Alcohol marketing and youth:
Monitoring the effectiveness of the U.S. alcohol industry's self-regulation
David H. Jernigan
The intention of this article is to set out the context for alcohol advertising and promotion to youth through a brief description of the profile and toll of youth alcohol use. The alcohol industry's voluntary standards and efforts at self-regulation will then be examined, and finally some results of the work being done by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, to monitor alcohol advertising exposure to youth audiences will be provided.
The consequences of youth alcohol use are real and tragic. Alcohol plays a substantial role in the three leading causes of death among young people: unintentional injuries such as motor vehicle crashes, falls and drownings, as well as suicides and homicides. Young Americans who begin drinking prior to the age of 15 are four times as likely to develop alcohol dependence as those who wait until they are 21 to drink. Yet the numbers of American teens 12 to 17 who report having started drinking seems to be growing significantly, from 2.2 million in 1995 to 3.1 million in 1999. Monitoring the Future, the federal government's annual survey of drug use among schoolchildren, recently found that 16.6 per cent of eighth graders reported having been drunk at least once in the past year. By the tenth grade, that number has increased to nearly 40 per cent. Heavy sessional drinking (alcohol consumed at the level of five or more drinks on a single occasion) accounts for nearly all of the alcohol consumed by teenagers.
Self-regulation in the alcohol industry is based on codes adopted by trade associations and the companies themselves. The codes of the beer and distilled spirits manufacturers deserve the closest attention because they are the largest alcohol marketers. Statements from the codes will be paired with examples of current advertising. The Beer Institute code says that "Beer advertising should not suggest directly or indirectly that any of the laws applicable to the sale and consumption of beer should not be complied with." Yet an advertisement for Sam Adams Light Beer showed a young man hiding his beer behind his back when a law enforcement officer came to the door of his apartment. Offended by the advertisement's apparent mockery of law enforcement, the National Liquor Law Enforcement Association endeavored for four months to get the company to withdraw it, and only succeeded after taking the story to the Boston Globe.
The Beer Institute code also states, "No beer identification, including logos, trademarks, or names should be used on clothing, toys, games or game equipment, or other materials intended for use primarily by persons below the legal purchase age." Yet a Heineken magazine advertisement depicts a Nintendo video game controller with two beer bottles taped to it, and the tag line, "Add two more features to your controller." The code says, "Beer advertising and marketing should not contain any lewd or indecent language or images," a provision flaunted by numerous beer advertisements. The code stipulates, "Beer advertising and marketing materials should reflect generally accepted contemporary standards of good taste," and "beer advertising and marketing materials should not portray persons in a state of intoxication or in any way suggest that intoxication is acceptable conduct." Yet a current series of Coors television advertisements shows young people and young adults engaged in activities of questionable taste and exuberance suggesting intoxication, answering the question of why they are doing these things with the words, "Because we can."
When asked about enforcing the code during the Sam Adams controversy, Beer Institute general counsel Arthur Decelle told the Boston Globe that enforcing the code "is not our job. The code is not going to work if we become the judge."
On the distilled spirits side, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) code states that, "No distilled spirits advertising or marketing materials should contain advertising copy or an illustration unless it is dignified, modest, and in good taste." Yet distilled spirits advertising regularly features scantily-clad models in suggestive poses. The DISCUS code is based on two general principles.
The first is "to ensure responsible, tasteful, and dignified advertising and marketing of distilled spirits to adults who choose to drink." Many would conclude that the recent magazine advertisement for Bacardi rum, showing a man licking a woman's stomach, failed to live up to this standard. The advertisement was the subject of a protest to DISCUS, and Bacardi complied by discontinuing the print version. However, the segment of the advetisement showing the young man licking a woman's stomach remained on the Bacardi website for nearly a year afterwards, accompanied by the words "Tired of football? Join the party." The current campaign for Cutty Sark whisky, including sexually explicit internet downloads available to any who are able to click "enter" to get into the site, is also lacking in this regard.
The second DISCUS principle is "to avoid targeting advertising and marketing of distilled spirits to individuals below the legal purchase age." A recent study of alcohol advertising in magazines reported that distilled spirits producers accounted for 82.7 per cent of all alcoholic beverage advertising in magazines in 2001, spending approximately $332.7 million. More than half of the money alcohol producers spent on alcohol magazine advertising was in 24 magazines with youth audiences that exceed 15.8 per cent - the proportion of youth ages 12-20 in the general population age 12 and over.
These findings come from the first study released by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth last September. Established with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Center's mission is to monitor the marketing practices of the alcohol industry and to focus attention and action on industry practices that jeopardise the health and safety of America's youth. Reducing high rates of underage alcohol consumption and the suffering caused by alcohol-related injuries and deaths among youth requires using the public health strategies of limiting access to and the appeal of alcohol to underage persons. The Center does this by "reverse engineering" the marketing campaigns of the alcohol industry. Working with a media planning firm with 25 years of market research experience, and using the same market research databases and methodologies employed by the industry, the Center's analysis exposes information that was available to the industry when it made decisions about where and how to spend its advertising dollars.
The Center is looking at exposure in each of the principal categories of measured media. What we found in our first report, on alcohol advertising in magazines in 2001, is that total youth exposure to beer and distilled spirits advertising in magazines is systematic and pervasive. In 2001, youth ages 12-20 saw more beer and distilled spirits advertisements than adults 21 and over: 45 per cent more beer advertisements and 27 per cent more distilled spirit advertisements; more malternative ads – 60 per cent more advertisements for the new sweet and fizzy beverages such as Smirnoff Ice; and fewer wine advertisements – 58 per cent fewer than adults. Nearly a third of all alcoholic beverage advertising was placed in ten magazines with youth audience compositions of 25 per cent or greater, while 25 brands placed their advertisements solely in magazines delivering disproportionately high numbers of young readers relative to the presence of young people in the general population 12 and above.
In our report on alcohol advertising on television in the U.S. in 2001, released in December 2002, we examined 208,909 alcohol advertisement placements on television in that year, and found that nearly one-quarter of those on U.S. television were more likely to have been seen by young people than by adults. Youth were more likely to see advertisements for alcohol than for such traditional youth oriented products as candy, gum, sneakers, skincare products, or jeans. And finally, the distilled spirits and beer industry standards stating that advertisements may not appear on programmes with audiences composed of a majority of persons under the legal drinking age of 21 left 99 per cent of television programming open to alcohol advertisements.
Clearly there is a need for stronger standards for alcohol advertising exposure to youth. In its review of alcohol industry advertising practices in 1999, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the body in the U.S. responsible for protecting consumers as well as safeguarding market competition, called on the industry to "raise the current standard to reduce underage alcohol ad exposure." The FTC said the industry should create independent external review boards with responsibility and authority to address complaints, and asked the industry to bar placement on television series and in other media with the largest underage audiences, and conduct regular audits of previous placements. Little has happened on any of these fronts since the FTC released its report in 1999. Meanwhile, Mothers Against Drunk Driving has called for restricting the placement of alcohol advertisements on television to programmes where the underage audience is 10 per cent or less. The American Medical Association has called for a complete ban on all broadcast advertising of alcohol.
To provide a scientific base for policy debates over youth exposure to alcohol advertising, the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth will continue its analyses, moving on in the coming months to other measured media such as radio, as well as to more ephemeral media such as the internet, sports marketing, sponsorships, and product placements in film and entertainment television.
The alcohol industry's advertising images are placed so that they can become lodged in our children's imaginations, their social lives, the magazines they read, the music they listen to, the places they go during their school vacations. At the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, we plan to extend our monitoring activities so that we are everywhere that the alcohol marketers are. We hope in this way to assist the American public, including parents, policy makers, and the press, to raise our awareness of the alcohol industry's marketing practices. This is a central goal of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, so that findings like those we have shown today do not fly under our collective radar. It is our belief that the ensuing policy discussions will lead to clear and enforceable standards for alcoholic beverage advertising that allow for legitimate business activity while protecting our children from predatory marketing practices.
Dr David H. Jernigan is Research Director, Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.