The British Medical Journal is not happy with the advertising industry. According to an investigation conducted by former Daily Mail health editor Sophie Borland, companies that own outdoor advertising space have been using the “tobacco playbook” to thwart local councils who want to ban “junk food” ads on bus shelters and billboards. The BMJ has exclusively revealed that these companies have been lobbying — yes, lobbying! — against policies that adversely affect their business. Ms Borland sent Freedom of Information requests to 52 of England’s 317 local authorities and found “evidence showing an attempt by the advertising industry to influence their policy making” in eight of them. Sources close to the BMJ say that the real figure could be even higher!
It is a sad day for democracy when businesses can brazenly e-mail a handful of local councillors to express their opinion about regulatory proposals that directly concern them. Fran Bernhardt, who rejoices in the job title of Commercial Determinants Coordinator at the lobby group Sustain, says she has encountered a “range of lobbying tactics” from the out-of-home advertising sector while she has been lobbying for outdoor advertising bans. Bernhardt has been lobbying “around 150 local authorities” to bring in bans on advertisements for food that is high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) but has so far only succeeded in 22 of them. She blames this on lobbying.
Katharine Jenner, a lobbyist from the Obesity Health Alliance lobby group, is also cross about lobbying from people who disagree with her. “It’s quite a well proven tobacco playbook strategy,” she says. “What the companies try to do is deny and undermine the evidence, to say it’s not important; they try to delay policies coming in; and, they dilute them as well, make them as least impactful as possible.”
How exactly has this playbook of denial, delay and dilution been put into action by billboard owners? The BMJ points to a report commissioned by the Advertising Association which questioned the findings of a ludicrous piece of junk science which claimed that banning HFSS ads on the Transport for London estate in 2019 led to the average London household consuming 1,000 fewer calories a week. The report had the temerity to suggest that, as the BMJ puts it, “the fact that childhood obesity rates rose in London after the ban came in — and at a rate faster than in other regions — is proof that it has not worked”. How unsporting of the industry to point this out.
Out-of-home advertising companies have also warned councils that they are likely to lose revenue if they ban HFSS food adverts on council-owned property. This, you might think, is a statement of the obvious. If the companies didn’t think the advertising ban would lead to less advertising, they wouldn’t be lobbying against it. For the BMJ, however, such arguments are part of the “deny, dilute, delay” strategy that makes the “tobacco playbook” so distinctive.
That’s the “deny” element. The “dilute” element is evidenced by the fact that even after HFSS foods have been banned, McDonalds can still advertise chicken nuggets, and KFC can still advertise chicken burgers. “This”, moans the BMJ, “is because they ‘pass’ a complex scoring system used to decide whether a product is HFSS.” To put it more bluntly, these products are not covered by a ban on food that is high in fat, sugar or salt because they are not high in fat, sugar or salt. It is difficult to see what has been ‘diluted’ here. The Nutrient Profiling Model was designed by neither the advertising industry nor the food industry. It was designed a long time ago by the Reverend Mike Rayner, a fanatic who thinks that God told him to lobby for the sugar tax. Since there is nothing unhealthy about eating bread, chicken and salad, these companies are complying with both the spirit and the letter of the law.
Accusing companies of following the “tobacco playbook” or the “corporate playbook” has become a verbal spasm in the world of “public health”
The “delay” element stems from some councils having long-term contracts with advertising companies. The BMJ says that Tower Hamlets council, which banned HFSS ads in 2023, has a contract with the out-of-home advertising company Clear Channel until 2031 “so the policy will not take effect until it can be written into the new contract”. The council has decided not to cancel the contract, but has told Clear Channel to abide by the new policy. If there are any legal ramifications from this (and it seems unlikely that the contract is for HFSS foods only), it is a problem the council has brought on itself by moving the goalposts after signing a long-term contract.
What has any of this got to do with cigarettes? We are told that the advertising companies are following the “tobacco playbook”, but the only similarity between this tale of provincial fussbucketry and the twentieth century tobacco wars is that a trade association has queried the results of a study — and there is a world of difference between an epidemiological study of lung cancer and a modelling study of a policy’s outcome.
Accusing companies of following the “tobacco playbook” or the “corporate playbook” has become a verbal spasm in the world of “public health”. As I showed in an IEA paper this week, the jibe has been so over-used that it has become meaningless. A handful of activist-academics have spent a decade trying to define the “corporate playbook” but all they have come up with is a list of rudimentary public affairs strategies such as lobbying, commissioning research and speaking to the media which any interest group would engage in and which “public health” groups engage in more than most. Are we to conclude that an anti-smoking group that criticises its opponent’s evidence and appears on television is following the “tobacco playbook”?
Every time these academics extend the scope of their enquiries, they find another industry that is using the same “tactics”. Last year, a World Health Organisation report found the playbook being used by not just the tobacco, alcohol and food industries, but also by the gambling, pharmaceutical, infant formula, fossil fuel, dairy and chemicals industry, as well as “the emerging gig and platform economies”. Recent studies of Uber Eats in Australia and the “road lobby” in New Zealand found the same assortment of political tactics yet again. It never seems to occur to these researchers that they have cast their net too wide. The definition is so all-encompassing that it explains nothing.
But it is not really supposed to explain anything. These studies contribute nothing to the field of political science, but they do serve several purposes. The first is to make political pygmies feel as if they are taking on Big Tobacco when they ban adverts for ice cream. The second is to discourage policy-makers from engaging with business; these studies often conclude with an appeal for certain industries to be excluded from the policy-making process. The third is to divert attention from the people who are really following a playbook. HFSS food advertising will be banned online and on TV before 9pm in October. The BMJ article makes the case for banning it everywhere else. This is what happened with tobacco and is what the “public health” lobby hopes will happen with alcohol and gambling in due course.
There is an anti-tobacco blueprint that is being inexorably applied to other products: ban advertising, raise taxes, apply warning labels, demonise industry, stigmatise consumers, put it in plain packaging and then go for full prohibition. It is all so predictable because we’ve seen it rolled out before. That is the real playbook. Everything else is projection.
