Controversial Television Advertising may be geared at attracting the more influential and younger crowds in society today. There may be growing proof that alcohol advertisers use unique appeals to get to youthful audiences (Jacobson, Atkins, and Hacker, 1983; Neuendorf, 1987). These publicity companies ought to be thinking about the content and substance they endorse to advertise on television. They sought to consider all age groups and not just their intended age groups. Adam Smith, says in his Theory of Moral Sentiment that, "Man should regard himself, not as detached or separated, but rather as a world citizen, a component of the vast nature commonwealth and to the community’s great interest. He should at all times have the will to sacrifice his own little interest” (Adam, 1790). These words ought to ring loud and clear in the alcohol marketing professionals ears. Nevertheless, it gives the impression that their longing to increase their wealth exceeds any moral responsibility thoughts to children. This may be evident in the Phillip Morris quote from a marketing report that, “The capacity to attract new smokers and build them up into a young adult franchise may be vital to brand improvement.” Advertising and the explosion of high-tech media today needs regulations to maintain the products in suitable places to reduce the influence of alcohol by the youth.
The Substance-Abuse and Mental-Health Service Administration recently conducted a study that concluded approximately one quarter of the entire American students, habitually smoke tobacco by the twelfth grade, whereas three quarters of them have consumed alcohol or small sips of alcohol (Cohen, 2005). This ongoing epidemic of underage consumption of these two potentially deadly substances continues as prominent as ever in the youth today.
The current argument is that the aforesaid problem unswervingly shows a relationship between alcohol advertisements that may be aimed at appealing the youth and alcohol consumption. Whereas it may be true that there may be a considerable amount of legislation that are passed to try and prevent advertising of alcohol to the most vulnerable patrons of the state, the question may be whether our government and these companies are honestly doing their best in terms of preventing the use of alcohol amongst the youth. Alcohol companies deliberately continue to market their products to the youth, regardless of the moral and legal guidelines put in place.
Controversial alcohol advertisement
Alcohol advertisements may be considered to be controversial in our society today (Kimberly). Alcohol companies use cartoon characters to symbolize their merchandise. This use of cartoon characters may seem to make the merchandise more attractive to the consumer; however, they sometimes this can be terrible since cartoons frequently appeal the younger crowd, consequently this may lead to underage drinking. It also seems apparent that youngsters focus a lot to alcohol advertisement, in some cases paying larger attention than the adults (Atkin et al., 1988). Additionally, the alcohol advertisement industry may portray the drinkers in commercials to be very attractive and young. This may be very smart advertising since the consumer is more likely to buy the product advertised with something pleasant rather than something that may not be appealing. According the article Alcohol Advertising: Regulation Can Help by Kimberly, advertising companies that handle alcohol products confess that consumers may be ‘buying a symbol’ (Kimberly). Waiters, Treno, and Grube said that Television ads for alcoholic beverages have included elements that grasp particular appeal to the young viewers. These may include celebrity endorsers, the use of humor, animals, animated characters and youth-oriented music for instance rap and rock music (Waiters, Treno, & Grube, 2001).
Regulations and laws concerning alcohol advertising have more often than not been left up to the states control individually for regions outside of radio and television, which as a result falls under the federal government. Officially, the federal government has never passed legislation to ban alcohol advertising on either radio or television. There was a long era when advertisements never appeared or hardly ever on the national television broadcasts.
For a long while, alcohol advertisements had been restricted in television and radio, although other media outlets never fairly met similar level of regulations, especially in print advertising. Magazines may be predominantly popular way for the alcohol companies to get to youths, and at the present online advertising is reaching to the youth as well. Online advertising may be growing at a extremely rapid pace, and emerges to be a major link to the shocking amount of exposure that youth exposure are receiving from advertisement. Advertising grew up to 71 percent between the years 2001 and 2009 (Bloomberg, 2010). Unlike tobacco advertising, alcohol advertising proves to be extremely different in the way that ultimately restrictions and regulations actually may be lessoned. Tobacco advertising seeks cunning and unique marketing schemes to get to the youth, whereas alcohol advertising has an unbelievably vast variety of outlets to employ to get to the younger age brackets of our nation.
Conclusion
Over the years alcohol companies have gone through a radical evolution through diverse changes in legislation, guidelines, and civilization as a whole. As our people keep on to evolve and innovative media such as the Internet turn out to be more fashionable within the demographics of our younger generation, our nation may be at a turning point on the struggle against alcohol advertisement exposure among our youth. Harold and Christine, in their article Alcohol Advertising Restrictions Without Due Cause, state that alcohol is a ‘mature’ product kind, which denotes that consumers are conscious of the product and its essential characteristics (Harold and Christine). However, they don’t consider the youth as immature and unaware of what they partake whether a beverage product or an alcohol product. At this instant the government must to step up and take hard line actions against alcohol companies who persist on ignoring the specific guidelines and publicize to whoever mainly effortlessly makes money (Kimberly). In the intellects of the government, there has been sufficient effort in the alcohol industry put forward on their behalf to avert the abuse of their merchandises among the youth of America. Merely enough attempt to snooze with a good sense of right and wrong at night on their mattresses blown up with the wealth made at the forfeit of our youth.
This dispute holds no fundamental pretense; it may be backed up by numerous statistics that illustrate how the misuse of these items of consumption has been progressively growing in the youth more than the precedent decade. As long as the morals and decency of this situation is disregarded and legal loop-holes incessantly tolerated, the alcohol industries may continue to unearth means to advertise to the youth of America and build lifelong loyal consumers of their products. I believe what the advertisers may be doing in society today may be very effective and clever. However, let us face reality; these alcohol advertisers may be doing extremely fine considering the consumers carry on with purchasing all these merchandises that may be advertised controversially; hence, Advertising and the explosion of high-tech media today needs regulations to maintain the products in suitable places to reduce the influence of alcohol by the youth.
References
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