Advertising doesn’t help you choose – it limits you (and that’s the point)

The UK government’s new ban on junk food advertising to children has been in force since early January. While it’s a step in the right direction, the new measures could have gone much further to protect children’s health from the junk food giants. One glaring shortcoming is that the policy does not cover outdoor advertising, which means we’re seeing even more ads for unhealthy food in public space as food companies increase their outdoor ad spend in response to the ban.

This means that young people are being bombarded yet further by food giants, stacking the odds against children’s health. It means that McDonald’s are free to advertise their oversized, eye-wateringly unhealthy Big Arch burger on streets across the UK (see an example above). The burger contains 130% of your recommended daily limit of saturated fat in one meal*.

Outdoor advertising space is dominated by ads like this for unhealthy, ultra-processed and climate-damaging food, particularly meat and dairy – and the biggest spender on outdoor advertising in the UK, by a long way, is McDonald’s.

The food lobby may say that limiting unhealthy food advertising is a restriction of freedom, and that people shouldn’t be told what to eat. But advertisers are limiting our freedom to choose all the time – that is their very purpose.

You could argue that people can make up their own minds about whether to consume such an excessively unhealthy meal, but the Big Arch advert is typical of this kind of ad, and contains no information to help you make this choice. It does not advise you that this burger contains well over the recommended daily upper limit of saturated fat. It does not even suggest that you should consume this food in moderation.

What it does do is what ads do best: manufactures desire for a product you don’t need, lining the pockets of megacorporations who are harming your health and the planet in the process. There has even been associated surveillance advertising (a “geo-targeted audio sync strategy”, as explained on McDonald’s ad agency Leo Burnett’s website). Referring to a stomach rumble noise made in their broadcast advertisement, they explain that “…a geo-targeted audio sync strategy will retarget people who’ve seen the OOH with the stomach rumble audio when near a McDonald’s restaurant, doubling temptation and desire to visit their nearest restaurant”.

When did it become acceptable to track people’s movements in order to manipulate them into purchasing an oversized beef burger, and to use sounds to manipulate people’s desire to eat?

Advertising restrictions are not about telling people what to eat. They are about shifting some of the colossal financial and narrative power held by corporations like McDonald’s and the ad agencies who promote them. They are about removing the manipulative, skilful messages that lead people, including children, to eat unhealthy food to excess, and which push people of all ages to over-consume foods that are harming our health, harming animals and harming the planet.

Policymakers both locally and nationally have the power to restrict advertising to stop the promotion of harmful products, to remove the relentless and aggressive pressures to consume, and enable people to make genuine choices in line with their values and priorities. Eat a burger if you want to – but not because you’ve been pressured to.

Adfree Cities has submitted a complaint about McDonald’s Big Arch adverts to the UK regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority.

• * This is based on the reference intake (RI) for an average woman. Even for an average male, one Big Arch burger contains 87% of the recommended saturated fat daily limit.