THE JUNK FOOD PUSHERS - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 28

ternational news agency, industry attorneys have filed at least six document requests with public agencies
from California to New York. The article quotes an advocate as saying, “It is, in our opinion, an effort to
overwhelm or smother government employees, who already have too much to do.” 16
When the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine came out with a report concluding that a child's
chances of becoming obese increases 60 percent for each can of soda consumed a day, the American Bever-
age Association went into high gear. The report's authors called for an excise tax of a penny per ounce
on soft drinks to create a revenue stream for health programs. In response, the ABA formed the Americ-
ans Against Food Taxes coalition. Its dozens of member companies and trade associations—including the
GMA, the soft-drink manufacturers, the fast-food chains, convenience stores, the U.S. Chamber of Com-
merce, the Corn Refiners Association, and Cargill—are spending millions on lobbying and advertising to
stop federal and state initiatives, including those in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Mississippi, Kan-
sas, and Alaska.
One of the ways consumers, and especially children, are lured into buying junk food and soft drinks is
product placement—the practice of embedding brands in TV shows, movies, videos, and news programs
to create in consumers a subconscious emotional connection with the brand. According to the trade journal
Broadcasting & Cable , two thirds of advertisers employ “branded entertainment”—i.e., product place-
ment—and 80 percent of this is on TV.
Pepsi uses product placement ads to gain brand loyalty in its ongoing war with Coke, by far the highest-
selling cola, at 1.6 billion cases in 2010. Pepsi has waged the battle to differentiate itself from its similar
tasting and looking competitor by placing products in movies and TV shows such as Just Go with It and
The X Factor .
In October 2011 several consumer advocacy organizations filed a complaint with the FTC against Pep-
siCo and its Frito-Lay subsidiary for engaging in deceptive digital marketing practices. The advertising
campaign on two horror-themed Web sites creates an “illusion that they are entertainment instead of ad-
vertising” and that the “sites do not clearly state how and to what extent the data collected on users will be
shared.” According to Jeffrey Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy: “Pepsi is really in the forefront
of using digital marketing to promote its products, including its snack chip line. They have unabashedly
targeted teens.” 17
In 1898, when Caleb Bradham first sold the fountain drink Pepsi-Cola in a Bern, North Carolina, phar-
macy, he could never have imagined this type of advertising or that his soft-drink company would morph
into the largest food and beverage company in the United States. Bradham was a brilliant marketer and
prescient of Pepsi's future reputation for daring advertising that taps into people's deepest emotions; he
named the signature drink for the enzyme pepsin and the African kola nut. The name was designed, similar
to future marketing ploys, to evoke the exotic. Although it was first advertised as a digestive aid, “an ab-
solutely pure combination” of pepsin and fruit juice, by the early 1920s the original ingredients had been
replaced by cheaper substitutes: sugar, flavoring, and hype. 18
Today PepsiCo is the world's second-largest food and beverage manufacturer, and it is worth $60 billion
and operates in two hundred countries. Categorizing Pepsi as a food company is a generous definition,
since the majority of its sales are from sugary drinks and salty snack foods. Pepsi, like all of the top
food-related corporations, is a marketing machine, with its profits generated through slick advertising and
multibillion-dollar budgets designed to convince the targeted consumer that its brand will bring happiness,
fun, sex appeal, thinness, health, or all of the above. As a major purveyor of the empty-calorie foods that
are becoming ubiquitous around the world, PepsiCo has been scrambling to protect its brand image.
In 2011 the company's increasing profitability was tied to the rising sales volume of snack foods and
beverages in the developing world, where PepsiCo hopes to addict people to processed food, high-calorie
snacks, and carbonated beverages. Indra Nooyi, the company's CEO, answers critics of their push for junk-