Sugary Visuals

This is a screenshot of a news site snippet. It comes from a pair of English celebrity chefs. They’ve spent the latter halves of their careers fronting “campaigning” food telly.

Here, they’re up before a parliamentary committee looking into the depressing epidemic of childhood obesity. The always reliable sketch writer Quentin Letts reports on Public Enemy Number One.

Big Pop, you might say. As an aside, how about his rinsing of this preceding speaker;

“Before the TV chefs arrived we had endured a session of the most grinding tedium from a line-up of professional lobbyists. They included a shouty Dr James Nobles from Leeds Beckett University, uttering seamless management-speak. What a dullard he was, boasting about how ‘we’ve sculpted a six-phase process’ and how we should ‘keep obesity as a burning-platform issue’. It needed a ‘whole-system approach’ with ‘route-maps’ and ‘traction’ and ‘best practice’ for ‘weight management services’. Gas gas gas, went this Nobles bloke, murdering the English language.”

Many a presenting lesson in there alone.

The above pic shows the difference in labelling from one top-seller soft drink, just one week into the UK Sugar Tax. A levy is now imposed on sugary drinks, dependent on the amount of ‘pure white and deadly’ therein.

On our right, how the label reflected ingredients before the tax. On our left, how the reformulation many such products have undergone to reduce sugar and therefore tax-related price tag has shrunk said inputs.

A good thing, so they suggest.

Difficult to argue against (phew). Even visually, the old recipe needed 16 folds of label. The new today, only 8. Surely that halving is indeed a good thing.

The selling point is simply their visual representation. It works, wouldn’t you say?

Not every (hardly any?) solution sell proposal impacts may lend themselves to such an apparent stark treatment. But maybe somewhere in there for you, does indeed hide something akin to those folded labels.

Can you find it? Then unfurl it to shape your winning argument?