Though the legal drinking age in the U.S. remains 21, it appears as though most advertisements for alcohol are aimed at those who cannot legally imbibe.
A recent study claims that many of the ads for alcohol today are most appealing to the age group under 21. Researchers from John Hopkins have found that roughly 70 percent of ads in magazines for alcoholic beverages have a greater influence on those under 21 than in any other demographic.
"We've got at least 14 long-term studies that have looked at young people's exposure to alcohol advertising and found that the more exposed they are the more likely that they are to start drinking or if already drinking, to drink more," explained senior author of the study, David Jernigan. "So we try to monitor youth exposure to that advertising because it's a risk factor for underage drinking."
The research team at John Hopkins examined alcohol advertisements that appeared in 124 national magazines during the course of 2011. They then matched their data to the readership data of those publications used to identify which age groups read the magazines and the advertisements within them.
The study's research discovered that some 25 alcoholic beverage brands that are already very popular among underage drinkers were the ads that were most visible in the publications they studied. The ads of the far less well-known brands among underage drinkers were not nearly as visible in the magazines studied.
"It's striking that we looked at the top 25 brands among males and the top 25 among females and 308 other brands managed to reach the legal aged audience more effectively than the underage audience," Jernigan added. "We sometimes call this advertising that flies under the parental radar."
The alcohol industry does voluntarily conform to certain advertising standards that prevent these companies from placing ads in publications that have fewer than 30 percent readership in the under 21 years of age demographic. The John Hopkins study seems to suggest they are finding ways to exploit that age group despite the standards.
The main fear with advertising that is encouraging underaged youth to drink alcohol is the fact that this is the group (between ages 18-20) which has the highest rate of binge drinking according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Recent CDC research is now making links in the rising in number of car accidents and fatal health issues to binge drinking and the organization is stressing an urgent need to resolve this issue.
