Energy bar advertisements

The most common words in energy bar advertisements seem somewhat obvious: they include descriptions of the product category (energy, protein, carb and bar); acknowledgement of the consumer/reader (you and your) and generic yet positive words (make, high, delicious and will). There were 22 mentions of flavor-related words (like chocolate and almonds) and 94 total mentions of health-related words (calcium, nutrition, protein and whey, for example).

Authors' note:
In the samples collected, it is easy to see that each energy bar company tends to fall into certain patterns (from layout to diction) when it creates its advertisements. Because the number of samples per energy bar company was not consistent, two sets of statistics are presented to the left--a blue bar represents the average number of times a word appears in an ad, weighting the data from each company by the number of ads provided; a purple bar uses the raw data without differentiating the numbers by company.

More surprising is the number of words per advertisement, which averaged out at almost 46 words per advertisement. The most common number of words per ad is in the range of 24-31 words. Based on these numbers, energy bar advertisements place one to two full sentences or almost two to five sentence fragments (usually one or two appear in an average ad) per energy bar advertisement. The advertisements use long copy to detail the health benefits of their products and to give the consumer details such as ingredients or flavors that help differentiate the company's product from its competitors.