Alcohol and Youth According to the Center on Marketing and Youth (CAMY), states are not doing very much in terms of keeping adolescents and other youth from being over-exposed to alcohol-related advertisements on television. The liquor and beer companies are clearly interested in getting young people started with their particular brand, and through television commercials those companies make beer and liquor seem very "cool" to impressionable young people. This paper reviews and critiques the literature on youth and alcohol-related advertising on television -- including peer-reviewed scholarship from several sources.

Youth Exposure to Alcohol Advertising

The Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth -- a component of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health -- reports that the amount of advertising on television that specifically targets youth rose by 38% between 2001 and 2007. About one in five alcohol advertisements was placed on programs that attracts young people ages 12 to 20 (CAMY). The Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth analyzed how 2,033,931 specific alcohol product commercials were placed on television programming between 2001 and 2007 (the cost of those ads was reportedly $6.6 billion).

This is a classic case of an alcohol company marketing products to youth; the suggestion here is that while a kid is playing electronic games, he can also drink Heineken beer. (Swift, 2012). The results showed the following: a) more than 40% of youth exposure to ads featuring alcohol on television came from "youth-oriented programming"; b) two thirds of the ads mentioned in "a" appeared on cable television which accounted for 95% of the overexposure to youth; c) of that overexposure to youth, about 53% was beer ads and 41% promoted liquor; and d) although the alcohol industry ran 73,565 ads that called for "responsible" drinking, young people (ages 12 to...

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Relationship between American advertising and youthful behaviors and attitudes

In the peer-reviewed journal Contemporary Drug Problems (Jernigan, et al., 2010), the author explains that there is a "…growing body of evidence" that in fact the advertising and marketing of alcohol has an influence on the drinking behaviors of young people (Jernigan, 57). The beer and liquor companies know that the presence of a certain brand -- "or even the attitudes held toward it" -- can actually "…define a person with respect to others" (Jernigan, 61). So for example, if a friend only drinks Bud Light, that brand becomes "…an extension or an integral part of the self," Jernigan continues on page 64).

Jernigan references the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth's data to make the point that U.S. television advertising for alcohol reached about 96% of the population considered the "adult population" (21 and over) in 2007 "446 times" (65). Meanwhile, 2007 advertising promoting alcoholic beverages reached young people between the ages of 12 to 20 "…an average of 436 times" (Jernigan, 65). As to magazine advertising, in 2007 alcohol ads reached 94% of the over-21 population an average of 77 times while alcohol advertising in magazines reached the youth market (12-20) an average of 89 times -- clearly more often…