By Maclane Heward
According to research conducted by a BYU professor, responsible drinking advertisements put out by alcohol advertising agencies simply do not work for the majority of adolescents that see them.
Steven Thomsen, a BYU professor of communications, and other researchers allowed youth to view 14 advertisements for as long as they wanted. Six of these ads were alcohol advertisements containing responsible drinking messages. Another six were for things like iPods, McDonalds or cereal. While viewing these ads, the adolescent”s viewing habits were recorded using complex eye-tracking equipment.
Immediately after the ads were shown, adolescents were taken to an adjacent room where they were asked questions about the ads. The same ads were shown to the youth, except this time the responsibility messages were blacked out. The adolescents were then asked questions about the ads” original message.
“We wanted to see if perhaps they picked it up peripherally from the very short exposure to the responsibility message for those who did look at it, however briefly,” Thomsen said in a news release. “They didn”t. One ad showed a designated driver holding up bottled water at a bar. When we showed the young people the ad with the bottle blacked out, most remembered it as alcohol.”
Directly after the viewing of these ads, up to 94 percent of youth could not accurately identify either the general concept or the exact wording of the missing sections. That equates to more than 9 out of 10 times the youth were ineffectively given a message of responsible drinking.
“They just didn”t remember the responsibility message,” Thomsen said. “The kids just aren”t seeing them, and even if they are, it”s not working.”
Adolescent participants were equipped with a headpiece that detected eye movement. The headpiece was hooked to a computer that was able to map the viewing pattern of each of the 63 youth that participated.
“This technology allows us to scientifically show what we may have assumed based on previous studies,” Thomsen said in a news release. “You can ask someone what they see in an ad, but this is more accurate because it”s very difficult to deceive the eye tracker.”
Evaluations of the different viewing patterns of the adolescents showed that youth spent only .35 seconds, on average, looking at the responsibility message. Young people were more likely to focus on models, headlines, product names and bottles then the responsibility message. In two of the ads, only 12 percent of the participants even looked at the message.
“Across our study, 93 percent of their mental effort is spent outside the responsibility message,” Thomsen said.
These messages are voluntarily put into circulation by alcohol advertisers and are targeted to adult readers. However, they are also placed in magazines that are common perusing for adolescents, who see the ads but miss the message.
“The advertisers don”t intend these ads for anyone but adults. The problem is the ads are in popular magazines that are commonly seen by teenagers,” Thomsen said.
According to a news release, Thomsen said he believes one of the reasons for these responsible drinking campaigns is to keep efforts to restrict alcohol advertising to a minimum. Advertisers need to effectively communicate these responsibility messages in order to actually earn the good will that they are looking for.
“If they”re serious about responsible drinking ads, then the message must be far more specific and much more visible,” said Thomsen, who related the clarity necessary in alcohol ads to the clarity of the Surgeon General”s Warning on tobacco products.
