imagery of burgers, crisps and fizzy drinks, drowning out the faint whispers of “please eat your greens.” It is estimated that children might see 20,000 commercials in a single year, many of them for food, whereas they will see only a handful of public service adverts about the importance of a well-balanced diet, if any at all.
The levers that actually change behaviour
So what can public health do? First, stop thinking of this as a matter of individual choice. This is a question of environment, regulation and power. When corporations flood our surroundings with calorie-dense cues and use psychology to hardwire cravings, asking people to “choose wisely” is a fig leaf.
Second, we must regulate branding the same way we regulate ingredients. The UK’s HFSS (high fat, salt, sugar) restrictions were designed to limit junk food advertising, but loopholes remain. Chief among them is the “brand exemption,” which allows companies to advertise logos and slogans even when products themselves cannot appear.
Some major high-street fast-food chains did not merely take advantage of this loophole; they built an entire national campaign around it. Thus restrictions can be sidestepped by using promotions based around “secret” menus, drawing on internet rumour and fan speculation. Outdoor adverts, bus shelter roofs, kiosk screens and glitchy in-store displays offer tantalising hints of the food without ever showing it. Logos alone are all that is needed. The brain filled in the rest.
This kind of semiotic sleight of hand is only possible because branding is still treated as neutral under policy. But it is not. Branding is an active ingredient, as potent in its effects as salt or sugar, driving cravings and reinforcing habits in ways we can measure in neural responses and population health.
Third, we need upstream interventions: limits on outdoor advertising in deprived areas, tighter controls on packaging and mascots, and fiscal policies that level the playing field. France taxes ultra-processed drinks. Chile mandates warning labels. These are not nudges. They are the structural levers that public health needs to pull if it wants to rebalance the scales.
Because until we match the reach and cunning of the commercial playbook with an equally bold regulatory one, we are not in a contest.
We are in a rout.
About the author: Dr Philip Broadbent is a Public Health Doctor & Multimorbidity PhD Fellow at the University of Glasgow