How FMCG Brands Can Thrive Despite UK HFSS Ad Ban

Executive Summary

October 2025 marks a pivotal moment for UK FMCG brands. New regulations banning pre-9 pm TV advertising and restricting digital promotion will significantly disrupt how food and beverage companies engage consumers. These changes demand more than tactical tweaks - they require a fundamental shift in brand visibility strategy.

In response, Luscid and The Value Xchange have joined forces to offer brands clarity and confidence as they navigate the UK’s HFSS advertising restrictions. Luscid delivers insight-led intelligence to help brands identify sponsorship opportunities that are both compliant and commercially effective. The Value Xchange brings decades of experience in media, sports & entertainment partnerships to ensure those opportunities translate into measurable impact. Together, they provide marketers with the tools and expertise needed to adapt responsibly and effectively in a changing landscape.

This whitepaper provides FMCG marketers with evidence-based guidance on how partnership marketing can support long-term brand equity, aligning with both the letter and spirit of the legislation, while maintaining meaningful connections with the right audiences.

Understanding the Regulatory Landscape

The UK's new regulations tackle a genuine public health concern. With one in eight children aged 2-10 now classified as obese, the government has taken decisive action to limit exposure to HFSS advertising. The cornerstone of these measures is the watershed ban on  television advertising before 9 pm, alongside additional restrictions on digital platforms.  A change is expected to remove approximately £200 million  in annual TV advertising spend from the FMCG sector.

For many brands, this affects not just where they show up, but how they remain visible at all. This represents more than a simple shift in tactics; it demands a fundamental re-evaluation of how HFSS brands build and sustain visibility in a changing media and regulatory landscape.

The End of an Era in FMCG Marketing

For decades, FMCG marketers have mastered the balance of reach and relevance, building brand equity through the scale of broadcast. Household names like Coco Pops and Walkers embedded themselves in cultural memory, driven by high-frequency TV and digitally targeted reinforcement. Often via high-impact, appointment-to-view TV moments.

This strategy enabled marketers to:

• Achieve mass visibility through broadcast
• Layer in segmentation via digital and social
• Create responsive, multi-format campaigns with agility
• Cultivate brand communities, particularly among families and younger demographics

There’s no question that FMCG marketers have historically been right to focus their budgets on broadcast. Seven of the top ten genres identified in Luscid’s FMCG report, including Comedy, Drama, Films on TV, Documentaries, Entertainment Shows, and Reality Television, have consistently delivered both the scale and agility needed to drive campaign effectiveness.

The dominance of these formats reflects a tried-and-tested strategy: pairing high-frequency products with high-frequency viewing habits, particularly within family and household environments where purchasing decisions are shaped.

However, with the introduction of the new HFSS restrictions, this well-established model is being fundamentally dismantled. The traditional broadcast, at scale and frequency brands have relied upon, is no longer a viable primary approach.

Strategic Partnerships: A Shift in Brand Visibility

FMCG brands now face the challenge of maintaining creative, resonant messaging within new regulatory boundaries. One strategic direction for brands is to develop thoughtfully designed partnerships that create meaningful consumer connections while fully embracing both the letter and spirit of the new regulations.

As the marketing landscape evolves, partnership opportunities present a strategic pathway forward that enables brands to connect authentically with their customers while upholding the highest standards of responsibility that both consumers and regulators expect.

Effective sports and entertainment partnerships allow brands to:

• Reach established audience segments through cultural and community touchpoints
• Build trust through association with positive activities
• Showcase brand values rather than focus on product attributes through storytelling

Luscid's proprietary partnership selection data model, alongside The Value Xchange’s decades of experience in delivering winning partnerships across the Sport & Entertainment ecosystem helps marketers navigate these opportunities through rigorous data analysis and strategic alignment.

What Our Research Reveals

Using Luscid’s proprietary platform, we evaluated 89 potential partnership environments against an illustrative FMCG brand brief, designed to mirror real-world marketing objectives under the new regulatory landscape. The report was built around the following criteria:

• A mid-market target audience, demonstrating active purchase behaviour across categories including snack foods, confectionery and chocolate, ice cream, soft drinks, candy and biscuits.
• A socially active, family-oriented consumer profile, classified through the Luscid platform as Mobile Dependent, Heavy Social Media Users, with a strong representation among Family Shoppers and Active Parents.
• A requirement for broadcast-scale audience reach, supported by complementary digital impressions.
• An emphasis on positive association with brand values aligned to spirit of the HFSS regulatory changes, including Health and Wellbeing, Community and Charity, Education and Diversity and Equality.

This approach ensured that the partnership environments through Luscid’s analysis not only deliver on audience reach and engagement but also reflect responsible brand alignment within the evolving public health landscape.

Several findings stand out for FMCG marketers:

• Football (Soccer) delivers exceptional visibility, scoring 117.4% above average on the Luscid Broadcast Visibility Index. It also performs remarkably well on ethical messaging, with a 68.7% higher resonance than average, on responsibility and wellbeing metrics.
• Marathon events provide authentic health associations, creating natural environments for brands to emphasise purpose rather than products, though it falls back on Broadcast Visibility, with an index score 17% weaker than the average of 89 passion points that we evaluated.
• Rugby Union (59.5% above average), Athletics, Triathlon, Netball, and Cycling offer strong combinations of reach and values alignment, especially valuable for brands targeting families.
• Live experiences generate deeper engagement, with an average CSR engagement index of 54.3%, creating more meaningful connections than traditional advertising.

Notably, these environments remain relatively untapped by HFSS brands. Just 1% of UK football sponsorship revenue comes from HFSS categories, compared to their significant presence in traditional advertising channels.

Activating with Integrity: Evolving FMCG Strategy in a New Era

For FMCG marketing leaders navigating the HFSS regulatory landscape, this moment represents more than a compliance challenge, it's a fundamental shift in how brands connect with consumers. As traditional broadcast and digital avenues become restricted, the industry still has options, but needs to embrace a strategic evolution in approach.

Luscid’s comprehensive analysis provides valuable direction. Football, for instance, offers great visibility, but more impressively, it indexes 68.7% higher on responsibility and wellbeing metrics. Marathons, community sports and live experiences also represent partnership territories where brand presence can be both effective and ethically sound.

Rather than viewing these environments as mere replacements for lost advertising channels, brands could capture competitive advantages by building brand equity through purposeful engagement:

• Audience understanding drives commercial results: Robust audience insights help brands identify environments where their audience naturally gathers, ensuring partnerships reach the right people with minimal wastage through contexts that resonate with their existing behaviours and interests.
• Value alignment delivers business growth: The most effective partnerships are those where brands genuinely contribute to communities, wellbeing initiatives, or cultural moments, creating meaningful stories and connections that translate to measurable increases in consideration and purchase intent, particularly among value-conscious consumers.
• Holistic brand experience integration amplifies ROI: These strategic relationships deliver maximum impact when woven throughout the consumer journey, from retail storytelling and product development to community engagement and corporate responsibility initiatives, creating multiple touchpoints that reinforce brand positioning while driving commercial objectives.
• Purpose-driven performance metrics demonstrate success: Leading FMCG brands are already measuring success through indicators like trust building, community impact, and brand purpose fulfilment, complementing traditional metrics with measures that demonstrate long-term business value creation.
• Driving scale beyond the partnership via paid amplification: Constant advancements in digital audience targeting and content distribution allow brands to take their partnership story to a wider audience. And powerful content can drive increases in organic visibility across their online presence.

In this context, strategic partnerships represent the natural evolution of marketing itself, an approach that delivers deeper consumer connections and stronger business results by focusing on meaningful engagement rather than interruptive messaging.

By embracing this approach, brands could find that they can confidently activate in spaces that align with both regulatory requirements and their business ambitions, often discovering more impactful connections than traditional advertising previously delivered.

Leading Through Transition

The forthcoming HFSS restrictions represent more than regulatory hurdles; they signal changing expectations about how food and beverage brands engage with society.

The brands that will thrive won't be those searching for regulatory loopholes. They'll be organisations that embrace this new landscape, developing partnerships that build lasting brand equity while respecting public health priorities.

This transition isn't easy. It requires new capabilities, metrics, and organisational structures. But it also offers a genuine opportunity to create more meaningful consumer connections and demonstrate authentic corporate citizenship.

Once the transitions are navigated, partnerships and sponsorships, when set up with clear objectives and grounded in data, represent one of the most versatile and credible tools in the modern marketing mix. Far beyond logo placement or short-term visibility, they can influence every stage of the customer journey: from driving brand awareness and shaping perception to influencing consideration, trial, and loyalty.

When aligned with brand values and consumer interests, partnerships can strengthen corporate reputation, fuel content strategies, support ESG commitments, and create distinctive consumer experiences. Crucially, they are not speculative or intangible; with the right planning, measurement frameworks and activation strategies, partnerships become accountable marketing investments, capable of delivering both immediate impact and sustainable brand value.

For further information or to discuss the findings in more detail, please contact:

The Value Xchange: Jamie Wilson, Director: jamie@thevaluexchange.co.uk, or Oliver Rockett, Partnerships Manager: oliver@thevaluexchange.co.uk

Luscid: Damien Gillman, Chief Strategy Officer: damien.gillman@luscid.com, or Charlotte Burrows, Marketing Manager: charlotte.burrows@luscid.com

About The Value Xchange

The Value Xchange is a sports, media and entertainment marketing agency that creates partnerships with lasting impact for fans, sponsors, and rights holders. With roots in media and a heritage in sponsorship dating back to the mid-1990s, its team brings deep industry experience and a commitment to building partnerships that matter.

The agency works across sectors to help brands navigate a changing media and cultural landscape. By combining strategic thinking with data-driven tools like Luscid, The Value Xchange supports more informed decision-making and ensures partnerships align with audience values, brand purpose, and long-term business goals.

About Luscid

Launched in 2022, Luscid is a Martech platform purpose-built to transform the sponsorship selection process. By combining 15 years of data across 500,000 historic and live partnerships in over 80 countries, Luscid helps brands deploy marketing budgets through clear, data-driven insights. The platform delivers an agnostic, objective view of the global sponsorship landscape, enabling marketers to identify the right opportunities, reduce inefficiencies, and stay ahead of the competition.