For the staffers of a booth run by the alcohol-industry sponsored Century Council, last month's Alcohol Policy 13 conference in Cambridge, Mass., must have felt like a pretty lonely place.

While the very presence of the Century Council booth elicited grumbles from many attendees, however, at least the staff was isolated from the conference halls, where the industry was repeatedly hammered by speakers for allegedly marketing their products to youth, alcoholics, and binge drinkers.

"The alcohol industry understands alcoholism better than anyone ... If every American drank according to the federal guidelines, industry sales would be cut by 80 percent," said Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D., a visiting scholar at Wellesley College and a national expert on alcohol and tobacco advertising.

"No matter what you're selling, the heavy user is your best customer" she said, charging that the alcohol industry "need alcoholics and binge drinkers on campus."

"Whenever someone recovers, someone loses money, whether it's the drug dealer on the street or the pusher in the boardroom," added Kilbourne.

George Hacker, director of the Alcohol Policies Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, agreed. "Ten percent of consumers drink 50 percent of the alcohol," he said. "Without them, the alcohol industry would dry up like a prune."

Tom Greenfield, a senior researcher at the Alcohol Research Group, said that marketing for beer, in particular, encourages overconsumption. For instance, while research shows that the top 20 percent of wine buyers consume one to four glasses at a sitting, Greenfield said the top 20 percent of beer purchasers drink four of more at a sitting.

"The majority of beer sales come from people drinking in unsafe ways," he said.

Industry Advertising, Standards Challenged

Differences between the marketing and consumption of beer, wine, and liquor call into question the alcohol industry's claim that the appeal of their products to youth is purely unintentional, according to David Jernigan, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at Georgetown University [Read a JTO Interview with David Jernigan].

A CAMY study showed that while youths aged 12 to 20 saw 45 percent more beer ads and 27 percent more liquor ads than adults, they saw 58 percent fewer wine ads. "It shows that it is possible to reach a legal-age audience without overexposing 12- to 20-year-olds," said Jernigan.

"Nine of 10 beer brands reached youth better than adults with ads," added Jernigan. "The same was true for liquor and malternatives. Wine was the opposite story."

Jernigan acknowledged that advertising can never be targeted precisely. "Any media planner will tell you there will be spillage," he said, "but you can control the direction." With beer and liquor ads, he said, "The spillage is consistently into the lower ages."

Underage drinkers comprise 11 to 20 percent of the alcohol market, contends Jernigan, who says most underage drinkers drink to excess. "These are not young people having a glass of wine at a school cafeteria soiree," he said. "New drinkers are heavy drinkers."

Jernigan called on the alcohol industry to adhere to its own advertising guidelines, which he said ostensibly prohibit the themes found in many current ads. During his presentation, he juxtaposed a Miller Lite commercial featuring two scantily clad women wrestling in mud and a fountain with the Beer Institute's standard that ads should not contain lewd or indecent images; and the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S.'s standard that ads be responsible, dignified and tasteful with a Bacardi print ad showing a man licking the belly of a young woman.

Industry guidelines for TV and print advertising are much too weak, added Jernigan. For example, he said that while industry self-regulation prohibits ads on TV programs where youth make up more than half of viewers, that only eliminates about one percent of all shows.

During her conference breakout session, Kilbourne said that loosening the hold of advertising is critical to the fight against underage and abusive alcohol consumption. "It's difficult to be healthy in a toxic cultural environment," she said. "The top executives at Philip Morris and Anheuser Busch still get community support. The cultural denial is still enormous."

Kilbourne said that advertising, which she called "the propaganda of American society," trivializes relationships, teaches that happiness can be bought, and says that people are less important than things. "That's especially troubling when the product is addictive," she said. "We know addicts feel lonely and feel that the substance they are addicted to is their only friend."

Conference speakers called for increased use of counter-advertising and more federal involvement in setting advertising standards.

John Noble, former director of the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information and currently with Social and Health Services Ltd., said that the alcohol-policy field shouldn't be discouraged by the fact that the alcohol industry spends $1 billion annually on advertising.

"We spend $1 billion a year on prevention, so poor them," said Noble. "We have the population on our side, we have the internal drive to [succeed], and we have public health behind us. We also have colleagues in parallel fields talking about healthy lifestyles and healthy diets."