Athletes Drink Gatorade: DMA Advertising Expenditures, Ad Recall, and Athletic Identity Influence Energy and Sports Drink Consumption

Abstract
Understanding why sports and energy drinks remain increasingly popular among adolescents despite declines in other sugar sweetened beverages is critical. This study points to memory for advertising exposure and adolescent athletic identity as two aspects that together help to explain consumption. An online survey of U.S. adolescents aged 14–18 (n = 503) was combined with Nielsen data for television and social media advertising expenditures by sports and energy drink brands in participants’ designated market areas (DMAs). Advertisement recall mediates the relationship between social media DMA expenditures and sports and energy drink consumption. Recall for television advertisements is related to consumption but is unrelated to television DMA expenditures. Athletic identity moderated the relationship between recall and consumption such that consumption increased as both recall and athletic identity increased, suggesting a role for motivated memory and motivated processing of ad messages based on athletic identity consistent with the limited capacity model of motivated media message processing. Based on these results, we conclude that effectiveness of expenditures in influencing behavior is dependent upon both ad recall and ad relevance, and that athletic identity is an important factor in ad effectiveness in the context of sports and energy drinks advertising.
Description
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Health Communication on 10/10/2022, available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10410236.2022.2131971. This article will be embargoed until 04/10/2024.
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Citation
Morgan E. Ellithorpe, Amy Bleakley, Michael Hennessy, Amy Jordan, Robin Stevens & Erin Maloney (2022) Athletes Drink Gatorade: DMA Advertising Expenditures, Ad Recall, and Athletic Identity Influence Energy and Sports Drink Consumption, Health Communication, DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2022.2131971