What was the Department of Health thinking? Choosing to sponsor The Simpsons with its Change4Life healthy eating campaign is a decision made by someone who has surely missed the point: the Simpson family won’t ever change – and neither will their fans on the basis of this campaign.
At the risk of stating the obvious, The Simpsons is a satire. If Homer, Bart and co all stopped eating doughnuts and lolling on the sofa we wouldn’t want to watch them anymore. A fleeting glimpse of a substitute cartoon family chomping on carrots on a Simpsonesque sofa isn’t going to alter anything. The Department of Health has bitten off more than it can chew by associating with the very family doomed to fail at “change for life”. And if Bart and Homer can’t manage healthy eating, why should we?
The herd effect, as described by Mark Earls and in Robert Cialdini’s Yes! 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive, tells us people behave as they believe others do. And in this case that means the family Simpson: unless the advert’s faceless figurines actually persuade The Simpsons characters themselves to reform and permanently ditch the fried chicken and doughnuts, it won’t sway fans either – and £640,000 spent on a few minutes sponsorship on Channel 4 in the run up to Christmas will just be a novel flash in the pan.
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