Young people are susceptible to alcohol’s effects due to adult consumption, easy access at retail points, and exposure to advertising across various media.
Alcohol marketing influences positive attitudes, perceptions, and expectations towards drinking. It impacts the initiation of drinking, the desire to try, choice of consumption, and societal attitudes towards drinking. Over 21 global studies confirm the link between exposure to alcohol advertising and the initiation of drinking among young people, and the progression to heavy drinking for existing drinkers.
Dr. Jos Vandelaer, WHO Representative to Thailand, stated that the WHO Global Strategy to Reduce Harmful Use of Alcohol recommends ten evidence-based policy options at the national level. The three most cost-effective interventions to reduce alcohol consumption and its impacts are controlling alcohol availability, regulating alcohol marketing, and implementing pricing policies. These interventions should complement each other.
For marketing control, the most effective approach is to enforce legal measures that regulate both the content and volume of marketing activities. This includes regulating direct and indirect marketing across all channels, prohibiting sponsorship activities promoting alcoholic beverages, restricting or banning alcohol promotion at events involving children and adolescents, and controlling emerging alcohol marketing techniques, such as social media communications.
These measures can reduce overall marketing exposure among children and adolescents, potentially preventing early alcohol initiation and reducing alcohol cravings among those with addiction. Importantly, this could counteract the alcohol industry’s influence in normalizing or creating positive social values related to alcohol consumption behavior, which has widespread negative impacts on public health, the economy, and society.
Given that children and adolescents often share the same physical environment as adults and have access to both offline and online media, enforcing marketing restrictions directed at children is challenging. Therefore, marketing should be regulated across all channels and techniques to protect children from marketing influences. This should be supplemented with effective measures to limit physical access and a licensing system that considers the distribution of alcohol consumption problems.