Rapid Response Media Network
BMSG worked closely with the Strategic Alliance for Healthy Food and Activity Environments to use media advocacy to accelerate the coalition’s efforts to shift debate on nutrition and physical activity away from a primary focus on individual choice to one that includes corporate and government practices and the role of the environment in shaping eating and activity behaviors. The Rapid Response Media Network draws its members from the Strategic Alliance, The California Endowment’s Healthy Eating, Active Communities Initiative, and others in California interested in improving food and activity environments.
Media monitoring
BMSG monitored the food and beverage industry trade press and the business pages to inform the Strategic Alliance’s Rapid Response Media Network about new products and practices that shape the environment influencing food and beverage decisions. Through the monitoring, BMSG identified opportunities for members the Rapid Response Media Network to respond to breaking news and shape debate.
Strategic consultation
BMSG provided strategic consultation on media advocacy to the Strategic Alliance’s Rapid Response Media Network, so the Network could react effectively to breaking news and create news that highlights the role of the food and beverage environment.
Framing briefs
BMSG analyzed key issues that shape how people understand, and how advocates can talk about, food and activity environments.
Making the case for breastfeeding: The health argument isn’t enough
Breastfeeding can improve women’s and babies’ health, but simply trumpeting that message won’t improve breastfeeding rates. That’s because many social and cultural barriers make it difficult or undesirable for women to breastfeed. This framing brief shows advocates the key ingredients they need to produce effective breastfeeding messages that promote policies in support of this very basic but vital act.
Sugar water gets a facelift: What marketing does for soda
This Framing Brief describes the intensive, immersive, incessant marketing tactics soda companies are using to encourage young people to drink more of the top non-alcoholic beverage in America, soda.
What surrounds us shapes us: Making the case for environmental change
This Framing Brief helps advocates explain that what surrounds us — our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces — influences our health. When people understand that, then the policies that improve places make sense.
Food marketers greenwash junk food: Companies tout link to health and environmental movements
This Framing Brief explains how food and beverage companies are borrowing the symbolism of the environmental movement to cast a favorable “green” light on themselves and their products. But many of the products they label green are still high in fat, salt and calories, and whether they are eco-friendly is open to debate.
Reading between the lines: Understanding food industry responses to concerns about nutrition
When a food or beverage company does something that might be good for health, should public health groups congratulate them publicly? If not, why not? What do these promises mean? When companies’ words don’t match their deeds the answers are not always clear. This Framing Brief describes how food and beverage companies are reacting to pressure from public health groups and explores the implications for framing public health’s responses to those actions.
The problem with obesity
Obesity has become the popular term for a set of problems that result in premature death and injury from diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. It is a convenient term, but we should stop using it. This framing brief explains why.
Case study
A decade of advocacy: The Strategic Alliance for Healthy Food and Activity Environments
This case study of the Strategic Alliance, a network of 15 California-based organizations that came together to promote healthy food and activity environments, provides a roadmap for effective collaboration and highlights the impact a group of organizations can have when working together to effect change.