Underage thinking

They’re the most impressionable when it comes to advertising, but advertisers claim they don’t target them directly.  Are they telling the truth? asks Jon Rees

BUDWEISER’S CARTOON frogs are more familiar to US school kids than Tony the Tiger, who has been the "voice" and face of Frosties cereal for decades, and that could spell trouble for the drinks industry.

It is not just in the US that the success of alcohol advertising is beginning to catch the eye of legislators. In Ireland, for instance, traditionally seen as a country with a liberal attitude to drink, researchers have found that teenagers reckon commercials for Guinness and Budweiser were rated more highly than ads for all other consumer products.

Meanwhile, across Europe and, indeed, the entire world, drinks companies have learned the value of sponsoring everything from all-night dance parties, music concerts, club nights and any number of sporting events.

Of course, drinks firms are perfectly entitled to advertise and it is very difficult to prove that advertising alone is responsible for increasing consumption of a product, or even what part advertising may have in fuelling the growth of a particular market.

However, since advertising is the most visible of market stimulants, it is inevitably the first to get noticed by those who are concerned about the effects of drink. 

Those effects are becoming more and more marked, as US magazine Newsweek – the same magazine that gave London its briefly held "coolest city on the planet" tag – pointed out in an article headed "Is Europe drinking too much?"

Broadly, European adults are drinking less, even in such countries as France which is often seen as marinated in wine.  But Europe’s teenagers are drinking more and more from an even younger age.

Nor is it merely the fact that youngsters are drinking; it is the sheer quantities which they are consuming that is causing the real headaches.  In Britain, for instance, youngsters under the age of 16 now drink twice as much as they did 10 years ago, drinking, on average, five pints of beer a week.

In Ireland, 59% of men and 26% of women between the age of 18 and 29 binge-drink at least once a week (which means they drink more than five alcoholic drinks at just one sitting).

In Denmark the number of 15-year-olds drinking at least once a week has risen from 20% to 39% for girls and from 37% to 50% for boys in the past 15 years.  In France, 45% of 12- to 18-year-olds were drinkers in 1990; now the figure is a truly amazing 70%.

Contrary to the national stereotype, half those polled in France had switched from wine to hard liquor, while 70% of girls and 80% of boys had their first drink at just 11-years-old.

Teen drinking is among the highest in Europe in Britain and Ireland, and critics of the drinks industry say it is no surprise that these were the two countries which were the first to introduce alcopops to the market.

That was in the mid-1990s, but the alcopop market is still growing at an astonishing 21%, according figures from Datamonitor.  They are neon-coloured, fruit-flavoured and half soft-drink, half hard-core alcohol.

The drinks industry has always stuck to its line about them not being aimed at teenagers, but, in the words of Simona Anav of Italy’s Permanent Observatory on Youth and Alcohol, "What adult is likely to be attracted to fruity, neon-coloured drinks?"

The social costs are terrifying: in the UK there has been a tripling of alcoholrelated deaths among young men and women over the past 20 years and a staggering 40% of all the accident and emergency admissions here are now alcohol-related.

In all, about a quarter of all deaths of men between the ages of 15 and 29 in western Europe can now be attributed directly to alcohol.  The figure for eastern Europe is one third. In the UK there are 1.2 million incidents of alcohol-related violence each year and the government puts the total financial cost of alcohol misuse at over £20 billion every year.

So it is hardly surprising that governments across Europe feel the urge to do something about it.  In Italy, the country’s health ministry has recently launched a campaign to bar alcohol advertising aimed at young people, so it is now illegal to encourage excessive consumption, aim advertising at minors, link alcohol to driving or point out alcohol content in any advertising.

In September, the Swiss parliament imposed a US$1 tax on each bottle of alcopop, describing it as a "youthprotection measure".  Denmark put an age limit on alcohol purchases, for the first time.

Taxes and other restrictions have been imposed in Poland, while Ireland is considering lowering its drink-driving limits and demanding more warnings on drinks.  The Irish prime minister has even called on drinks companies to "refuse to produce, import, distribute or sell alcopops", saying he would ban them entirely but that European Union law prevents it.

In the UK we are gradually becoming accustomed to seeing warnings on our drinks commercials, something which has been happening in the US for years.  Indeed, British drinks company Diageo reckons 20% of its $120m advertising budget in the US goes on socially responsible commercials aimed at dissuading consumers from drinking and driving, or else it is aimed at preventing underage drinking.

Plenty of critics in the US say this is worse than useless, by the way, and socially responsible advertising is nothing more than a way of getting your brand in front of more, often younger consumers.

One thing is certain, however, which is that alcohol-consumption among younger people is rising apparently inexorably in the western world. Unless drinks companies learn how to respond to this in a way which does not involve merely selling as much alcohol as they can, the lawmakers will surely feel the need to teach them a lesson the hard way.