Alcohol Advertising Policies in the United States: National Promotion and Control initiatives

Abstract

This article describes policy developments in alcohol advertising and counter-advertising at the U.S. national level, including federally mandated warning labels on alcoholic beverage containers, the campaign for health warnings on broadcast advertising, the end of the voluntary ban on advertising of distilled spirits on television and radio, and the debate concerning a health-benefits label on wine products. Federal legislative documents and media accounts provided the context for 64 key-informant interviews with persons working for the federal government, the alcohol industry, public health, and research and media organizations. A decline in per capita alcohol consumption in the 1980s and 1990s and concurrent demographic shifts in the U.S. population have given impetus to controversial advertising campaigns and their opposition. The policy case studies show disagreement among key players about the impact of advertising on consumption and problems, need for controls, benefits of regulation and counter-advertising, and need for federal-level legislation.

Alcohol industry involvement in policymaking: a systematic review

“…This review identified 20 reports drawn from 15 studies (treating each study as a discrete data collection exercise, with some generating multiple journal reports) as eligible for inclusion [see Figure 1]. These were largely published since 2012 (six reports [22][23][24][25][26][27] from four studies were earlier) and concerned mainly high-income, English-speaking countries [seven UK (four studies), two US (one study), two Australia, one New Zealand], with other reports of studies undertaken in Africa (Lesotho, Malawi, Uganda and Botswana [26]), Hong Kong [28], Thailand [29] and Poland [30], respectively. All are qualitative studies, with the exception of the Thai study [29], which largely presents quantitative data.…”

“…Among the six non-documentary studies, three (the UK studies by Holden and colleagues [32][33][34][35] and Katikireddi and colleagues [36] and the US study by Giesbrecht and colleagues [22,23]) are designed carefully with detailed and rigorous attention to inference generation and reported transparently in studies generating multiple reports in the peer-reviewed literature (see Table 1). These methodological strengths produce findings in which there can be a high degree of confidence.…”

“…Policy actors Position themselves as key stakeholders in the policymaking process and partners in tackling alcohol harms [13,26,33,37,38] Position themselves as key economic actors; i.e. generators of tax revenue/employment [13,23,28,30,32,34] Claim they are responsible actors, unfairly demonized by public health actors and policymakers [13,22,30,31] • Emphasize that they are a legal industry [13,26,27,34] • Differentiate themselves from the tobacco industry [13] Present public health actors as extremists (or neo-prohibitionists) driven by a moral agenda in order to undermine their credibility and policy influence [23][24][25]40] The policy problem Play down the scale of alcohol problems (and thus the need for policy interventions) [13,22,24,[26][27][28]30,32,34,[36][37][38]40] • frame the alcohol problem in terms of a small minority of problem drinkers versus the moderate majority who are already aware of the need to drink responsibly [13,22,24,27,32,…”

“…social and health benefits of 'moderate' drinking [13,26,28,30,34] • focus policy debates on narrow range of harms, issues and subpopulations; i.e. binge and youth drinking; drink driving; drinking in pregnancy; certain areas of the country [24,26,32,34,36,37] Promote individualized accounts of the nature of alcohol problems [13,23,24,[26][27][28]32,34,[36][37][38][39] • consumer behaviour (misuse), not the product, is the source of harm [13,24,34,39] • it is unfair to penalize the majority for the actions of the few [24,27,28,34,38] Present alcohol and 'responsible' drinking as socially acceptable, while alcohol misuse should be socially unacceptable [22,24,26,34,36,38] Policy positions…”

Views of alcohol control policies in the 2000 National Alcohol Survey: What news for alcohol policy development in the US and its States?

“…The first factor comprising six items could be conceptually identified as ''controls on access or price.'' Although two items (banning TV ads and sports sponsorship) are not related to sales of alcohol use directly, they limit marketing by controlling public access to alcohol and brand images and ''impressions'' (Giesbrecht, Johnson, Anglin, Greenfield, & Kavanagh, 2004). The second factor consisted of four items and could be described as ''intervention and education/prevention.''…”