Oatly: The New Coke

This post originally appeared on Divinations.

This is one of my favorite advertisements:

It was published in LIFE magazine in 1970 as part of a campaign by the Sugar Association to promise sugar as a diet aid. Some of the other ads are pretty incredible too. 

For example, did you know that if you don’t want to get fat, you should stave off hunger with the sugar in a soft drink?   

Or that eating some sugar will give you the willpower you need to avoid overeating? 

The language and imagery in these ads is brilliant. Each features an attractive, healthy-weight woman, suggesting what you could look like if you start having some sugar before meals. And they all make true but misleading statements: 

“Sugar can be the willpower you need to undereat.” Anything “can be” the willpower you need, that doesn’t mean it’ll actually do anything. If anything, we now know that the blood sugar spike and crash from sugar reduces willpower. 

“Sugar… only 18 calories per teaspoon, and it’s all energy.” Any pure carbohydrate has 4 calories per gram, and since a teaspoon fits a bit over 4 grams of sugar, you’ll have 16-18 calories per teaspoon. So they haven’t lied! But the soda the woman is drinking looks like a 12oz cup which would have about 39g of sugar, or 156 calories from sugar (the coke site says 140, but that math doesn’t make sense). That’s 10 teaspoons, 10 times as much sugar as the ad makes you think you’re getting. 

The sugar industry didn’t invent this strategy. It was used by the tobacco industry starting in the 1930s to convince people that cigarettes were fine. Even your doctor uses them: 

(source)

And, of course, cigarettes would help you stay slender: 

(source)

And if you blow Tipalet smoke in people’s faces, they’ll want to sleep with you. Not sure how they did this study: 

(source)

The playbook, outlined in detail in Merchants of Doubt, is very simple: 

Obscure the Truth: Make vague health claims that aren’t falsifiable. “Give your throat a vacation… smoke a fresh cigarette” sounds like they’re saying “this is definitely healthy,” but they’ve really said nothing. 

Create Confusion: Fund massive amounts of research papers showing the harmful ingredients are healthy, or at least not provably harmful. Then cherry-pick or p-hackresearch into meta-analyses that support your industry. The sugar industry did this throughout the 1950s-1970s to point the finger at fat and cholesterol. The tobacco industry did this extensively as well.

Strawman the Disagreements: When people criticize the ingredients or health claims, strawman their arguments by focusing on the most easily dismissed criticisms, or by pointing the finger elsewhere. Sugar convinced people dietary fat was a bigger problem, or that not enough exercise was the culprit for obesity. 

And when all else fails, use sexy lifestyle marketing to keep promoting the product. I don’t know what this ad means, but it sure makes me want a coke: 

Sugar, tobacco, soda, and many more companies have built billion dollar brands on the back of deceptive advertising. The average consumer fell for it for decades, and government agencies in the U.S. were extremely slow to respond to the growing evidence of what was going on. The first research linking tobacco and lung cancer came out in 1912, but in the 1950s you could still advertise tobacco on TV and radio.

So now we have to ask ourselves: What’re the odds that we’ve learned our lesson and this will never happen again? Or could there be a new class of products running the same playbook, building billion dollar brands with clever marketing and deceptive health claims while secretly ruining our health?