The visual style of food marketing: TikTok and the teen audience

Unhealthy food marketing to youth on digital platforms is engaging and widespread, prompting calls from public health bodies to restrict and/or monitor this marketing. Yet little is known about what teenagers find persuasive within the online food advertisements they see, especially on teen-dominated platforms like TikTok. This exploratory study examines the visual style of food advertising on TikTok. Using multimodal thematic visual analysis, it assesses 422 TikTok food ads that 147 teens captured and deemed persuasive specifically due to ‘visual style.’ Seven visual styles were apparent: bold focus, ‘real,’ artistic, memeified, nostalgic, maximalist, and bespoke. This typology offers new insights into how teen-targeted food ads are visually persuasive within TikTok’s short-video format and reveals how meme-style aesthetics and traditional advertising are mobilized to seize teen attention.