New research suggests that exposure to brand-specific alcohol advertising can influence which brand of alcohol teens consume, HealthDay reported.
Researchers from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Boston University School of Public Health found that youth between the ages of 13 and 20 are more than five times more likely to consume brands that advertise on national television and 36 percent more likely to consume brands that advertise in national magazines compared to brands that don't advertise in these media.
"Marketing exposure is increasingly recognized as an important factor in youth drinking, yet few studies have examined the relationship between overall advertising exposure and alcohol consumption at the brand level," David Jernigan, lead co-author of the study and CAMY director, said in a statement. "These findings indicate that youth are in fact consuming the same alcohol brands that they are most heavily exposed to via advertising."
For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from more than 1,000 underage drinkers to examine the relationship between brand-specific advertising and brand-specific consumption of alcohol among teens using the 898 brands that were available on the United States market in 2011, Medical Daily reported. Study participants were asked which of the 898 brands they had consumed in the past thirty days using an online national survey conducted between December 2011 and May 2012.
Previous studies linking youth alcohol advertising exposure to alcohol consumption have generally found small but significant associations between how much advertising young people see, hear or read, and how likely they are to start drinking or to drink more. This new research, which explores the relationship at the brand level, strongly suggests that the smaller effects found in earlier research may be a result of grouping all alcohol brands together or in broad categories of beer, wine and spirits.
The findings are detailed in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.
