According to AdAge.com, a new university report is criticizing alcohol advertisers for failing to keep booze ads away from teens. The report closely follows another report that found a decline in youth binge drinking.
Industry ads are prohibited to be on TV shows where more than 30% of the audience is below the legal drinking age. Last year, 7.5 percent of all alcohol ads failed to meet that standard, down from 8.6 percent in 2008, according to a study by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
However, the center points out that there is an increase in alcohol marketing exposure to teens. The report examined the 2.7 million alcohol TV ads from 2001-2009, and showed that they zero in on people ages 12-20, who are most at risk of taking up alcohol as a result of ads. 91 percent were exposed to alcohol TV ads in 2009, seeing an average of 366 ads, according to the study.
The center wants marketers to tighten up standards to ban booze ads on shows where more than 15 percent of the audience is ages 12-20.
“It’s just not possible to stop all booze ads from reaching kids,” said Dan Jaffe, executive Vice President for government relations for the Association of National Advertisers. “If you start advertising at three in the morning, you would hope that most young kids would be in bed—but even then, that would not be the case with all children.”
