World Cup Broadcasts More Than 93,000 Junk Food Ads

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More than 93,000 displays of brands promoting unhealthy food and drinks, alcohol and gambling appeared during broadcasts of this year’s FIFA World Cup, according to research by the Universities of Bristol and Oxford.

FIFA estimates that almost six billion people around the world watched this year’s tournament, while more than 30 countries recorded record television audiences.

The research team used the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, Isambard-AI at the University of Bristol, to analyse all 172.6 hours of live footage from the tournament’s 104 matches.

In the UK, researchers estimated that advertisements for products associated with harmful effects generated 267 billion exposures across the 53 broadcasts for which audience data was available.

The analysis focused on advertisements embedded in match footage, such as those displayed on advertising boards around the pitch, rather than commercials shown during television breaks.

Brands associated with potentially harmful products appeared in every match and remained visible for 39.3 hours of live coverage, accounting for almost a quarter of the total match time. Viewers could therefore not avoid the commercial exposure without also missing part of the football action.

Seven in 10 ads promoted unhealthy food and drinks

Brands selling unhealthy food and drinks dominated tournament sponsorship exposure, accounting for more than seven in 10 recorded displays, or 70.4%, with a total of 65,722 appearances.

Prediction markets followed with 9,360 displays, alcohol with 9,266, gambling with 6,429 and cryptocurrency with 2,632.

Audience exposure concentrated heavily on a small number of globally recognised brands. A major soft-drinks brand recorded the highest number of logo appearances, with 21,893, followed by a major fast-food chain with 13,915, a sports-drink brand with 12,777 and a crisps brand with 12,087.

Together, the four brands accounted for 65% of all recorded product logos associated with potentially harmful effects during the tournament.

Dr Raffaello Rossi, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Bristol and one of the study’s authors, said the findings revealed the “huge scale” of commercial exposure embedded in tournament broadcasts.

He said the exposure made marketing for unhealthy food, alcohol and gambling “ubiquitous and unavoidable” for viewers.

Rossi said the findings were particularly concerning given the substantial body of evidence linking marketing for unhealthy products, alcohol and gambling with increased consumption and a range of health, social and financial harms, particularly among children and young people.

Dr Eliza Becker, a researcher at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s authors, said the world faced a global crisis of childhood obesity and diet-related disease.

“Yet the world’s biggest sporting event is saturated with marketing for unhealthy food and drinks,” she said.

Becker argued that sport should form part of the solution to poor health rather than serve as one of the world’s most powerful advertising platforms for products that contribute to the problem.

Researchers call for stricter advertising rules

The research highlights a significant issue with the match footage that FIFA supplied to broadcasters worldwide: it included the same embedded advertising around the pitch.

This also occurred in countries where laws restrict or prohibit advertising for alcohol, gambling or prediction markets.

Technology for virtual advertising-board replacement allows broadcasters to display different advertisements in different countries. However, the researchers said the findings showed that FIFA’s commercial model did not adequately account for national laws and cultural rules governing the promotion of potentially harmful products.

FIFA did not use the technology and distributed World Cup footage containing embedded advertising to countries where the use, advertising or purchase of some promoted products is illegal.

The researchers are calling on governments and regulators to ensure that advertising rules also cover commercial advertising embedded in live sports broadcasts, with meaningful penalties for violations.

They are also calling on FIFA to adopt an independently developed public-interest standard for its commercial partnerships and use existing technology to remove or replace advertisements in countries where the law prohibits advertising or selling the products concerned.

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