Underage drinkers are three times more likely to drink alcohol brands that advertise on television programs they watch, compared to other alcohol brands, providing new evidence of a strong association between alcohol advertising and youth drinking behavior.
That is the conclusion of a new study by researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which examined whether exposure to brand-specific alcohol advertising on 20 television shows popular with youth was associated with brand-specific consumption among underage drinkers.
Published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, the report comes on the heels of a similar study by the same researchers, published earlier this summer, which found that underage drinkers are heavily exposed to magazine ads for the alcohol brands they consume.
Dr. Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences at BUSPH, said now that a link has been shown with TV advertising, “The question becomes, what do alcohol advertisers do with this information, given the consequences of alcohol consumption in underage youth?”
Read more: http://www.bu.edu/sph/2014/08/04/tv-influences-alcohol-brand-choices-among-youths-new-study-finds/