Today, the first of June, the Lithuanian Parliament voted for important changes to the Alcohol Control Law. After lengthy discussions and some minor amendments to the proposals, the ‘alcohol control regulation package’  was adopted 101 votes for, 10 against, with 10 abstaining. Some amendments will become effective from 2018, while others as of 2020. Parliament decided that people under Read More →

Findings suggest that code violations of the IARD Guiding Principles were prevalent in the four types of media sampled during the MAMPA project in the seven countries. The data were gathered by the Dutch Institute for  Alcohol Policy STAP.

It is interesting to note that the country with the fewest marketing materials recorded (n = 4) was The Gambia, which is a Muslim country with a ban on most forms of advertising. Despite the limitations of the prior MAMPA project and the current re-analysis, this research establishes a basis for a monitoring and regulating alcohol advertising in African countries. The methodology offers a systematic way to evaluate media advertisements of alcoholic beverages to determine whether their contents comply with generally accepted guidelines for responsible advertising practices.

Based on the evidence described above, governments and policymakers should give serious consideration to the key messages emerging from the Consultative meeting on addressing alcohol marketing in the African Region (WHO, 2012) and from the PAHO Expert Meeting on Alcohol Marketing Regulation (PAHO, 2016), which are consistent with the well-documented premise that alcohol is not an ordinary commodity (Babor et al., 2010) and should not be marketed as such.

 These findings provide evidence of violations in the seven countries studied and the need for systematic surveillance of alcoholic beverage marketing to protect vulnerable populations such as youth, who may already be experiencing problems related to their alcohol use.

Our secondary analysis of the original MAMPA marketing data confirms the conclusions of the original MAMPA report, in that it provides strong evidence of code violations in all media evaluated, and suggests that exposure to potentially harmful alcohol marketing content is widespread in six of the seven countries studied. These reports also raise questions about the effectiveness of current industry efforts to regulate alcohol marketing

IARD: International Alliance for Responsible Drinking 

If you want to know more about the evaluation you can read the documents here:

 

Dear Ministers, The signatories to this letter would like to present suggestions to the ongoing negotiations on the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) relating to commercial communications. Obesity and alcohol consumption are major causes of preventable ill-health and early death. Currently, over half of EU citizens are overweight or obese and Europe’s prevalence rate for Read More →

   In the first part of this series we looked at how little legislation regulating alcohol advertising there is, and how the industry has been left to regulate itself. Muhammad Zakaria Suleman asks whether self-regulation is enough or whether alcohol advertising should be banned. The public health sector monitors the effect and burden alcohol has Read More →

Author: Sarantis Michalopoulos | EURACTIV.com The Lithuanian government has unveiled new policy measures aimed at tackling alcohol-related harm, including increasing the legal age for buying and consuming alcoholic drinks. Lithuania is among the countries with the highest per capita consumption of alcohol in Europe, according to the World Health Organisation. In an effort to address Read More →

SAN FRANCISCO – Alcohol brand placements in popular movies of all ratings nearly doubled during the past two decades, new research shows, but particularly in child-rated movies. Researchers presenting these findings at the 2017 Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting in San Francisco found the alcohol brands on the movie set are often those young people report Read More →

A new report highlights how alcohol producers worked to circumvent legislation designed to protect children during the UEFA Euro 2016 football tournament. Researchers at the Institute for Social Marketing, University of Stirling, found over 100 alcohol marketing references per televised match programme in three countries – France, the UK and Ireland. Most marketing appeared in Read More →