Malt Beverage Brand Popularity Among Youth and Youth-Appealing Advertising Content

This study examined whether alcohol brands more popular among youth are more likely to have aired television advertisements that violated the alcohol industry's voluntary code by including youth-appealing content.

We obtained a complete list of 288 brand-specific beer advertisements broadcast during the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men's and women's basketball tournaments from 1999 to 2008. All ads were rated by a panel of health professionals using a modified Delphi method to assess the presence of youth-appealing content in violation of the alcohol industry's voluntary code. The ads represented 23 alcohol brands. The popularity of these brands was operationalized as the brand-specific popularity of youth alcohol consumption in the past 30 days, as determined by a 2011 to 2012 national survey of underage drinkers. Brand-level popularity was used as the exposure variable to predict the odds of having advertisements with youth-appealing content violations.

Accounting for other covariates and the clustering of advertisements within brands, increased brand popularity among underage youth was associated with significantly increased odds of having youth-appeal content violations in ads televised during the NCAA basketball tournament games (adjusted odds ratio = 1.70, 95% CI: 1.38, 2.09).

Alcohol brands popular among underage drinkers are more likely to air television advertising that violates the industry's voluntary code which proscribes youth-appealing content.