The Portman Group, an industry body that works with drinks producers to raise standards of alcohol marketing, has published a guide that aims to stop alcohol brands targeting underage consumers or encouraging harmful drinking through their digital marketing. This is interesting to me for a number of reasons:

Firstly, please answer this question: Have you ever been encouraged to drink alcohol based on something you saw on the internet?

While there may be some out there that say yes, I suspect the vast majority would say no.

My second point is that when you are a teenager, or indeed ‘under age’, you drink whatever you can get your hands on. Brands that have enough money in the marketing budgets to advertise are often too expensive for teenagers that live of a wage of pocket money from their parents.

But I don’t want to criticize the good deed the Portman Group is doing. It is challenging companies to be socially responsible after all.  

I think however, that it is interesting how the internet has led to further concerns over underage drinking.

Read the rest of this entry »