At 7.13am this morning, the Health Ministers Select Committee decided to wage war on alocohol advertising. (link here) The call for a pre-9pm ban on alcohol advertising seems to make sense to me although you could argue that many news stories and newspapers carry more messages about alcohol advertising throughout the day. Nevertheless, the ban is designed to inflict an effect on the “quantity” of advertising not the actual message. This isn’t suprising given I covered Budwesier’s recent “aspirational” £1m campaign which was everywhere including the IMAX Cinema at Waterloo, which has daily school’s showings of films.
It isn’t limited to traditional routes to market however, as ministers have turned on social networking sites in a bid to completely remove alcohol advertising from these channels. In my eyes, alcohol advertisers have tried to take a responsible route in these areas, but the networks themselves have not done enough to counteract the challenges these brands throw up. (excuse the pun) Therefore, I think there are a few key things that brands and social networks can do to make sure social media channels can be used to deliver effective advertising, within the limits imposed by the Health Ministers.
The Facebook line is “as long as people are over the age limit then you can advertise to them”, but to me this doesn’t really do enough.
I think there are two areas that alcohol brands are being asked to concentrate on:
1) Warn of Irresponsible Drinking;
There are 350,000 number of events uploaded to Facebook per week/month. My head says that a large number of these are about parties or Night of Mayhem as they are called on Facebook. There is certainly a large role here for Facebook other SNs to take on a role of responsiblity. My view, is that all these events should be underpinned by “Responsible Drinking” advertising which comes, not from the COI, but directly from Facebook. e.g. Facebook encourages responsible drinking…know your limits.
Facebook could even go as far as encouraging its legions of fans to engage with it on a public debate about binge drinking, somewhat projecting it into the realms of YouTube’s Presidential debates.
2) Prevent minors from coming into contact with alcohol brands:
At present all alcohol brands pages are “gated” to 18+. However, this doesn’t stop people creating false profiles or it doesn’t stop people sending out information on the pages to their friends who could be under 18. My first proposal would be that the limit on these pages is lifted to 21, the same as the verification age in shops.
Lock-Down Content: The second implementation would be to lock down content so that no content could be passed from user to user, unless the correct DOB for both parties is entered into a log-in/form. This would apply to applications, messages content etc. It would mean alcohol brands profiles become alot less viral, but also it would remove the likelihood of messages being passed on to those under the legal drinking age. Again I would propose 21 being the limiter here. Teens limit their access to photos and videos, so why shouldn’t brands do the same to them.
Extend the Watershed: The third point here is again to look at the watershed. Unlike on TV, where programming is shaped to deliver to an adult audience after 8pm/9pm. The internet is always on and for most sub-18s, social networks are where they frequently dwell during these hours. The following chart seems to suggest that the Watershed is safely around 10pm.
The only way to combat this further is to increase the watershed to 10pm, make sure all ads are targeted to 21+, and continuously trawl through website/FB/YT insight data to make sure we are only reaching these groups.
One final method I would point out is “double dipping”. This could be a really good usage of Facebook Connect for alcohol brands. What this would mean is alcohol brands could use Facebook Connect to understand DOB of the person visiting their site, then “double dip” – ask the person for their DOB again, and if the two don’t match the user would get kicked out of the site. Then in the future anyone trying to visit the site with that profile would also be removed. (Double dipping should be used as a matter of course for all alcohol brands on Facebook at least)
Right, I’m off to the pub for a swift half. 
