Complaints to the Swedish Consumer Agency about alcohol advertising have gone up by 800% after sobriety organization IOGT-NTO introduced their Alcohol Bothers campaign last summer. This explosive growth, compared to the same period last year, can be ascribed to an online service making it very easy for people to report their complaint through social media.
“When we spoke to the Swedish Consumer Agency last year they told us they weren’t very busy with alcohol adverts, because they did not have the resources and because people did not file many complaints. They received approximately 60 per year,” explains IOGT-NTOs European officer Irma Kilim. “We at IOGT-NTO were certain that people were bothered by alcohol advertisements but that they did not always know that what they saw is illegal or even where to report it.”
This motivated the organization formerly known as the International Organisation of Good Templars to create a tool for people to easily report alcohol advertisements and to show the prevalence of alcohol advertisements.
The tool works very easy through social media. Anytime an Instagram or Twitter message contains the hashtag #alkoholstör it is automatically entered into IOGT-NTOs database. The organization filters the incoming ads and publishes the relevant ones on the alcohol bothers website. Kilim ads that:”We also trained four ambassadors who looked through all the pictures and reported them to the Swedish office of consumers. If we compare the campaign period to the same period last year, we can see a raise in reports with 800%.”
The reporting tool however is only one tier of the Alcohol Bothers campaign. Before IOGT-NTO started reporting on alcohol advertisements, they gathered the email addresses of all candidates for the Swedish elections. Through the Alcohol Bothers website, people can contact any of the candidates to ask them, ”Do you think that the Swedish legislation for alcohol advertising should be more restrictive?” ”We knew that the Swedish people had a strong opinion in this but we wanted to show that there is a great political will as well”, Kilim explains. In this the campaign has already succeeded, with over 70% of the political response being in favor of further restrictions.
The Alcohol Bothers website includes a bit of information on every candidate and the possibility to directly ask them the above mentioned question. Additionally, anyone interested could go to the website, find the candidate they are interested in and click on their name. This will present them with a pre-written post card asking you only to fill in your contact information and hit “send”.
“Our goal was that every candidate should be asked at least once, that half of the candidates answered our question and that the majority of those who answered would say ‘Yes’. We reached all these goals, and got more candidates to answer than the biggest political surveys in Sweden,” Irma Kilim told EUCAM. ”It’s a big success!”
Besides these local and national Swedish parts of the campaign, IOGT-NTO is also planning a global Alcohol Bother campaign.
The New Zealand Government has been advised to end alcohol sponsorship of sports clubs and ban any advertising of beer, wine and spirits during televised matches by a ministerial forum. The forum concluded after a two-year inquiry that the total cost of alcohol-related harm in New Zealand was “enough to justify further restrictions on alcohol … Read More →
EUCAM was recently contacted with legal questions by a company starting up a scheme like this in Poland. Apparantly this is not just a US problem anymore.
In 2014 the Australian Alcohol Policy Coalition commenced work on an alcohol policy roadmap project, examining the current state of alcohol law and policy in Victoria, and looking at areas for law reform and policy development, with the overall goal of reducing alcohol related harm in the state.
In the first phase of this project, the APC are examining state powers to limit advertising exposure to children and young people, the impact of planning laws on alcohol policy, the ways in which planning laws can be improved to reduce alcohol related harm and national model laws on secondary supply.
As part of this project, they have produced a series of podcasts on the three current focus areas: advertising, planning law and secondary supply. This is the first podcast, Alcohol marketing and young people: David Jernigan, PhD, Director of The Centre on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:
Take a look at this interesting video of Professor Gerard Hastings explaining the pervasive way in which alcohol marketing works and what the current shortcomings of its regulations are.
Earlier this month Systembolaget, the agency that handles the Swedish monopoly on alcohol aired a new campaign on Swedish television called ‘How smooth is that?’, mocking the way that famous spirits brands market their product. Over in England, Balance, the alcohol office for the North East region, has started a campaign called ‘See what Sam sees’. The campaign visualizes the amount of exposure to alcohol marketing an average English child sees on a daily basis.