CUNY Fights the Fizz Counter-Advertising Contest
Amy Kwan, Public Health
Faculty Advisor: Nicholas Freudenberg
Project Website: CUNY Fights the Fizz Counter-Advertising Contest
The CUNY Fights the Fizz Counter-Advertising Contest seeks to use visual and social media to raise awareness about the harmful marketing practices of the soda and beverage industries. The contest is being sponsored by the Healthy CUNY Initiative, an effort by students, faculty and staff to make CUNY the healthiest urban campus in the United States.
As we know, sugar-sweetened soda contributes to rising rates of obesity, diabetes and other life threatening chronic diseases, and soda companies profit by targeting children and young people for their unhealthy products. Counter-advertising against the tobacco industry helped convince many young people not to start or to quit smoking, saving thousands of lives. The Healthy CUNY Initiative is inviting CUNY students to design similar campaigns to educate the CUNY community about the harmful health effects of soda and help end Big Soda’s targeting of young soda drinkers. Winning videos, posters, music, photographs, spoken word or other submissions will be used in a Spring 2012 Healthy CUNY campaign to reduce sweetened soda drinking among CUNY students, faculty and staff and build support for policies to reduce promotion of unhealthy sweetened beverages.
Through our work with the New Media Lab, we have created a website for the Fight The Fizz contest, and are now working on building an online presence for the Healthy CUNY Initiative more broadly, through social media.