Trade bodies should help brewers with social media

12-Aug-2012 - Last updated on 11-Mar-2017 at 19:52 GMT

Related tags Social media Advertising Beer

Gordon Johncox: NACM and BBPA must do more to help with social media

The British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) and the National Association of Cider Makers (NACM) should do more to highlight the pitfalls of social media to its members.

That’s the view of Gordon Johncox, managing director at Aston Brewery in Birmingham, who chaired a social media round-table discussion with alcohol brands.

He said that trade bodies could help members by talking to social media providers about how to make sure that only people of a legal age can access the sites. Johncox noted that in the past he has found is difficult to verify a user’s age on particular sites, unless you were a “monetised customer”.

He said: “If you’re marketing alcohol, really you need to to make sure you are not attracting people below the legal age. I think that’s something that the NACM and probably the BBPA really should be taking up with some of the providers.

Johncox added: “Personally, I think there’s a case for industry bodies to be helping, through dialogue with the social media providers, making it easier for their members to age-gate. Otherwise, you’ve got a small local brewery, who might be a member of the BBPA but won’t have the resource to go to meet with Google and talk about how you age-gate Twitter.

“If you have lots of alcohol brands on social media that are not complying with the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) code, even inadvertently, it’s not good for the industry.”

Johncox accused the ASA and the Committee for Advertising Practice (CAP) codes of being “ambiguous” around social media. He explained that part of this is through people posting comments on sites about drinking excessively of a particular brand. “The moment that anything like that is posted on your site, those posts become your responsibility and you’re immediately in contravention of the code,” he said.

BBPA director of public affairs David Wilson said: “We work closely with the Portman Group and the ASA to ensure that our members are aware of the legal parameters when engaging digitally.”

An NACM spokesperson added: “The NACM doesn’t have any official guidelines but we do offer support to our members if they require it and will keep the situation under review on the basis of responding to the needs of our members.”

The round-table discussion was held by Seal PR.