YOUTH 60 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO SEE TV ALCOHOL ADS THAN RESPONSIBILITY ADS ACCORDING TO NEW STUDY

A new study reaffirms that TV alcohol advertising is bombarding our youth while responsibility messages are taking a back seat.  A Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) report released today shows that in 2001 young people under the legal drinking age of 21 were 60 times more likely to see television alcohol ads than an industry responsibility message discouraging underage drinking or drunk driving.   Eighty-nine (89) percent of youth saw an average of 245 TV alcohol product ads in 2001 compared to just 56 percent of youth who, on average, saw ads discouraging underage drinking only four times.  With that kind of placement, responsibility messages don’t have a chance of getting through to our young people.   The report also revealed that youth’s total exposure to underage drinking responsibility ads was half that of adults. 

MADD recommends in its guidelines that the media should include a matching amount and comparable placement of air time/ad space for alcohol-related public health and alcohol-related safety messages for young people and adults.  As a result of MADD’s efforts to create a national media campaign to prevent underage drinking, Congress has directed the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine (NAS/IOM) to develop a strategy to reduce underage drinking.  MADD looks forward to the release of the IOM’s report addressing this serious issue, and to working with Congress to develop a national media campaign to save young lives.  CAMY states that youth were 93 times more likely to see an ad promoting alcohol than an industry ad discouraging underage drinking and 170 times more likely to see an alcohol ad versus an ad discouraging drunk driving.  The study also shows that alcohol companies spent less than 1 percent of their TV advertising budgets on ads warning against drinking and driving—alcohol-related traffic crashes kill more than 17,000 people annually and injure more than half a million. 

By reducing underage drinking, we prevent future drunk driving tragedies.  Underage drinking is the nation’s No. 1 youth drug problem – killing 6.5 times more young people than all other illicit drugs combined.  Numerous surveys and polls show that youth are influenced by alcohol advertisements.  MADD urges Members of Congress to make the prevention of underage drinking a national priority.  Protecting our kids should come before lining the pockets of the alcohol industry.  It has been nearly four years since the FTC called upon the alcohol industry to clean up its act, but the sale of alcohol is still obviously winning the war of the airwaves at the expense of America’s youth.