Advertising and Alcohol

Advertising and Alcohol

While skimming through my traditional issue of Cosmopolitan, and while still unsure of what the focus of this paper should be on, it became clear, page after page that I was to focus on advertising and alcohol in the media. I came across an ad for Jose Cuervo tequila, in it there is a young, sexy woman standing over a young, idealistic man putting her hands on his bald head; her hair is standing straight up and the caption says: "It makes you electric...not true, but sparks may fly anyway". After viewing this it only made sense to write about advertising and alcohol. After researching a bit, I found out "that many advertising industries spend billions of dollars on advertising alone" .

Pondering this, one would assume that the more advertisements for alcohol the more likely a society will increase it's consumption of alcohol, however further analysis and research would prove this assumption to be defective; "advertising increases alcohol abuse...right? Wrong, there is no solid evidence from either science or research [to prove this] theory".1 If advertising industries are spending billions of dollars on "ineffective" advertising that doesn't increase consumption, what does it do? According to Alcohol Advertising, a website by D.J Hanson it increases it's products market share.

By definition a market share is the specific percentage of total industry sales of a particular product achieved by a single company in a given period of time. Instead of increasing total consumption, the objective of advertisers is to encourage consumers to switch to their brand loyalty" 1.

While this is true, one must ask if the affect of alcohol advertisements is less consumption of alcohol in general, what does the media have to do with this? "For many adolescents the media forms a major part of their leisure activities. They are also cited as the major source of information about general affairs in the world" (Dorn, South 19). They go on to talk about another study that was done in 1973 that concluded: "Eighty-five percent named television as the main source for information generally, a long way ahead of school, family and friends" (Dorn, Smith 19). Considering all this, it would only make sense that the media has a large influence on not only children but also adolescents and adults as well. A broadly published fact is "that by age eighteen, the typical young person will have seen 100,000 beer commercials"1. However, one main counter-argument against alcohol ads on television is that they "normalize drinking in the minds of young viewers; this means the common nature of alcohol ads on television serves not to glamorize [it's] products, but [the idea] is to cast them as mundane consumer products, right alongside aspirin, cookies, and alkaline batteries" 1.

Another thought to consider is if advertising is seemingly affluent not only on billboards, but mainly on television, who are these ads targeted for, and why? In the text Alcohol Use & Alcoholism by Penny Booth Page the text talks about how the media uses alcohol to target a certain audience based upon a number of qualities.