Anti-booze adverts 'encourage binge-drinking'

It shouldn't come as a surprise. Government anti-drug advertising in the '90s was shown to encourage drug taking. Now a report from a US university claims to show the same is true of anti-binge-drinking advertising campaigns.

Researchers at the Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Illinois have shown that anti-binge drinking ads may actually provoke binge drinking. The research, based on interviews with 1,200 undergraduates, shows that advertising's empahsis on guilt and shame generally backfires.

Kellogg marketing professor Nidhi Agrawal explained that this process is known as "defensive processing", in which the ads' targets "tend to disassociate themselves with whatever they are being shown in order to lessen those emotions".

Worse still, the ads cause the same defensive processing in an individual who's feeling guilty about some other shameful behaviour. Agrawal noted: "If you're talking to a student about cheating on an exam, and one of these ads comes up, you can bet they are headed straight to the bar. There's a lot of money spent on these ads that could be put to better use."

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