Malt Beverage Brand Popularity Among Youth and Youth-Appealing Advertising Content.

Background: This study examined whether alcohol brands more popular among youth are more likely to have aired television advertisements that violated the alcohol industry's voluntary code by including youth-appealing content.
Methods: We obtained a complete list of 288 brand-specific beer advertisements broadcast during the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men's and women's basketball tournaments from 1999 to 2008. All ads were rated by a panel of health professionals using a modified Delphi method to assess the presence of youth-appealing content in violation of the alcohol industry's voluntary code. The ads represented 23 alcohol brands. The popularity of these brands was operationalized as the brand-specific popularity of youth alcohol consumption in the past 30 days, as determined by a 2011 to 2012 national survey of underage drinkers. Brand-level popularity was used as the exposure variable to predict the odds of having advertisements with youth-appealing content violations.
Results: Accounting for other covariates and the clustering of advertisements within brands, increased brand popularity among underage youth was associated with significantly increased odds of having youth-appeal content violations in ads televised during the NCAA basketball tournament games (adjusted odds ratio = 1.70, 95% CI: 1.38, 2.09).
Conclusions: Alcohol brands popular among underage drinkers are more likely to air television advertising that violates the industry's voluntary code which proscribes youth-appealing content.
(Copyright © 2017 by the Research Society on Alcoholism.)