Adapted from "Deadly Persuasion: 7 Myths Alcohol Advertisers Want You to Believe," by Dr. Jean Kilbourne. This article originally appeared in the Spring/Summer 1991 edition of Media & Values. Adapted, with permission, from the Center for Media Literacy (www.medialit.org).
"Absolut Magic," proclaims an ad for a popular vodka. "Paradise found," headlines another. "Fairy tales can come true," says a third.
These are the myths the alcohol industry wants us to believe. Messages such as these want to convince people that alcohol is magic. These ads tell us alcohol can make us successful, sophisticated and even sexy. Without it, life is dull, ordinary and boring.
Everyone wants to believe in happy endings. But as most of us know, for many people alcohol is more like a horror story than a fairy tale. We are surrounded by messages that drinking is fun, sexy, desirable and harmless. It's easy to identify these messages when they appear in advertisements and commercials, but we also get less obvious messages from other media – in films, music videos, television shows, sporting events and even songs. This is because many media companies depend on alcohol advertising for a large share of their profits. As a result, alcohol use is often glorified in the media, and alcohol problems are seldom seen.
Alcohol is related to parties, good times, celebrations and fun, but it is also related to murder, suicide, car accidents, unemployment and child abuse. Of course, you never see alcohol's negative side in ads. Advertisements are created to sell products, so it makes sense that advertisers are going to promote only positive messages about drinking. But when the product is the nation's number one drug, people should pay attention to the negative side.
Most people know alcohol can cause problems. But did you know that 10 per cent of all deaths in the United States - including half of all murders and at least one quarter of all suicides - are related to alcohol? It costs more than $100 billion each year to deal with the negative consequences of drinking in that country.
Meanwhile, the alcohol industry in the U.S. spends more than $3 billion a year on advertising and promotion to make sure drinkers keep spending money on alcoholic beverages. Problem drinkers and young people are its primary targets.
Of course, the alcohol industry disagrees with this claim. Over and over again, alcohol industry executives state that they are not trying to create new or heavier drinkers. Instead, they say, they only want people who already drink to switch to their brand and to drink it in moderation. However, many researchers who study alcohol advertising disagree. In fact, they believe the opposite – that alcohol advertising is specifically designed to recruit new, young users and to promote heavy consumption of its products.
Did You Know? 10 per cent of drinkers consume over 60 per cent of all the alcohol sold |
Indeed, telling people to drink moderately doesn't make good business sense for the alcohol industry. If all drinkers did drink moderately, alcohol companies would lose nearly half the income earned from sales of beer, wine and spirits. In fact, if every adult in North America drank according to the U.S. federal guidelines for what is low-risk drinking (which is no more than two drinks a day for a man and no more than one drink a day for a woman), alcohol industry sales would be cut by 80 per cent. Although the alcohol companies claim they want people to drink "responsibly," the truth is that "responsible" drinking would destroy them.
It's unlikely industry executives want this to happen. In fact, research has shown that advertisers deliberately target heavy drinkers and create ads designed to appeal to them. As with any product, the heavy user is the best customer. But when the product is a drug, the heavy user is often an addict.
Young Prospects
Not all problem drinkers are alcoholics, and not all teenagers drink. But teens who do drink are more likely than adults to binge drink, making young people a lucrative market for alcohol producers.
According to the 1989 National Institute on Drug Abuse survey of high school seniors, 33 per cent of students reported they had consumed five or more drinks on one occasion over the previous two weeks. [Over one half of Grade 12 students, who drink in Ontario, consumed five or more drinks at least once in the past month.]
Consider this: The most widely used illegal drug in North America is beer, since it is the drug of choice for young people. Underage drinkers account for 12 per cent of all alcohol sales. |
The primary purpose of the mass media is to deliver audiences to advertisers. In fact, magazines, radio stations and TV stations work hard to attract advertising dollars from all kinds of companies, including those that sell alcoholic beverages.
In the ad shown here, Cosmopolitan is trying to convince the alcohol industry to advertise alcohol in its magazine. The ad reads:
"Cosmopolitan readers drank 21,794,000 glasses of beer in the last week ... Isn't it time you gave Cosmopolitan a shot?"
One of the main symptoms of alcohol dependence is the denial that there is a problem. In general, as a society, we tend to deny the problems associated with alcohol – and advertising encourages this denial. It may be impossible to prove beyond all doubt that alcohol advertising affects whether or not people drink, but it clearly affects attitudes about drinking. Ads for alcohol contribute to an environment of social acceptance of high-risk drinking and denial of related problems.
Questions
- What are some of the myths promoted by the alcohol industry?
- In addition to commercials, what are some other ways that the media sends us messages about drinking?
- What are some of the negative consequences of drinking?
- What strategies are used in alcohol ads to sell us products?
- Who are the primary targets of alcohol ads?
- According to alcohol companies, why do they advertise?
- What would happen to the alcohol industry if people consumed only "moderate" amounts of alcohol?
- According to the article, what is the primary purpose of mass media?
- How do ads contribute to attitudes about drinking?
- What solutions does this article recommend?
