Why the UK's Junk Food Ad Ban is Actually a Marketing Masterstroke

A ban on ads featuring High-Fat, Salt and Sugar (HFSS) products, known as the Less Healthy Food ad ban, has rolled out in the UK. In his latest column, Mark Ritson argues that this forced pivot from product promotion to brand advertising is a hidden opportunity for marketers.

For the past week, the acronym HFSS has haunted every food and beverage marketer in Britain. It stands for High in Fat, Salt and Sugar – the government’s classification for products deemed unhealthy enough to warrant advertising restrictions now fully in force.

HFSS products are banned from all paid online advertising and daytime television advertising. Volume promotions and prominent in-store displays were already restricted from October 2025. The intent is straightforward: reduce childhood obesity by limiting kids’ exposure to marketing for Coco Pops, Big Macs, and similar products.

Think of all those classic food ads. How do you eat your Cream Egg? Finger lickin’ good. Taste the rainbow. Even Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot – himself HFSS-compliant – would be banned because most of what he promotes isn’t. Under the new rules, any creative featuring a burger, a chocolate bar, or a bag of crisps is banned from paid digital media and banished to the post-9pm TV watershed.

The government’s reasoning is logical. Obesity costs the NHS billions. Restrict the advertising, reduce the consumption, and improve public health outcomes. But the wider marketing implications are not as negative as they seem. Strangely, the main impact of HFSS might be to help big food companies market better.

Handily Focused Stronger Semiotics

When you can no longer show your product on Instagram feeds, YouTube pre-rolls, and prime-time television – what exactly do you show? The answer, for any well-trained marketer, is obvious: distinctive brand assets. The golden arches. The Cadbury purple. The Kit Kat snap. The Colonel’s face. You may not be able to show the final food destination, but you have unlimited licence to promote the semiotic signposts that send consumers in the desired direction.

HFSS doesn’t ban brands from advertising. It bans them from advertising products. That distinction matters. Cadbury can still show a drum-bashing gorilla any time it likes because there is no product shot or chocolate consumption. McDonald’s can run a 30-second spot with the iconic golden arches against a red background and “I’m Lovin’ It” playing throughout. They just can’t show a Big Mac or anyone eating it.

While that’s a tactical limitation, it’s also liberation. Marketers who’ve spent years obsessing over product shots and price points will be in crisis. But brand managers who know what they’re doing and have invested in building distinctive brand assets - recognisable colours, characters, sounds, shapes, and taglines - will barely break stride. Those without will discover, painfully, that their weaker brands are essentially invisible without the product.

Higher Fewer Smarter Stories

The second accidental gift HFSS delivers to marketers is a forced pivot from product promotion to brand advertising.

For years, marketing effectiveness researchers have been screaming into the void that long-term brand building delivers superior returns compared with short-term, product-focused activation. It’s at the genesis and conclusion of “The Long and the Short of It”. And it’s possibly the single biggest impediment to advertising effectiveness: marketers spend too much money promoting products at the bottom of the funnel with rational, targeted activation aimed at the 5%. And not enough higher up, building emotional brand associations to the mass.

HFSS removes the short, product option for much of paid media. Want to run digital advertising for your crisp brand? Better make it about brand associations, characters, and emotion – not the actual crisps and how they taste. The result will be more emotionally resonant creative that builds mental availability over time.

If you weren’t ready to listen to Field and Binet, it’s time to pay attention to His Majesty and His Government. Less product, more brand. By law. The government just accidentally mandated brand building.

Hold Firm, Stop Specials

And there’s another accidental gift buried in these regulations. HFSS products can no longer be sold on buy-one-get-one-free deals or multibuy discounts. The stated intent is to reduce consumption by removing the incentive to stockpile chocolate biscuits. And it will probably work.

But the dirty secret of grocery marketing is that most of the food manufacturers who run these promotions hate them with a passion. A typical BOGOF doesn’t expand the category – it just pulls demand forward while eviscerating current margins and breaking up repeat purchase cycles. But manufacturers have been coerced into a promotional arms race for decades by their retail “partners”. Supermarkets demand a certain amount of “trade support,” and every time they run a promotion, it forces competitors to follow suit, destroying category profits.

HFSS has now handed manufacturers the perfect excuse to partially excuse themselves. “Terribly sorry, Tesco, but the government won’t let us run that three-for-two any more. Awful, isn’t it?” Behind closed doors, brand managers across the food industry are doing quiet cartwheels. The new regulations have achieved what no amount of internal strategy decks ever could: partial liberation from the tyranny of trade support. Granted, temporary price reductions remain admissible and probably the new focus for retailer negotiations. But every little helps, as we say around these parts.

Highly Fractional Synergistic Spend

Perhaps the most tactically interesting consequence of HFSS is a forced rethink of the channel mix.

The regulations target paid online and TV advertising. But they do not – and this is crucial – apply to owned media, earned media, or physical spaces. Your restaurant windows? Exempt. Your brand website? Fill it with as many glistening burger shots as you want.

Several very effective media channels are also entirely exempt from the new legislation. Radio and podcasting are untouched. So is outdoor, both digital and traditional formats. Public relations - long an ironic victim of a crappy reputation among advertisers - will get a much-needed corporate reappraisal. The owned digital ecosystem – websites, apps, email, CRM – will also get proper creative investment rather than recycled social assets.

Smart marketers will also rediscover visual merchandising and packaging – that strange physical realm most digital-first brand managers have studiously ignored. Window displays at QSR locations transform from afterthought to critical touchpoint. Digital menus and kiosks become premium inventory.

Some of the most potent communications channels, traditionally underinvested in by marketers, have suddenly been prioritised. HFSS doesn’t eliminate product advertising. It redistributes it. We’ve known for a decade that diversity in media choices delivers more bang for buck. Now brands will be forced to find that out first-hand.

Helping Firms Spawn Spinoffs

If you cannot advertise your products freely, one obvious strategic response is to expand into products that aren’t HFSS-classified.

Watch the major food brands launch aggressive line extension, brand extension and co-branding strategies into adjacent, compliant categories. McDonald’s already sells salads - expect these to feature more prominently in the future. Mars has been investing in healthier snacking alternatives. Nestlé has a raft of new products lined up.

The regulations create genuine incentives for portfolio diversification. If half your range is advertising-restricted and half isn’t, budget and creative attention will flow toward the unrestricted half. A big emphasis will turn to halo line extensions like Coke Zero Sugar – partly because it’s a growing sub-brand, partly because it’s easier to advertise, and mostly because it can carry brand salience and associations on its compliant shoulders on behalf of the whole portfolio.

Over time, this will shape R&D priorities, NPD pipelines, and portfolio architecture. One could argue this is exactly what the government intended. But I suspect they didn’t anticipate it would primarily benefit large conglomerates with the resources and range to execute sophisticated extension strategies.

Helping Food Superpowers Succeed

The uncomfortable, unexpected implications of these regulations are that they will disproportionately benefit the larger food and beverage brands with established distinctive brand assets, sophisticated marketing teams, and the resources to execute multi-channel, brand-led strategies.

Smaller, newer entrants – the challenger crisp company, the startup chocolate maker, the regional fast-food chain – rely heavily on product-led advertising to build initial awareness. We know that in early stages of growth, product differentiation is the engine for success. With maturity and scale, the emphasis shifts to brand distinctiveness, as per How Brands Grow. The new HFSS protocols restrict much of the former, and with it the opportunity for challenger brands, innovation and new entrants. HFSS essentially pulls the drawbridge up behind the big incumbents.

HFSS is well-meaning legislation. Some of its impacts will genuinely benefit public health. Reduced exposure to junk food advertising for children is, obviously, a good thing.

But the notion that these regulations will somehow hobble McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, or Cadbury fundamentally misunderstands how marketing works. This is a set of restrictions that will improve rather than disable advertising effectiveness for the big food companies.