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. 2023 Dec;38(13):3031-3039.
doi: 10.1080/10410236.2022.2131971. Epub 2022 Oct 10.

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

Morgan E Ellithorpe  1 , Amy Bleakley  1 , Michael Hennessy  1 , Amy Jordan  2 , Robin Stevens  3 , Erin Maloney  1
Affiliations

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

Morgan E Ellithorpe et al. Health Commun. 2023 Dec.

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Conceptual model.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Graph of the interaction between recall for television energy drink advertising and athletic identity on energy drink consumption.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Graph of the interaction between recall for social media energy drink advertising and athletic identity on energy drink consumption.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Graph of the interaction between recall for television sports drink advertising and athletic identity on sports drink consumption.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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