Sugar High
Sugar addiction is a major problem in our society that goes unnoticed. How is eating candy and sugar all day a bad thing?! Sugar can be up to nine times as addictive as cocaine. The goal of this project was to raise awareness to sugar addiction and how enticing candy products can be because of their bright and colorful packaging.
One major issue in the world is sugar addiction. Sugar addiction is extremely similar to drug addiction and is eight times more addictive than cocaine. I really wanted to show this similarity and how severe both issues are. Most drug addiction commercials or advertisements you see are very dark and intimidating, I wanted to create a totally different feeling for a “lighter” issue, sugar addiction.
I chose this topic because I think it’s a very underrepresented problem and most people don’t realize how much sugar they consume, and how much they rely on it. The younger generation is more likely to be addicted to sugar than the older generation, and they don’t even realize it. My target audience for the photos is teenagers and above. I think kids in high school could really relate to this campaign because they start to either experience drugs, or have friends who are, so they would be able to identify what I’m hinting at in each photo, while younger children might just see candy and nothing beyond that.
My intention for the project is to raise awareness to how serious sugar addiction is in comparison to a more well-known problem, which is drug addiction. If the audience can understand that sugar addiction is similar if not worse to drug addiction, more parents and children might give more effort to try to solve this issue. I could picture in my head what types of photos I was wanting to take, and I wanted them very bright and vibrant. I think it’s lacking a little bit when it comes to various “tools” or objects associated with drugs simply because I don’t have access to those (which is a good thing!). Other than that I’m really pleased with how they turned out. The logo is still a bit of a work in progress after getting feedback on it in our class critique.
I think the next step in taking this project further would be to research and gather factual information about sugar addiction and include this (somewhere) on the advertisement photos. I can also envision a cool TV commercial, using the same objects and color combinations, but showing more actions. For example, a teenager throwing back a bunch of “pills” aka smarties.