Digital Scrapbook #3

Drug-Free Action Alliance: Children Vote Beer Commercials among Their Favorite Super Bowl Ads

Neither my husband nor I are pro-football fans. None–the-less, we look forward to watching the Super Bowl every year, though not for the football—for the ads. Advertising companies realize that the Super Bowl is their time to shine. They spend more and more money every year to produce bigger and better ads, competing with other ad companies to have the “Best Super Bowl Ad”. Advertisers also want their ads to be memorable; after all, the reason for the ad in the first place is to get you to buy whatever it is they are advertising. Some adults, me included, can simply watch and enjoy the ads without feeling the need to buy into what it is marketing. I’m capable of understanding that advertisers use any tactic they can think of if it may persuade you to purchase their product, including sex. But what affect do Super Bowl ads have on children? Most of what they are trying to sell isn’t for children, so a person might assume that the kids tune out or don’t pay attention to the ads. This would be especially true for alcohol ads. But when the Drug-Free Action Alliance surveyed 6,300 Ohio youth in middle and high school about their favorite Super Bowl ad, they “selected commercials for alcohol, specifically beer commercials, among their favorites”. When students specifically named their favorite commercial, the Anheuser-Busch commercials took “three of the top six most-remembered ads”. I know many adults who don’t see this as an issue, after all, kids cannot just go out and buy beer; they just enjoy the ads. But more and more research is showing the negative impact alcohol ads have on kids.

In “Defining Addiction: Patterns of Chemical and Psychological Addictions” Charlotte Kasl examines the personal experience of addiction starting with predisposing factors which can determine whether a person will become addicted to a substance. The first of these predisposing factors is the availability of the substance; meaning, “repeated exposure to a drug or substance increases the changes of using that substance” (94). Kasl emphasizes the “need to recognize that exposing children and young people repeatedly to alcohol and alcohol ads that equate alcohol with being sexy, glamorous, cool, and watching sports may make it harder for the people with alcoholic chemistry to abstain because they keep getting presented with a trigger to their unconscious pleasure center” (94).

In the film Still Killing Us Softly3, Jean Kilbourne stresses the need to take advertising seriously. We need to realize that the goal of the ads is to tell us who we are and who we should be. She also emphasizes that not only are the ads defining us, but they also keep us trapped in strict roles of masculinity and femininity. These are the messages being sent to our children, who are very impressionable, by the advertisers because they need to convey their message early and often to the future consumers. And their selling tactics work; if they didn’t, advertising would not be a $130 billion industry (in 1994). Kilbourne, in “Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising and the Obsession with Thinness”, the “advertising industry is a powerful educational force in America. The average American is exposed to over 1500 ads every day and will spend a year and a half of this or her life watching television commercials. Although the individual ads are often insipid and trivial, they have a serious cumulative impact” (395).

In terms of alcohol addiction, the impact of the alcohol commercials was revealed in a study published in Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine in January of 2006. According to a press release from the Drug-Free Action Alliance, the study “found that youth who saw more alcohol ads on average drank more than those who did not see the ads. It is noteworthy that in 2007, Anheuser-Busch is estimated to have spent nearly $20 million on commercials that aired during the Super Bowl according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest”.

In 2008, more than 17 million Super Bowl viewers were under the age of 21.