Authors
Paula-Alexandra Gitu
R. Cerina
Alexander Grigoriev
Stefanie Vandevijvere
Date (dd-mm-yyyy)
2026-03-11
Title
Evaluating AI Models for Food and Alcohol Advertisement Classification Against Human Benchmarks
Journal
Sci Rep
Publication Year
2026-03-11
Document type
Article
Abstract
The growth of food and alcohol marketing on social media creates a need for scalable monitoring methods that go beyond
manual processing. This study evaluates whether Large Language Models and Vision-Language Models can recognize
advertisements and identify their features in consistence with general public or expert opinion. We collected 1000 Facebook
ads from major Belgian brands, and annotated them with 600 crowd workers, three dieticians and four AI models (GPT-4o,
Qwen 2.5, Pixtral and Gemma3). Our analysis of the data shows that for single-option advertisement features, like alcohol
presence or target group, GPT-4o and Qwen reached agreement with the dietician consensus above 90%, similar to the level of
pairwise agreement observed between individual dieticians. Though agreement was lower for multiple choice features, like
premium offers and marketing strategies, it was still within the variability observed in crowd raters. The bias analysis revealed
how models interpret certain labels, with some being consistently under- or over-detected. Based on these findings, we propose
tiered deployment recommendations that distinguish between ad features that MLLMs can already monitor with human-level
accuracy, and more complex features requiring expert oversight and taxonomy refinement, like marketing strategies or food
categories.
URL
go to publisher's site
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/524674ca-be55-4cd1-815e-be805148c075