Alcohol advertising: The hard sell

Alcohol advertisers are out of control. Their irresponsible behaviour, particularly their attempts to lure children into the boozing habit, are undermining society, and their pathetic attempts at self-regulation prove that, if alcohol advertising is not to be banned outright, then it needs urgently to be brought under state regulation.

Well, that's what you would conclude if you just followed media coverage of alcohol advertising, anyway. And it's what a number of influential bodies genuinely seem to believe. The Health Select Committee is currently grilling drinks company chiefs, and recently accused the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) of "complacency" with regard to its responsibilities towards alcohol advertising. Alcohol is undoubtedly the new tobacco.

So what - specifically - is the case that the industry must answer? What are drinks producers doing that's so wrong? Under the surface, the answer is more elusive than a typical newspaper reader might think.

"We get 25,000 complaints about advertising every year," says an ASA spokesperson, "and of those, about 200 are related to drinks advertising. This is a steady figure, year on year".

So - complaints about alcohol advertising make up precisely 0.8 per cent of what the ASA has to deal with.

Clearly then, the public do not believe there is an issue. But perhaps that's not the point. Can we be trusted to decide what we should and shouldn't be seeing, or do we need authorities to make those decisions for us? Is this the sense in which the industry is 'complacent'?

End of an era

The people who actually make alcohol advertising don't seem to think so. "Campaigns such as 'Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach' and 'I bet he drinks Carling Black Label' were some of the most famous advertising of the last 40 years," says one ad agency employee.

"You couldn't make any of those campaigns under current legislation. Agencies used to build their creative reputation on beer - it was their shop window. Not any more."

"I wish people who think the regulation is lax could do my job," laughs another, currently working on a drinks account. "Nine out of 10 scripts we submit for clearance are rejected, or at least require rewrites. The main reason people drink is to be sociable. But if you even hint at that in an ad - if it could be interpreted to suggest that in any way - you've a fight on your hands."

Even when ads have been approved, they may still face arbitrary censorship. Diageo, a company that prides itself on having an internal approval process that is more extensive than those of the ASA and Ofcom, had a previously approved campaign for Smirnoff Ice pulled when it was discovered that one of the actors was in an obscure Icelandic rock band.

The fact that this band never released a record in the UK and had no songs available for download on iTunes was insufficient defence against an unproven belief that, being a rock musician, the actor "might" appeal to underage drinkers. Not one consumer complaint was received about the campaign before it was pulled from the air.

No sex please, we're responsible

ASA regulations were tightened in 2005, and ads can be rejected if the ASA's council believe they infringe either the spirit or the letter of the rules. These rules include a ban on any links whatsoever to youth culture, sex, or tough or daring behaviour, and no product shots that might be deemed irresponsible serving or drinking of alcohol.

The Portman Group, the industry's self-regulatory body, acts on a broader remit to curb irresponsible promotion of alcohol. It responds to complaints as well as taking action independently where it feels the rules are being infringed. It advised on 250 products in 2008, and has had 70 products removed from the shelves in the past 12 years.

In the main, these are spirits or alcopops launched by small, maverick companies. "We believe the code in place is strict but fair, and rightly so," says a spokesperson for one of the country's biggest brewers, "but there are some tiny brands that use things like sexual imagery, and we all get judged by the standards of the worst, not the best. Those products are moved against swiftly, but it does provide ammunition to attack the industry as a whole.

So if the alcohol industry is complying with strict, albeit self-determined codes, the problem is perhaps that any advertising at all - even advertising that doesn't suggest any benefit from drinking of any kind - encourages people to drink to excess.

Even Alcohol Concern admits that the evidence linking higher levels of alcohol advertising to higher consumption is "mixed", and a recent comprehensive study carried out by Sheffield University - which was critical of cut-price promotions - found no link between advertising and alcohol consumption.

Think of the children

One particular problem seems to be exposure of children to alcohol ads (despite the fact that recent studies suggest modest falls in the number of children drinking). While the current codes prohibit any appeal to children and ban advertising around children's programmes, Alcohol Concern talks of the dangers of children being "exposed" to advertising - with the clear but unsubstantiated inference that simply seeing any alcohol ad will make children more likely to drink. This is an interesting area, because of course the only way to completely ensure children never see a billboard ad, for example, is not to have any billboard ads.

Alcohol Concern also argued that one-sixth of alcohol ad spend should be put into a campaign to discourage binge-drinking. Yet a new report from the European Centre for Monitoring Alcohol Marketing claims such campaigns are disingenuous and actually encourage drunken behaviour.

This confusion among the anti-alcohol industry shows that drinks advertisers are damned if they do, damned if they don't. The only solution to the problem - again - would be a total alcohol advertising ban.

Putting the hysteria aside, this seems unlikely. The effectiveness of the Portman Group has been praised by the International Harm Reduction Association, the government and the recent KPMG report that criticised the industry in other respects. For now at least, this is one area where evidence and reason are proving a match for the neo-prohibitionist agenda.

Pete Brown is a beer writer and author of the Intelligent Choice cask ale report. He is a regular columnist for The Publican