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 There have been similar results from studies conducted in the U.S.,
Scotland and the Pacific, said lead author Avalon de Bruijn of the
European Center for Monitoring Alcohol Marketing in Heerde, the
Netherlands, but “it was a surprise to me that the impact of online
advertising was so strong and the exposure so high among young
people in these countries.”
Alcohol marketing seems unavoidable on the internet, de Bruijn told
Reuters Health by email.
The researchers surveyed more than 9,000 students around age 14 at
schools in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. About 4,500
kids said they never drank alcohol and were categorized as
non-drinkers; all others were categorized as drinkers. In addition,
one quarter of all the participants said that they had five or more
drinks at once in the past 30 days and were classified as binge
drinkers.
The students answered questions about having seen promotional emails
or joke emails mentioning alcohol brands and websites for alcohol
brands or whose content was about drinking. They were also asked
about using mobile phone or computer screensavers containing an
alcohol brand name or logo and about having used a profile website
on social media that contained an alcohol advertisement.
Two-thirds said they had noticed an alcohol ad online, and one third
had used a profile website with an alcohol ad. One fourth received
promotional emails containing alcohol advertisements and one in five
looked at websites for alcohol brands. The proportion of kids who
had downloaded a screensaver featuring an alcohol brand ranged from
just under one in three in Italy to one in six in Poland.
In each country, higher exposure to online alcohol marketing was
tied to greater odds of being a drinker and of binge drinking,
according to the results in Alcohol and Alcoholism.
“Existing research suggests that exposure to alcohol marketing
increases the risk of starting to drink and to increase the amount
and frequency of drinking among drinkers,” de Bruijn said, though
the current study cannot prove that one factor causes the other.
Active engagement with online marketing materials was also found to
be more closely linked to drinking behavior than passive exposure to
them, the report notes.
All types of alcohol advertising have been tied in past research to
higher levels of drinking, de Bruijn said. “However, the impact of
online alcohol marketing is especially influential. This might be
explained by the interactive and personalized character of online
alcohol advertising.”
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Past research has also shown that price policies and restricting the
number of alcohol vendors in a certain area can reduce binge
drinking among youth, she said.
“Given that teens are spending considerable amount of time online,
it is not surprising that advertising and marketing are influential
in the online realm,” said Dana Litt of the Center for the Study of
Health and Risk Behaviors at the University of Washington in
Seattle, who was not part of the new study.
But it is possible that adolescents who drink more are seeking out
alcohol advertising and marketing more than adolescents who are not
drinkers, Litt told Reuters Health by email.
“It may not be feasible to reduce the volume of alcohol marketing
teens view online, but it is probably more realistic, at least in
the short term, to work on teaching our kids how to be more savvy
‘consumers’ of this alcohol content by teaching media literacy
skills,” she said.
Most alcohol advertisers have pledged to voluntarily limit ads
targeting teens but the nature of the internet makes it very hard to
monitor and enforce these regulations, Litt said.
“In most EU countries the volume of online alcohol advertisements in
not regulated by law and only by insufficient voluntary codes by the
alcohol industry,” de Bruijn said. “There is a responsibility of EU
Member States and the European Union to regulate this in order to
protect children and adolescents against harmful exposure to online
alcohol advertisements.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/27U4I5p Alcohol and Alcoholism, online May 5,
2016.
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