Thursday, May 03, 2007

Recent RAND paper on advertising's effect on adolescents

RAND have recently published a paper in the Journal of Adolescent Health showing very large effects of alcohol advertising on adolescent alcohol consumption. The news release is below. This builds on earlier work that they did looking at effective exposure to alcohol advertising. An Irish paper looked at this using qualitative analysis and showed very high degrees of brand awareness among 13 year olds. Proponents of total alcohol advertising bans cite this type of evidence to further their argument. The current code in Ireland prohibits any marketing to children but clearly if you are marketing constantly to adults, it is difficult to see how children are not going to pick up the message, particularly given that they look to their older peers for role models. Once again, we have little causal information in Ireland but apriori the case must be seen as strong and worth investigation.
http://www.rand.org/news/press.07/05.03.html

5 comments:

Liam Delaney said...

here a paper for and one against
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content?content=10.1080/00036840110102743

http://econ.la.psu.edu/papers/Nelson_IOS_AdBans.pdf

Anonymous said...

In a related story in today's election coverage, there's a section in the Green Party manifesto where they are promising to ban the advertising, marketing and promotion of junk food to children under 12.

This is a wonderful initiative to get at the roots of habit formation, but I wonder how the Greens exactly plan to do this? Some media channels that the under 12's are exposed to overlap with those that adults are exposed to.

We've head of collateral damage. This might be collateral benefit...

Kevin Denny said...

Someone told me that the opening of Aldi/Lidl stores & hence increased supply of low cost booze has a noticeable effect on young drinking. Anyone know about this,could it be tested?

Liam Delaney said...

The introduction of an ALDI/LIDL would actually be a potential instrument for price effects. I have heard a lot of anecdotal evidence that they are increasing alcohol usage among particularly those with low incomes such as students.

Kevin Denny said...

We have an instrument but do we have an outcome? That is alcohol consumption at local level by teenagers. I wonder could one get any information from local Garda stations.
It may not be just a price effect. I wonder are some establishments more likely to sell to under 18's?