CAMY Reports Decline in Youth Magazine Alcohol Ads

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) has issued a report showing that alcohol companies “have largely met the industry’s voluntary standards of not placing ads in magazines with 30 percent or more youth readership.” Nevertheless, the report singled out 16 brands allegedly responsible “for half of the advertising placed in publications more likely to be seen per capita by youth than adults.”

Researchers apparently used gross rating points, as opposed to gross impressions alone, to measure “how much an audience segment is exposed to advertising per capita.” In addition to tracking youth exposure to alcohol advertising, the report focused on the prevalence of youth exposure coming from overexposure. According to CAMY, “Advertising in media in which youth ages 12 to 20 make up more than 15 percent of the audience generally results in these youth being ‘overexposed,’ that is, they are receiving advertising exposure that is out of proportion with their presence in the population.” The results evidently showed that while youth exposure in magazines “with youth age 12 to-20 audience composition above 15 percent declined by 48.4 percent[,]…the percentage of youth exposure coming from this advertising
increased from 69 percent to 78 percent.”

Moreover, CAMY noted in an August 10, 2010, press release that as youth exposure to distilled spirit magazine ads declined by 62 percent, exposure to beer advertising in magazines rose by 57 percent between 2001 and 2008. “Beer advertisers appear to be filling the gap left by distillers in youth-oriented magazines,” stated CAMY Director David Jernigan. “If the entire industry is serious about underage drinking, it should adopt stricter standards to protect against youth exposure to its advertising.”