Alcohol adverts are everywhere: on television, online, at sporting events, and on billboards. We know that exposure to alcohol advertising is linked to increased drinking. But not everyone responds to adverts in the same way. So what makes some people more susceptible than others?
Our new study, published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, suggests that a key part of the answer lies in where people direct their attention. Put simply, the more attention you pay to alcohol adverts, the more you crave alcohol, and the more you end up drinking.
What we did
We brought participants into the lab and showed them video clips in which a beer advert and a soft drink advert played side by side. Crucially, we didn’t just observe. We experimentally manipulated attention. Half the participants were nudged to pay more attention to the beer adverts, and the other half to the soft drink adverts. We then measured how much they craved beer and how much they actually drank in a taste test.
Attention drives craving, and craving drives drinking
Participants directed to attend to beer adverts reported stronger cravings for beer and went on to drink more of it. Those directed toward the soft drink adverts did not show this pattern.
Importantly, further analysis showed that the effect on drinking was driven by craving. Paying more attention to alcohol adverts increased craving, and that increased craving led to greater consumption. This wasn’t just a correlation. By experimentally controlling where people looked, we could establish that attention plays a causal role in this chain.
This is an important first step. Previous research had shown that people who spontaneously pay more attention to alcohol cues tend to drink more, but those studies couldn’t rule out the possibility that people who already crave alcohol simply look at adverts more. Our design flips this on its head: we changed where people directed their attention first, and then observed the downstream effects on craving and drinking. This is, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for this causal pathway in the context of alcohol advertising.
Why this matters for advertising policy
For those working to strengthen alcohol advertising regulation, this finding adds a new piece to the evidence base. The case for restricting alcohol marketing has traditionally rested on the well-established association between advertising exposure and drinking behaviour. Our study begins to go further by identifying a specific mechanism through which adverts may exert their influence: they capture attention, which triggers craving, which drives consumption.
This is a single study, and more research is needed before drawing firm policy conclusions. But if this mechanism holds up, it has practical implications. If attention is the entry point, then the sheer visibility of alcohol marketing in everyday life becomes a direct concern. Every advert competing for a person’s gaze in a pub, on a bus, or during a football match is a potential trigger for this attention-craving-consumption chain.
It may also strengthen the argument for reducing the volume and prominence of alcohol advertising, not just its content. Regulations that focus solely on what adverts say or depict may not go far enough. Our findings raise the possibility that even adverts framed as “responsible” could still drive craving and consumption if they successfully capture attention, which is, after all, exactly what advertising is designed to do.
A new direction for intervention
Beyond regulation, our results hint at a complementary approach. If attention to alcohol adverts can be experimentally redirected in a single session, there is potential to develop attention-training programmes that help individuals become more resilient to the pull of alcohol marketing. This kind of targeted intervention could be particularly valuable for people identified as being at greater risk of harmful drinking.
This is still early-stage work. Our study used a young adult sample and focused on beer. But the principle is promising. Future research will need to test whether these effects generalise to other types of alcohol, other populations, and real-world settings.
The bottom line
Alcohol advertising works, in part, because it captures attention. And our findings suggest that attention can trigger a chain reaction, from craving to consumption, that people may not even be aware of. Much more research is needed, but for policymakers and public health advocates, these early results point in a clear direction: when it comes to alcohol marketing, reducing visibility may be just as important as regulating content.
The full study is available here.
Written by Dr Daniel Rudaizky, an academic at the School of Population Health and the enAble Institute, Curtin University, and the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Western Australia.
All IAS Blogposts are published with the permission of the author. The views expressed are solely the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute of Alcohol Studies.