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Alcohol Advertising Essay

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Alcohol Advertising Exposure to alcohol advertising is an everyday occurrence. Alcohol advertising is persuasive not only to adults but to those who are too young to buy alcohol legally. Although parents and peers have a large impact on youth decisions to drink, marketing also has a significant impact by influencing the attitudes of parents and peers and helping to create an environment that promotes underage drinking. Alcohol companies focus billions of dollars on advertising their products and still claim that the effect is minimal. I pose a few questions that are; who are the targets of alcohol advertising? How does alcohol advertising affect the people targeted by alcohol companies? Finally what actions are being taken to …show more content…

The effects that alcohol advertising induces on its targets are outrageously tragic. More than 40 percent of teenage deaths are caused by motor vehicles. More than half of those are alcohol related. Alcohol is implicated in at least half of the other major causes of death for young people, such as suicides, homicides, and accidents. Alcohol use is often a factor in many of the other problems afflicting this age group, such as teenage pregnancy, date rape, suicide, assault, and vandalism. At least three of ten adolescents today have serious alcohol problems. A 1996 study showed that children ages nine to 11 were more familiar with Budweiser's television frogs than Kellogg's Tony the Tiger, the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers and Smokey the Bear. The Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth found that, in 2001, youth in the United States were 93 times more likely to see an ad promoting alcohol than an industry ad discouraging underage drinking. In fact, compared to youth, adults age 21 and over were more then twice as likely to see advertising discouraging underage drinking. A USA Today survey found that teens say that ads have a greater influence on their desire to drink in general than on their desire to buy a particular brand of alcohol. Eighty percent of the

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