Deadly Persuasion: Marketing Alcohol & Tobacco to Children

Jean Kilbourne, Ed. D        

The earlier one starts drinking or smoking, the greater the risk of addiction. If you start drinking when you are 15, you are four times more likely to become an alcoholic than if you wait until you are older.  This is all we really need to know in order to understand why children are so important to the alcohol and tobacco industries. Addiction is bad news for most of us–it is slavery, disease, troubled lives and early deaths. However, it is the name of the game for these industries. The addict is their best customer by far. 

The tobacco industry spends $8 billion annually in this country alone on advertising and promotion. It has to get 3000 children to start smoking every single day simply to replace those smokers who die or quit.  When you are selling a product that kills people, you’ve got a problem. Ninety percent of teenagers who smoke use one of the three most heavily-advertised brands: Camels, Marlboros, and Newports.

Just as the tobacco industry needs to get kids addicted in order to be sure of a fresh supply of addicts, so does the alcohol industry. The #1 illegal drug in America is .... beer. Because beer is the drug of choice for young people. Although we hear a lot about marijuana, cocaine, heroin, the truth is our kids are at much greater risk from alcohol than from these other drugs. Fifteen percent of 8th-graders and 30% of 12th-graders are binge drinkers (which means they’ve had five or more drinks at one sitting within the past two weeks). These students drink over a billion cans of beer a year, spending almost $500 million.

Brand loyalty begins before children pick up a drink or a cigarette. This is why the alcohol industry has taken over the world of sports and the world of music and why it has turned Halloween into a drinking holiday. Maybe they don’t want children to drink but they do want them to have positive feelings for Budweiser. Hook people early and they are yours for life.

Do these ads affect kids? Recent research has found that Budweiser commercials are kids’ favorites– more popular than commercials for McDonald’s, Pepsi, or Nike. More 5th-graders know that frogs say “Budweiser” than that Bugs Bunny says “What’s up, Doc?” And a very recent study found that more children ages 6 to 17 recognized the Bud lizards than recognized Barbie (of course, I have mixed feelings about this). More important, various research studies have shown that alcohol advertising shapes young adolescents’ attitudes and intentions about alcohol and creates an unconscious presumption in favor of drinking.

Although the alcohol industry says it wants people to drink “responsibly,” the truth is that so-called “responsible” drinking would put it out of business. Ten percent of drinkers consume over 60% of all the alcohol sold. At least 1 in 10 drinkers is an alcoholic. Obviously, the alcoholic is the alcohol industry’s best customer. If alcoholics were to stop drinking entirely, the industry would lose over half its profits. In fact, if every adult American drank at the “safe” level as defined by federal guidelines (no more than one drink a day for a woman and two drinks a day for a man), alcohol industry sales would be cut by about 80%.

The alcohol industry needs to create a climate of denial–not just for the alcoholic but for everyone else– the parents, doctors, friends and lovers of the alcoholic. The industry needs to glamorize and normalize heavy drinking and high-risk use of alcohol.

We need to fight back with restrictions on alcohol advertising, especially the targeting of young people, with warning labels on the ads, with a host of other public policy measures, and with media literacy programs in our schools that teach our kids to be critical viewers.

Jean Kilbourne, Ed. D., is the author of Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel and the creator of several award-winning documentaries, including “Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women.”