I recently blogged about potential legislation in South Africa restricting alcohol marketing and legislation. This legislative development is not unique to South Africa and in Europe, eight of the largest alcohol firms have signed a self-regulatory pact to prevent harsher government legislation.
The focus of the self-regulation, known as the Responsible Marketing Pact, focuses on not advertising to children which is a different focus from the South African government which has highlighted alcohol’s involvement in driving fatalities and domestic violence.
“A key measure is a commitment not to target children, particularly on social media. The eight alcohol companies said that they will only buy advertising in media “where at least 70 per cent of the audience is reasonably expected to be above legal purchase age”, and the ads themselves must not be “attractive” to kids,” The Independent newspaper reported.
“The drinks brands also vowed to prevent children from ‘inadvertently seeing alcohol beverage marketing’ on websites such as Facebook by introducing ‘effective age controls’ on ads and user-generated content on official fan pages.”
The alcohol companies involved in the campaign are Carlsberg, Heineken, Diageo, AB InBev, Bacardi, Brown-Forman, Pernod Ricard and SABMiller.