Local strategies for the control of harmful commodities advertising and sponsorship
Research Team: Cheryl McQuire, Frank de Vocht, Steven Cummins, Emma Boyland, Amelia Lake, Eszter Vamos, Michael Daly, Paige Hull, Andrea Burrows
Who's involved: Bristol, LSHTM, LiLaC, Fuse and Imperial
April 2024 – March 2025
Many local authorities are in the process of developing policies to restrict advertising and sponsorship of harmful commodities. This project is investigating how local councils are doing this to help inform and influence the development of effective policies in a research-driven way.
Products that are harmful to our health and the environment are often promoted through advertising and sponsorship. Many local councils in England are now restricting advertising and sponsorship. This project is exploring how local councils are doing this, how impactful it is and how people and communities feel about the changes. The information gathered will be used to help inform and influence the development of policies that are more effective to improve human and planetary health.
Advertising and sponsorship are used to promote products. This includes products that can be harmful to our health and to the environment, such as alcohol and unhealthy food, as well as products that use fossil fuels or create plastic waste. There are many types of advertising such as outdoor advertising (e.g., billboards and posters on bus stops) and digital advertising (e.g., television and online adverts).
Sponsorship is defined as money that is given by a company to support a person, organisation or activity. An example is where gambling companies pay to have their logo on football kits.
Outdoor advertising reaches an estimated 98% of people at least once a week. Research suggests that this level of exposure to advertising can have an impact on our health, as it influences people’s attitudes towards, and their consumption of, harmful products. Children and young people, people from ethnic minority groups and those from more deprived areas have been shown to be particularly influenced by the advertising of harmful products.
Aim
This project aims to understand how local councils in England are restricting sponsorship and the advertising of products that are harmful to our health and to the environment. Some local councils have policies that prevent the advertising of certain products in their public spaces. For example, junk food advertising has been banned on the Transport for London network, and we know that over 100 councils are planning, or have introduced similar policies. The specific details of these policies vary in different areas, for example by the definitions of advertising used, the products that are included, and the types of advertising and sponsorship affected. These details are likely to have an impact on the effects of a policy, but the size of this impact has not previously been investigated.
This project has two main aims:
1) The first aim is to identify and describe policies that restrict sponsorship and advertising of harmful products in local councils in England. We will speak to the people who are involved in developing these policies and will analyse relevant documents to get a detailed description of what the policy contains. We will then summarise this information to define and understand the different types of policies.
2) Our second aim is to use this information to design a future research study that will look at the impact that these policies have on the amount of advertising and sponsorship in the local area, how people in the area feel about the policies, and the impact that they have on people’s health and the environment.
Design and methods
We will carry out a detailed documentary analysis and interviews with local authority stakeholders. From this we will identify, describe, and undertake a comparative assessment of the specific components of local authority strategies for controlling advertising and sponsorship of commodities that are harmful to human and planetary health, which are being planned or have been implemented, across England.
The information gathered in this project will be used to develop a protocol for a non-randomised evaluation of the impact of specific components of identified advertising and sponsorship restrictions at the local level.
Developing public and community partners will be crucial for providing detailed localised knowledge about local policies for the restriction of advertising and sponsorship of harmful commodities. The project has been developed with public collaborators and members of the public will be involved throughout the project, for example they will be involved in our PPI&E panel and will attend regular meetings to enable input and feedback at all stages of the project.
In addition to academic publications, we will produce resources that are tailored to different audiences such as blogs, policy briefings. We will also share results from the work at dissemination events such as conferences and SPHR network events.
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