Outcomes of Healthy Eating Ad Campaigns: A Systematic Review

Social marketing campaigns seeking to promote healthy eating hold promise in precision messaging and behavior change related to a key component of healthy living medicine. A systematic review that examines the behaviors promoted against their success is lacking. Of interest is the consideration of stop or go behaviors, such as not eating fast food or increasing the consumption of fruits and vegetables, respectively. We systematically searched five databases for peer-reviewed quantitative articles examining healthy eating campaigns that included at least one ad. We found evidence that campaigns with both stop and go outcomes (such as swapping) and outcomes that were not clarifying whether they were stop or go (such as calling a coach) tended to be more successful than campaigns with simple stop or go outcomes. Further, campaigns that were longer than six months seemed consistently successful. However, with 14 included studies, it is clear that further research is needed.