Reporter Kathleen Shaw, on All Things Considered, gave a report (August 7, 1998) on the concerns of government and private groups that alcohol product advertisements were encouraging underage drinking. Television advertising was a special concern. Some people thought that encouraging underaged drinking was a deliberate policy, since underage drinkers buy a lot of alcohol products, so there is a lot of money involved. Government and private groups intended to work with alcohol product companies to monitor advertisements and help prevent ads that appeal to teenagers and adults under the legal age to drink. Shaw's report prompted me to write the following response: Kathleen Shaw's substantial and valuable report on government and private citizens' concerns over the effects of alcohol product advertising on underaged drinkers overlooked an important point while focusing our attention on an important problem. While some of the impact of advertising alcohol products on underaged drinkers may well be intended, it is probably a mistake to tar the entire industry with this brush. Rather, we should realize that what is at work here is the impact of the advertising itself. Advertisements for alcohol products that show attractive people having a good time, or that use animals or other props to portray drinking as personally or socially desirable, are conveying potent messages to teenagers and adults under the legal drinking age without necessarily trying to deliberately target them. To oversimplify, there are basically two kinds of advertisements, information advertisements and motivation advertisements. Information advertising simply sets forth the desirable qualities of the product being touted, for example, "Listen to All Things Considered for the most information in the least time." Motivation advertising tries to attach desirable personal and social qualities to products that don't necessarily have anything to do with them, for example, "Listen to All Things Considered. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich do." The motivational message here is that by listening to a radio program one would become more like the elite and powerful. Automobiles are not inherently sexy, nor is tobacco inherently masculine or feminine, but these products are packaged and marketed in these ways. Once an image of social desirability and personal success is associated with a product, a market niche is created which assures its economic success, at least for the duration of that niche. Like automobiles, cigarettes, and other products, alcohol products have been marketed to adults by means of the same symbols that are powerful both for young adults and for adolescents. There is no magic line across the legal drinking age below which teens and young adults are not interested in being sexy, popular, confident and free-spirited, and above which they are. Thus, while it makes sense for government and private groups to try to pressure alcohol product advertisers to be careful not to go directly after underaged drinkers, we need to understand that underaged drinkers are the very people who are most vulnerable to the messages with which alcohol products are marketed to young adults over the legal drinking age. The solution to the problem of the susceptibility of underaged drinkers to motivation advertising of alcohol products may be harder to come up with than a campaign to stop advertisers from going directly after them. But we can identify some important parts of it. For one thing, motivation ads can be developed that show the cool people NOT drinking, or only drinking a little, and the losers drinking to intoxication. Another approach would be to use advertising to inform people, hammering away at the role of alcohol in teen deaths through drunk driving. Testimony from parents and siblings of kids who died while driving drunk, and of their victims who survived, together with live footage from accident scenes and emergency rooms, should help here. Beyond this, wouldn't it be useful to educate teens about the mechanisms and perils of motivation advertising itself? Imagine an ad in which the CEO of a major advertising company says something like, "Look, kids, I'm going to show you how we get you to want to buy things you otherwise might not want by hooking the products to your powerful personal and social needs." THAT would be a social step forward, indeed. But, failing that, the more mature adults in the lives of teenagers and young adults can help them along by deconstructing the motivation ads to which the teens and young adults are so susceptible. Anyone can start to do this. All you have to do is to look at the advertisement structurally. What are the features in it? What are the objects? What are the people doing? How are the people supposed to feel about themselves, and what to are the products supposed to have to do with that? It's a bit awkward at first, but gets easier quickly with practice. There is, in fact, an awful lot to be learned about psychology that way. Ultimately, the best way for teens and young adults to be immune from the effects of motivation advertising is for them to understand how it works, and how its effectiveness is due to the very feelings and needs that are so powerful in their everyday experience of being human. |