CAMY's Last Gasp
Trevor Butterworth, July 10, 2008
Why the end of the Center for Alcohol Marketing and Youth is an opportunity for better research on alcohol advertising and underage drinking.

CAMY – the Center for Alcohol Marketing and Youth – is no more. The cup of funding has not just run dry, the federal government has decided it will assign one of its agencies to keep tabs on alcohol advertising in the future. And based on the way CAMY went about its job, this may not be a bad thing. Teen drinking is a particularly complicated issue because of moral and social concerns, and this has meant that even scholarly research can have a hard time staying dispassionate and objective.

Over the course of its life, CAMY, which was based at Georgetown University, produced a series of studies that purported to show the alcohol industry was “over-exposing” youth to advertisements for drink, and that this contributed to the problem of teen drinking. This was the complaint levied in a 2005 study showing that Sports Illustrated, Popular Mechanics, Rolling Stone, and Vogue, all “targeted” youth with alcohol ads. Even though most readers of those magazines were and are all over the age of 21, CAMY argued that because the proportion of readers who were under the legal drinking age was greater than the proportion of underage youth in the country, over-exposure and therefore targeting was taking place.

In its valedictory study, released in June, Youth Exposure to Alcohol Advertising on Television, 2001 to 2007, CAMY argues the same thing for television, and especially cable TV, where ads for alcohol have tripled over the past seven years:

•  In 2007, more than 40% of youth exposure to alcohol advertising on television came from ads placed on youth-oriented programming, that is, programs with disproportionately large audiences of 12-to-20-yearolds.|

•  Almost two-thirds (63%) of these overexposing ad placements in 2007 were on cable television, which generated 95% of youth overexposure to alcohol advertising on television.

It is a tough argument for the alcohol, advertising, and media industries to accept; the interests of a 24-year old or even a 35-year old are not necessarily that different from a 20-year old – the only real demarcation is that one is not legally allowed to drink. Still, the implicit relationship between advertising and sales has always given CAMY’s argument an intuitive force. And taking the data a step further, CAMY has argued that the alcohol industry needs to cut back advertising to teens by raising its baseline for placing ads in media from where 70 percent of the audience is over the age of 21 to a new baseline where 85 percent of the audience would be 21 and older. (The alcohol industry’s code of practice is based on 2000 census data showing that 70 percent of the U.S. population is over the age of 21.)

But if intuition was a good predictor of cause and effect, one would also expect to see some correlation between increased drinking among teens and overexposure to advertising. The signal problem for CAMY is that there isn’t. Government surveys, such as Monitoring the Future, note that teen alcohol use has been in decline, with one slight uptick, for the past twenty years. If alcohol advertising is driving teen drinking, shouldn’t we see more teens drinking given the claim that they are being overexposed to more alcohol advertising than ever before?

As the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) noted in a report to Congress in June 2000, alcohol advertising has, in fact, little impact on whether teens decide to drink, according to the most rigorous research available. There are a multitude of factors involved in such a decision, notably parental and peer group attitudes to alcohol. Even studies which tried to gauge the impact of total bans on alcohol advertising in the real-world failed to show that they had any effect on teen drinking rates.

Federal Trade Commission challenges CAMY's baseline
CAMY's argument for c hanging the advertising baseline to 85 percent (something which the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine also support) is is also challenged by the Federal Trade Commission in a new report, “Self Regulation and the Alcohol Industry.” The FTC argues that the 70 percent baseline is effective in minimizing teen exposure to alcohol ads because in practice it results in an underage audience that is barely 15 percent.

According to the FTC’s research, 94 percent of alcohol ads placed on television and 99 percent of alcohol ads in magazines met the 70 percent audience threshold of 21 and older. And 86 percent of the aggregate audience for these ads was above the legal drinking age.

Perhaps the FTC is more disposed to taking a pro-industry position on advertising on the grounds that an 85 percent baseline would be difficult to implement, making it hard for industry to advertise to legal consumers of its products. It could, in effect, mean that certain magazines would have to stop advertising alcohol altogether. But if the FTC’s data is correct, CAMY's goal is already being met in practice if not in principle.

Cable is where the (legal) audience is
CAMY's report also pointed out that there has been an explosion of advertising on cable from 2001 to 2007 with the number of ads (and their value) jumping from 51,019 (approx $157 million) to 168,318 (approx $392 million). Spot advertising on broadcast TV has stagnated – 169,582 ads in 2001 (valued at approximately $139 million) to 168,027 ads in 2007 (valued at $118 million)

The most obvious rejoinder is that audiences – particularly those in the most coveted age demographics for advertisers – have been migrating from broadcast to cable for years. And the amount spent on advertising on cable overall has doubled in the past seven years. So there’s nothing necessarily sinister about the increase of alcohol ads on cable: that’s where the consumer has gone. Cable now holds 55 percent of all television viewers in its gaze. And last season, the median live viewer age for the five broadcast networks hit 50 – a year outside the preferred advertising demographic. It would be inexplicable for alcohol companies not to follow their market.

Monitoring and Interpretation
Reading CAMY’s reports, one might think that the relationship between teen alcohol abuse and alcohol ad exposure is proven and demonstrably linear: if one increases, so does the other. There is no concession to the absence of robust evidence for this relationship or the complexities of conducting research in this area. Nor, in CAMY’s data. are their useful breakouts to see how exposure to ads is related to certain shows or markets or timeslots, or whether over exposure occurs in smaller age ranges than 12 to 20.

And this is perhaps the consequence of creating a center devoted to analyzing the problem of alcohol advertising and teen drinking; the underlying yet unproven assertion of a link between the two is allowed to drive the significance of the data. As the government prepares to monitor alcohol advertising exposure among youth, the most valuable lesson from CAMY’s research may well be how not to assess the problem in the future.

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