Sweet Surprise: Part II

So I couldn't resist running this campaign by some first-year students I have this year in a Health Communication in the Media course. Their reaction to the campaign was mixed - some liked it, some didn't. I think they were a little surprised to see the press release from the AMA that is on the Sweet Surprise home page - that's a pretty big deal, and the AMA message doesn't come through particularly well during the existing TV commercials.

I asked the students to improve the campaign and try to do a better job spreading the Sweet Surprise message.

I think all the teams really wanted to include the information from the AMA press release, but they also wanted to avoid coming off as cheesy. This, of course, is the result of seeing too many Yaz commercials where young women are talking in a bar and all the fair balance information is provided by the woman who "didn't go to med school for nothing!" Ugh.

Anyway, the students had a couple interesting ideas, including:

• Putting a mom and child in a pediatrician's office. Then there would be some sort of interaction where the pediatrician could give the kid a sucker (or whatever) at the end of the visit, the mom might wonder why the doctor would provide a "bad" treat with HFCS, and the pediatrician could then do some education and include the AMA message.

• To reach an older audience, they wanted to locate the ad in a gym. Then some obviously-healthy man or woman could be shown drinking a "bad"sports drink with HFCS in it. The same general conversation would occur after the healthy person is questioned by someone else about why they're drinking something with HFCS.

With only 10-15 minutes to brainstorm about this, they did quite a nice job figuring out how to incorporate the AMA press release info without coming off as corny. Not a bad effort, and I know my initial hunch is that such commercials might be a little more effective in terms of credibility and spreading the word for the Sweet Surprise campaign.