Promoting bad eating habits!

For a few weeks now, i have been observing an ad on one of the local Television stations; WBS , in which the promoters of Blue Band margarine have taken their advertising skills to a different level.

In the ad, a mother measures the height of her son and then feeds him with bread spread with Blue Band. While feeding the kid reads on the cover of the Blue Band tin something that says.....Blue band for a faster and healthy growth. What follows is not desirable;

The kid gets bread, spreads quite a huge amount of Blue Band repeatedly and the faster way in which he eats it is alarming. That's not enough, another girl who is seated on the opposite side of the table shakes her head in disbelief at the way her brother is eating. he is not done yet, he runs to fetch his mother to measure his height again

Now, i must admit that blue band is good and i like it too. In fact, i am not a good fan of bread but i usually find reason to have it when there is Blue Band at the table, but the way the ad portrays blue band and its message of "Daily Blue Band, Daily growth" is in my opinion very dangerous to our growing children.

Come to think of it, the world is battling the growing obesity cases. I am neither a scientist nor a nutritionist but in my layman's knowledge i know that eating to much fat is not good for my body, so what about a kid?

When i was young, i always wanted to be like my brothers. I repeatedly wished that one morning i could wake up and i am as big as my brother so that i could do what was a preserve of 'big boys'.

Imagine a situation like this, where a kid is desirous of driving that car in the garage! and now he has found a faster way to do it; "eat huge amounts of blue band daily for a faster growth", do you see what i see? the kid will eat as much as he can access to make sure he is big in a few days or weeks to drive that car. Truth is, he will not be what he desires but instead he'll be a fatty lazy kid who cannot even help himself.

Before i decided to comment on this ad, i took it upon myself to check what Unilever says about blue band but what i found out is totally different from what the ad says. In agreement with the international Nutritional guidelines from WHO, they recommend a soft spread of margarine on bread for a healthy living but the ad surely speaks to the contrary.

While trying to market our products, it is desirable that we design market strategies that will not have a bad effect on people's lifestyles.

Blue band is surely a good ad on for breakfast but the message in the ad will do nothing to instill good eating habits in kids other than increasing sales and eventually profits for the manufactures as parents suffer with hospital bills of too much fat related diseases.

I stand to be corrected but remember my argument is not on the ingredients of Blue Band but on the way it is portrayed in the ad and the bad eating habits that will result from it.