Advertising for alcohol
Advertising for alcohol has long intertwined with cultural narratives surrounding celebration and social experiences, tracing back to ancient associations with figures like Dionysus. In contemporary society, alcohol ads often project an image of youth, beauty, and camaraderie, suggesting that drinking is integral to social acceptance and personal success. This portrayal can be particularly alluring to young audiences, who may be misled into believing that alcohol consumption will enhance their social lives, despite the legal drinking age being twenty-one in the U.S.
Critics argue that many alcohol advertising campaigns are intentionally designed to appeal to younger demographics, despite restrictions aimed at limiting their exposure. Iconic mascots such as Spuds McKenzie and advertising strategies that coincide with major sporting events have drawn scrutiny for targeting children and fostering early drinking habits. Studies indicate that increased exposure to alcohol advertisements correlates with a higher likelihood of alcohol-related health issues among youth, reinforcing concerns about the normalization of drinking in environments frequented by minors.
The alcohol industry's sponsorship of sports events, which attract diverse audiences, including many minors, complicates the dialogue around responsible advertising. As young fans are frequently bombarded with alcohol promotions, they may develop misconceptions about drinking being a harmless and essential part of social life, potentially setting the stage for future alcohol misuse. Thus, the complex dynamics of alcohol advertising raise critical questions about its impact on youth and public health.
Advertising for alcohol
Definition: Advertising for alcohol involves the use of various media in stores, shops, newspapers, and magazines, and on billboards, television, radio, websites, film, and clothing to entice and persuade persons to buy and consume products containing alcohol. Certain venues, particularly sporting events and concerts, also promote alcohol products because these venues are commonly sponsored by distributors of alcohol. Alcohol advertising especially influences youth.
Alcohol as Image
Since the ancient Greeks celebrated Dionysus, the god of wine, theater, and ecstasy, a connection has endured among alcohol, media, and sensuality. In addition to sharing a profound appeal to the senses, alcohol, theater, and ecstasy offer an escape from the mundane and a sense of liberation. The view of intoxication as a celebration and a rite of passage continues to this day, anchored by the many messages modern society reflects in its depictions of alcohol through advertising.
Echoes of Dionysus reverberate throughout much modern advertising for alcohol, which often touts youth, sexual prowess, beauty, and athleticism. Initiation into manhood, quite often involving male bonding through modern-day sporting events, is rarely viewed as complete without alcohol. Alcohol advertisers carefully create their own myths about alcohol normalcy, portraying a world where the successful people drink and all drinkers are rewarded.
Through advertising, young people in particular learn to associate alcohol with social acceptance. Those who abstain are promptly left behind and dismissed. Young people are especially susceptible to the lure of alcohol advertising. The images depicting alcohol’s social benefits are wildly exaggerated and distorted by alcohol advertising, and many young people tend to accept the misconception that drinking will somehow improve their lives.
Instead of finding the advertised camaraderie and companionship, many will find themselves, years later, abusing alcohol alone. Alcohol advertising frequently sells one reality but delivers another.
Alcohol Advertising and Youth
The legal age to buy alcohol in all fifty US states is twenty-one years. Many people argue that some alcohol advertising campaigns are designed specifically to appeal to the youth market, despite the legal barriers to consumption. One such compelling argument was frequently made about the advertising mascot Spuds McKenzie, a highly appealing 1980s ad image of a bull terrier dog, the original “party animal.”
Wearing sunglasses, a bandana, a Hawaiian shirt, and headphones, and holding a Bud Light beer, Spuds was depicted in tropical locales and surrounded by beautiful, scantily clad young women. First appearing to acclaim in a 1987 Bud Light commercial during the broadcast of the Super Bowl, Spuds, throughout the late 1980s, rode skateboards, raced horses, drove convertibles, maneuvered surfboards, played Frisbee, and combed beaches.
Sales of Bud Light beer soared during the Spuds ad campaign, which not only marketed the alcoholic beverage but also sold millions of dollars of Spuds paraphernalia: everything from T-shirts to caps to plush toys. Antidrinking groups responded by arguing that the campaign targeted children and teenagers. In 1989, Mothers Against Drunk Driving claimed that Anheuser-Busch , the maker of Bud Light, was deceptively marketing alcohol to children and demanded that Spuds ads cease promoting the beer. An investigation of the ad campaign by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ensued, and although the FTC found no wrongdoing by Anheuser-Busch, the company nevertheless terminated the campaign in 1989.
Anheuser-Busch again ignited controversy in the 1990s with its Budweiser Frogs ad campaign. First appearing as a Super Bowl television commercial in 1995, the Budweiser Frogs depicted three frogs, Bud, Weis, and Er, who lived on a log in a swamp behind a bar and croaked “Budweiser” rhythmically. In 1996, a study revealed that considerable numbers of nine- to eleven-year-old children could easily identify the Budweiser Frogs and associate them with beer, but were unable to recognize or identify various children’s cartoon figures. Antidrinking groups again accused the alcohol industry of targeting children.
Shortly thereafter, another study revealed that when asked to name US presidents, most eight- to twelve-year-old children could name few but had no difficulty naming a variety of brands of beer. In spite of these negative reports, the Budweiser Frogs campaign continued for many years; it is recognized in the adverting industry as one of most successful marketing campaigns in history.
A study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs in 2021 indicated that exposure to alcohol advertising increases the risk of alcohol-related health consequences among youth. While the alcohol industry must follow guidelines restricting the placement of alcohol advertisements only to media in which youth younger than twenty-one comprise no more than 28.4 percent, the guidelines do not account for variation in age groups of underage youth. From 2013 to 2018, the years of the study, alcohol advertising exposure among younger children grew faster than in other age groups. This age group included children ages 2 to 11.
Alcohol and Sporting Events
The alcohol industry is a frequent sponsor and promoter of sporting events, many of which appeal to a large percentage of fans who are minors. From the Super Bowl to the World Series to auto racing to college basketball, the alcohol industry spends billions of sponsorship and advertising dollars each year, specifically targeting an audience of sports fans, many of them younger than twenty-one years.
The alcohol industry provides a lucrative source of funding for collegiate sports, especially the annual National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball championships (known as March Madness), but some critics argue that the price for this funding is too high, owing to the toll it levies in the form of underage drinking. The NCAA’s playoff and championship games, for instance, welcome millions of children and minors as viewers each year, who are subjected to the same degree of intense alcohol advertising as adults. Although the alcohol industry maintains that it is advertising its products so rigorously during such sporting events only to establish brand loyalty among adults who already drink, March Madness nonetheless draws millions of underage viewers.
According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), studies reveal a greater propensity among young people to initiate drinking at a younger age if they are heavily exposed to alcohol advertising. Moreover, the NIAAA cites evidence demonstrating that the younger a person begins to drink, the greater the likelihood that he or she will become an alcoholic. For example, statistically, the NIAAA reports that a person who begins drinking by age fifteen years is four times as likely to become a heavy drinker and dependent on alcohol than a person who begins drinking at age twenty-one years.
Children, drawn to watch their favorite sports teams and athletes, are ill equipped to decipher the deceptive messages of alcohol advertising. Youths often come away from watching such sporting competitions with a false sense of normalcy, believing that alcohol consumption as portrayed by advertising is ubiquitous, harmless, fun, and inconsequential, regardless of age or circumstance. Fans attending both collegiate and professional sporting events sponsored by alcohol companies have recently become increasingly dismayed and alarmed at the escalation of public drunkenness and violence occurring among fans, an environment that is growing increasingly unsafe for children.
Alcohol Advertising on Social Media
In November 2018, Jonathan Noel and Thomas Babor, researchers at the University of Connecticut published a study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. They studied the effect that alcohol advertisements shown on Facebook had on 120 viewers between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four. The study revealed that the type of engagement with the ads and volume of engagement from other social media users influenced the likelihood that the participants would feel the desire to drink after viewing the ads and shares, likes, and comments. Participants were 3.5 times more likely to feel a desire to drink after viewing alcohol ads with pro-drinking comments and a high level of user engagement than they were after viewing alcohol ads with anti-drinking comments and high levels of user engagement. Pro-drinking comments also made participants more than twice as likely to like or share an alcohol ad when compared to one without such comments.
A study on published in Preventative Medicine in 2020 dispelled the myth that the more time adolescents spend on social media the less likely they are to drink. The researchers in the study found that a small increase in the use of social media increased the frequency of alcohol consumption for teens in the seventh to eleventh grades. They concluded that the way alcohol is portrayed on social media is encouraging kids to drink.
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