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The Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth February 9 2010
Youth Overexposed

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Executive Summary

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Executive Summary

Youth Overexposed: Alcohol Advertising in Magazines, 2001 to 2003

I. Executive Summary

Distilled spirits and beer advertising in national magazines between 2001 and 2003 consistently reached more underage youth1 than adults on a per capita basis, according to an analysis by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) of 10,455 alcohol ads costing almost $1 billion. Major findings from this analysis include the following:

Overexposure of Underage Youth

  • The beer industry led the way in this "overexposure" 2 of underage youth, delivering 52%, 57%, and 48% more advertising to underage youth than to adults on a per capita basis in 2001, 2002 and 2003 respectively.
  • The distilled spirits industry delivered 33%, 23% and 20% more advertising to underage youth than to adults on a per capita basis in 2001, 2002 and 2003 respectively. However, the dominance in spending by distilled spirits companies (see below) meant that the volume of distilled spirits advertising reaching underage youth overwhelmed that of beer.
  • Collectively, underage youth overexposure to alcohol advertising declined from 26% to 15% during this period as companies moved more of their ad placements to publications with 30% or less underage youth readership (see below), the spending on advertising for "alcopops" 3 declined, and wine advertising continued its trend of not overexposing underage youth in general.

Distilled Spirits Leads Spending, Beer Spending Up

  • Distilled spirits advertising was by far the dominant category of alcohol advertising in magazines during this period, accounting for 79%, 76% and 70% of the advertising dollars in 2001, 2002 and 2003 respectively.
  • Beer spending increased from $31 million in 2001 to $34 million in 2002, and then jumped to $55 million in 2003. This, combined with the decline in distilled spirits spending, resulted in beer advertising accounting for 16.8% of alcohol ad spending in 2003, up from 9.5% and 9.9% in 2001 and 2002, respectively.
  • Advertising for alcopops all but disappeared between 2002 and 2003. In 2001 and 2002 alcopops advertising accounted for 2.2% and 3% of the ad spending respectively, but in 2003 this declined to .9%.
  • Although spending on alcopops advertising declined, its overexposure of underage youth grew. On a per capita basis, underage youth were exposed to 63% more alcopops magazine advertising than legal-age adults in 2001, and this grew to 72% in 2002, and finally to 92% in 2003.

Half of Alcohol Ads Placed in Magazines with Disproportionate Youth Readerships

  • More than 55% of the $990 million spent on alcohol advertising in magazines between 2001 and 2003 went to ad placements in magazines that were more likely to be read by underage youth than by adults on a per capita basis.
  • In 2003, more than 50% of the $326 million spent on magazine advertising by alcohol companies, as well as almost half of the 3,241 ads, were in magazines read by disproportionate numbers of underage youth.

Impact of New Industry Marketing Guidelines

  • In September 2003, the trade associations for the beer and distilled spirits industries announced a new voluntary guideline for their members: no advertising in publications with 30% or greater underage youth audiences. In 2001, the alcohol industry placed 382 ads worth $30 million in publications with greater than 30% underage youth compositions, and in 2002 this increased slightly to 389 ads worth almost $38 million. However, in 20034 the alcohol industry placed only 223 ads worth almost $20 million in such publications, indicating a move toward the new threshold even before it was announced.
  • While the alcohol industry substantially reduced the number of ads and the amount of spending in publications with 30% or greater underage youth audiences between 2002 and 2003, the reductions in the number of ads and the amount of spending in publications with 15% or greater underage youth audiences were more modest. Fifteen percent is the threshold proposed by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine in their landmark September 2003 report on underage drinking in the United States because it reflects the actual proportion of underage youth, ages 12 to 20, in the U.S. population. The reductions in the number of ads and the amount of spending in these publications were 19% and 15% between 2002 and 2003, while the corresponding reductions for publications above a 30% threshold were 43% and 48%.

II. Why the Concern

Alcohol use is the leading illegal drug problem among America's youth. Every day, 7,000 young people under age 16 take their first drink. 5 Young people are more likely to drink alcohol than to smoke or use other illegal drugs. 6 In 2004, one in five eighth-graders, more than one in three 10th-graders, and almost half of 12th-graders reported drinking in the past month. And nearly one in five 10th-graders and one in three 12th-graders had been drunk at least once in the past month. 7

When young people drink, they are far more likely to drink heavily than adults, 8 and the consequences are predictable and tragic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in 2001 (the most recent year for which figures are available) 4,554 young people under 21 died from alcohol-related causes. 9 More than 30% of drivers ages 16 to 20 who died in motor vehicle crashes in 2003 had been drinking, 10 and alcohol is involved in an estimated 23% of suicides11 and 47% of homicides among persons under 21. 12 Drinking among young people can also impair brain development, 13 and binge drinking may increase the likelihood of teen pregnancy. 14

A growing body of public health research has explored the relationship between alcohol advertising and young people's drinking behavior. Studies have shown that youth exposure to alcohol advertising increases awareness of that advertising, 15 which in turn influences young people's beliefs about drinking, intentions to drink, and drinking behavior. 16 Brain imaging has revealed that, when shown alcoholic beverage advertisements, teens with alcohol use disorders have greater activity in areas of the brain previously linked to reward, desire, positive affect and episodic recall, with the degree of brain response highest in youths who consumed more drinks per month and reported greater desires to drink. 17 When it reviewed the evidence on this issue in 1999, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) concluded that, "While many factors may influence an underage person's drinking decisions, including among other things parents, peers, and the media, there is reason to believe that advertising also plays a role." 18

III. About This Report

Alcohol advertising reaching young people has been a subject of concern for parents, policymakers and youth advocates for many years. The debate has often centered on the content of alcohol advertising. However, as the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine recently concluded as part of their landmark study, Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility, 19 "formulating and applying a content-based standard is a difficult undertaking. The need to do so will depend in part on whether and to what extent the placement of advertisements is restricted. For example, there would ordinarily be less need for a content restriction if placements were precluded in any media for which more than 10 percent of the audience was expected to be underage than there would be if placements were precluded only if more than 50 percent of the audience was expected to be underage."

This report and other studies20 conducted by CAMY analyze the placement of alcohol advertising. For this report, CAMY commissioned Virtual Media Resources (VMR) of Natick, Massachusetts to analyze alcohol advertising that appeared in national magazines from 2001 to 2003. VMR is an independent media research, planning, market analysis and consulting firm serving communications organizations and marketers in a wide variety of market segments and media. VMR was established in 1992 and has grown to service over 100 clients across the United States and Canada in retail, publishing, financial, automotive, public health and other fields.

This report is based on the industry-standard data sources and methods that are available to ad agencies and advertisers as they make their decisions about where to place their advertising. Advertising occurrence and expenditure data came from TNS Media Intelligence (formerly known as CMR or Competitive Media Reporting). Audience data came from Mediamark Research Inc., the leading industry source for magazine readership demographics.

The measures in this report are standard to the advertising research field but may not be familiar to the general reader. "Reach" refers to the number or percentage of a target population that has the opportunity to see an ad or a campaign through exposure to selected media. "Frequency" refers to the number of times individuals are exposed to an ad or campaign and is most often expressed as an average number of exposures. "Gross rating points," or "GRPs," measure how much advertising exposure is going to a particular population on a per capita basis. For example, the measure of 100 GRPs indicates that the population received the equivalent of one exposure per person (although this also could have come from 50% of the population seeing the advertising two times). GRPs are the mathematical product of reach and frequency: if the reach is 80% and the average frequency is 2.5, then the GRPs total 200. GRPs thus provide a comparative measure of per capita advertising exposure. Further information on sources and methodology may be found in Appendix A. Appendix B provides a glossary of advertising research terminology.

Acknowledgements

The Center is supported by grants from The Pew Charitable Trusts and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to Georgetown University.

The Center would like to thank the following researchers for their independent review of this report. The opinions expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the funders or reviewers.

Stu Gray
Former Senior Vice President, Director of Media Resources, BBDO New York; Member of the Board of Directors of the Advertising Research Foundation

Esther Thorson
Professor of Advertising and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research, Missouri School of Journalism

Richard Zackon
Principal, Media Edge, Inc. Media Consultancy; Adjunct Professor, New York University; Former Research Director for the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau and Court TV




1For this report, unless otherwise noted, youth are defined as persons ages 12 to 20, and adults are defined as persons age 21 and over.
2Underage youth are more likely to see on a per capita basis, or be "overexposed" to, a magazine ad for alcohol when it is placed in a publication where the percentage of underage youth in the readership is greater than the percentage of underage youth in the general population. (In 2003, for example, this meant that youth were overexposed to ads in magazines where underage youth were more than 15.18% of the readership.) "More likely to be read by" (as well as percentage measures of youth overexposure and other comparisons of adult and youth exposure to alcohol advertising in this report) is based on "gross rating points," which measure how much an audience segment is exposed to advertising per capita. Another way of measuring advertising exposure is "gross impressions" (the total number of times all members of a given audience are exposed to advertising). The adult population will almost always receive far more "gross impressions" than youth because there are far more adults in the population than youth. Gross rating points are calculated by dividing gross impressions by the relevant population (e.g. persons 21 and over) and multiplying by 100. See Appendix B for a glossary of terms used in this report.
3"Alcopops" are also referred to as "low-alcohol refreshers," "malternatives" or "flavored malt beverages." Many of the brands in this category, which includes brands such as Mike's Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice, have alcohol contents of between 4% and 6%, similar to most traditional malt beverages. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), "Notice No. 4—Flavored Malt Beverages and Related Proposals," Federal Register (March 24, 2003): 14293.
4Data for alcohol ad placements in magazines in 2004 will not be available until mid-2005.
5Calculated using the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. J. Gfroerer of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, e-mail to David H. Jernigan, PhD, 14 September 2004.
6National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility, R.J. Bonnie and M.E. O'Connell, eds. (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004), 35.
7L.D. Johnston, P. M. O'Malley, J.G. Bachman, and J.E. Schulenberg, Overall teen use continues gradual decline; but use of inhalants rises (Ann Arbor, Mich: University of Michigan News and Information Services, December 21, 2004), table 3 (cited 16 March 2005). http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/data/04data.html#2004data-drugs
8National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility, 35.
9L.T. Midanik et al., "Alcohol-Attributable Deaths and Years of Potential Life Lost—United States, 2001," MMWR Weekly 53, no. 37 (24 Sept 2004): 866-870.
10National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts 2003 (Washington, DC: National Center for Statistics and Analysis, U.S. Department of Transportation, 2005), table 79.
11Calculated using Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) data, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data include only deaths for ages 15 to 20. M. Stahre of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, e-mail to David H. Jernigan, PhD, 20 December 2004.; See also G.S. Smith, C.C. Branas, and T.R. Miller, "Fatal Nontraffic Injuries Involving Alcohol: A Metaanalysis," Annals of Emergency Medicine 33, no. 6 (June 1999): 662.
12D.R. English, C.D.J. Holman, E. Milne et al., The Quantification of Drug Caused Morbidity and Mortality in Australia (Canberra: Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, 1995).
13S.A. Brown and S.F. Tapert, "Health Consequences of Adolescent Alcohol Involvement," in Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility, Background Papers [CD-ROM] (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004), 383-401.
14T.S. Dee, "The Effects of Minimum Legal Drinking Ages on Teen Childbearing," The Journal of Human Resources 36, no. 4 (2001): 824-838.
15R.L. Collins et al., "Predictors of beer advertising awareness among eighth graders," Addiction 98 (2003): 1297-1306.
16S.E. Martin et al., "Alcohol Advertising and Youth," Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 26 (2002): 900-906; A.W. Stacy et al., "Exposure to Televised Alcohol Ads and Subsequent Adolescent Alcohol Use," American Journal of Health Behavior 28, no. 6 (2004): 498-509.
17S.F. Tapert et al., "Neural Response to Alcohol Stimuli in Adolescents With Alcohol Use Disorder," Archives of General Psychiatry 60, no. 7 (July 2003): 727-735.
18Federal Trade Commission, Self-Regulation in the Alcohol Industry: A Review of Industry Efforts to Avoid Promoting Alcohol to Underage Consumers (Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission, 1999), 4.
19National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility, 137.
20The Center's studies of alcohol advertising on television and radio, in magazines and on the Internet are available at www.camy.org.

 
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