CAMY Criticizes States for Failure to Address Youth Exposure to Alcohol Marketing

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center on Alcohol
Marketing and Youth (CAMY) has issued a May 1, 2012, report claiming that
the majority of states have failed to adequately address youth exposure
to alcohol advertising. According to a concurrent press release, CAMY
researchers apparently reviewed state advertising laws to determine whether
each law incorporated all, some or none of eight “best practices” designed to
limit alcohol advertising that is likely to be viewed by children and underage
youth. Their results purportedly revealed that no state successfully applied
more than five of the eight recommended policies and only 11 states used
more than one.

In particular, CAMY has urged states looking to reduce youth exposure to alcohol marketing to (i) “prohibit false or misleading advertising;” (ii) “prohibit alcohol advertising that targets minors”; (iii) “establish jurisdiction over in-state electronic media (TV and radio)”; (iv) “restrict outdoor alcohol advertising in locations where children are likely to be present”; (v) “restrict alcohol advertising on alcohol retail outlet windows and outside areas”; (vi) “prohibit alcohol advertising on college campuses”; (vii) “restrict alcohol sponsorship of civic events”; and (viii) “limit the alcohol industry’s ability to provide free goods (giveaways).”

“Twenty-two states have no best practices across the eight policies, meaning
almost half of all states in the U.S. are doing far less than they could to keep
alcohol marketing from reaching youth,” said CAMY Director David Jernigan.
“This report should open people’s eyes to the unrealized potential of state
action in this arena.”

Meanwhile, researchers with the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock
Medical Center (DHMC) have reportedly presented two studies on youth exposure to alcohol and fast food advertising at the Pediatric Academic Societies Annual Meeting held April 28-May 1 in Boston, Massachusetts. As
explained in an April 30, 2012, DHMC press release, the studies apparently
involved showing children and young adults 20 images scrubbed of brand
names and logos that had appeared during the previous year in commercials
“for beer and hard-liquor brands and for quick-service restaurants.”

Based on these nationwide surveys, the researchers evidently found that, out
of 2,541 participants ages 15 to 20 years old, those who reported consuming
alcohol “regularly” “recognized many more of the commercials for beer and
other spirits than did those who claimed not to drink.” Similarly, “among the
3,342 youths ages 15 to 23 who answered questions about their weight,
their levels of exercise, and their habits of eating and watching TV, those who
described themselves as obese—15 percent of participants—were more than
twice as likely to recognize the disguised ads as their less-overweight peers.”

“At present, the alcohol industry employs voluntary standards to direct their
advertising to audiences comprised of adults of legal drinking age,” one of the
presenters was quoted as saying. “While this study cannot determine which
came first—the exposure to advertising or the drinking behavior—it does
suggest alcohol advertising may play a role in underage drinking, and the
standards for alcohol ad placement perhaps should be more strict.”