RWJF

Unveiling Alcohol Marketing Tactics
Of course, it is best to prevent children from using drugs and alcohol in the first place. Yet the multitude of media images—including advertising that glamorizes tobacco and alcohol—make that a challenging goal. A new Foundation program will shine a light on the alcohol industry’s marketing that reaches youth too young to drink legally. The Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at Georgetown University, co-funded with the Pew Charitable Trusts, provides reliable data on alcohol companies' marketing by using standard advertising data and practices to analyze their ads and other promotional tactics.

The Center was officially launched in September 2002 and quickly produced results. CAMY provided data used by a national organization to convince a major beer manufacturer to pull a commercial airing during “The Simpsons,” a television cartoon sitcom that attracts a large youth audience. A CAMY study showed that underage youth were a target of alcohol marketing in magazines and that alcohol companies spent more than half of their magazine advertising dollars on publications with large youth audiences.

Tackling Binge Drinking
The Foundation’s emphasis on combating binge drinking on college campuses continued in 2002 through A Matter of Degree: Reducing High-Risk Drinking Among College Students, which awarded grants totaling $935,000 to the University of Iowa in Iowa City and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Both schools have been involved in the program since its inception in 1996. Iowa City, for example, implemented an ordinance in 2002 to improve the enforcement of state laws regarding sales to minors and intoxicated persons. The new law also prohibits some drink promotions at taverns and restaurants, such as free alcohol, two-for-one and all-you-can-drink specials which, studies show, contribute to binge drinking.

In Wisconsin, tavern and restaurant owners in the area near the Madison campus voluntarily agreed to stop offering drink specials on Friday and Saturday nights for one year while Madison police tracked the number of police calls in response to disruptive and criminal behavior in the area. On campus, the university agreed not to sell alcohol at sporting events in its new arena, even though it would forfeit $500,000 in alcohol revenue during the hockey season.

Efforts to address substance abuse in young people long before they reach college received a boost in 2002 when results from the Foundation-supported, five-year study of the new Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) science-based curriculum were published. The evaluation found that this seventh-grade curriculum improved students' decision-making skills and ability to refuse drugs and strengthened their belief that drug use is socially inappropriate. The program will now be rolled out in school systems across the country.

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