Study: "Drink Responsibly" Ads Promote Alcohol Use

Alcohol ads urging consumers to drink in moderation don’t define what “responsible drinking” means and are often used to promote a product, a new study shows.

Basic public health information is missing from ads for beer, spirits, and other alcohol products even when they voluntarily carry—as most do—encouragement to drink responsibly or “enjoy in moderation,” the researchers say.

“While responsibility messages were present in almost nine out of 10 ads, none of them provided any information about what it means to drink responsibly,” says Katherine Clegg Smith, associate professor of health, behavior and society at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Instead,” she says, “we found that the vast majority of responsibility messages were used to convey promotional information, such as appealing product qualities or how the product should be consumed.”

Researchers analyzed all alcohol ads in US national magazines sold on newsstands from 2008 to 2010. The study is published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Most of the ads (87 percent) incorporated a responsibility message, but none actually defined responsible drinking or promoted abstinence at particular times or in certain situations. (Six of the 197 unique messages researchers identified did, however, refer to driving; three warned explicitly against driving drunk.)

When responsibility messages were accompanied by a product tagline or slogan, the messages were displayed in smaller font than the company’s tagline or slogan 95 percent of the time.

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