Talking Points

Meet with Legislators During July 4^th Recess:
Call for a Congressional Hearing on ALL Television Alcohol Advertising
 

Why the Hearings Are Needed:

• NBC’s action on hard liquor ads highlighted the need for tougher standards on all televised alcohol advertising to reduce youth exposure to commercials that glamorize and promote drinking in the powerful broadcast media. The present weak voluntary standards for beer ads – which also apply to the new crop of liquor-branded "alcopops" such as Smirnoff Ice and Bacardi Silver – allow HALF the audience to be underage!
   
• To many parents’ surprise and disappointment, hard-liquor brands are in fact still being heavily promoted to young people on network TV in commercials for liquor-branded "alcopops" (the industry will spend more than $350 million on such ads this year, according to trade journals). Brewers and hard-liquor producers have teamed up to market new, liquor-branded, fruit-flavored, pre-sweetened malt beverages – "alcopops" – that have special appeal for young people. Such liquor-branded products, including Smirnoff Ice, Bacardi Silver, Skyy Blue, Captain Morgan Gold, among others, are being heavily advertised this year to audiences that include large numbers of underage youth.
   
• Large audiences of underage viewers continue to be bombarded with hard liquor commercials that air on more than 400 independent and cable stations and on the radio across the country; those ads are subject to few, if any, explicit voluntary "responsibility" standards, and;
   
• Massive amounts (more than $700 million in 2000) of beer advertising continue to interest millions of underage people in drinking. Popular, glitzy, funny, hip, and memorable beer commercials provide a primary – and extremely powerful – source of "education" for young people about alcohol.
   
• Beer is the favorite alcoholic beverage of choice among young people (Eigen, 1991). Alcohol (primarily beer) consumption among underage persons is a leading cause of school failure, violence, unwanted pregnancies, accidental deaths, and numerous other injuries and social and economic costs to society (PIRE/OJJDP, 1999).
   
• Underage drinking and its harms are widespread. On average, young people begin drinking at 13.1 years of age. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, those who begin by age 15 are four times as likely to become alcohol dependent than those who wait until age 21. Alcohol is a factor in the four leading causes of death among persons ages 10 to 24: motor-vehicle crashes, unintentional injuries, homicide, and suicide. Underage drinking costs Americans some $53 billion annually.
   
• The booze industry commonly contends that ads have nothing to do with consumption or harm. Any first-year advertising student knows that ads serve to distinguish brands, attract new users, AND encourage consumption of products.
   
• In a September, 1999 report to Congress on promoting alcohol to underage consumers, the FTC found that measuring the effects of alcohol advertising on overall consumption faces significant methodological challenges. The FTC concluded that the inconclusive nature of the studies "does not rule out the existence of a clinically important effect of advertising on youth drinking decisions."
   
• Even as the Supreme Court overturned Massachusetts’ ban on billboard advertising for tobacco products, it upheld its long-standing acknowledgment that product advertising stimulates demand for products and suppressing advertising may have the opposite effect. Are we to believe that billboard advertising for cigars and smokeless tobacco lure kids, yet sexy, funny, romantic, or goofy television ads for beer don’t? Only the tobacco and alcoholic-beverage industries dare suggest that advertising has such modest intentions or effects.

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