By Ames K. Sweet

Raised in an electronic culture saturated with cell phones, social networking websites, information outlets, and the promise of perpetual connectivity, today’s youth find themselves at ground zero in an exploding digital marketplace. A lucrative target for all kinds of advertisers, young people are no longer just a market segment: “They have become the mainstream,” says John Geraci, vice president of youth research at Harris Interactive.

Image courtesy of Yahoo! Shine

“Kids drive technology today,” observes Anne Cohen Kiel, an anthropologist hired by Microsoft to study the use of technology by teens. “By meeting their needs, we meet everyone’s needs.”

Social Site Seduction, Texted Temptations

Accordingly, marketers are spending huge sums of money to research this important demographic group to see how they use technology in their daily lives. Not to be left behind, alcohol companies are increasingly utilizing new media technologies to promote their products to youth, targeting consumers through social media, online video, mobile phone applications, and virtual online communities.

While long-term, federally funded studies have consistently shown that the more young people are exposed to alcohol advertising, the more likely they are to drink, kids under the age of 21 are being exposed to a “24/7 digital marketing ecosystem,” according to Kathryn Montgomery, a professor of public communication at American University in Washington, D.C. and co-author of a May 2010 report titled “Alcohol Marketing in the Digital Age.”

The boundaries of that ecosystem are broad, says Montgomery, and are comprised of “a multiplicity of platforms throughout the day and night that includes online, offline, mobile, digital, music, video – a whole range of different ways that consumers interact.”

Social media marketing has spawned a host of techniques and software applications to appeal to young people and take advantage of the unique properties of these popular platforms. Polls, virtual gifts, free samples, and contests can easily be created by advertisers with the goal of “going viral” across Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites.

C’mon Kids, Let’s Play Snatch Your Profile and Mine Your Data!

At the official site for Jose Cuervo, for example, visitors are encouraged to connect to Facebook to play games, download screen savers, and enter sporting contests based on drinking-related activities. At the Budweiser site, visitors find a wide selection of colorful screen savers, wallpapers and cell phone ring tones, along with contests for free prizes. Both of these interactive sites, and many others like them, offer a parade of attractions that have little to do with the quality or taste of the product advertised but are geared toward the youth culture and their Internet tendencies, with almost no effective mechanisms to keep underage visitors from accessing the sites.

“The alcohol industry’s digital and social media marketing tactics are blurring the boundaries between advertising and content with unprecedented sophistication,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy and co-author of “Alcohol Marketing in the Digital Age.”

And, while young consumers are busy interacting in cyberspace, the alcohol companies are collecting data for future sales and product development purposes. “This is all about data collection for personalized, targeted marketing in order to better understand a user’s attitude, their interests, their online behavior,” says Chester. “Most of the data collection is covert. Users have no idea what’s happening to the data.”

Self-Controlling Cowboys in the Wild, Wild West?

The dramatic growth and popularity of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and others have already transformed the media landscape, and while many such sites claim that they are able to restrict alcohol ads from reaching underage youth, their mechanisms for age verification are, at best, “imprecise and faulty,” according to David Jernigan, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It doesn’t take much imagination for kids to fib about their birthday before entering a website.”

For the most part, alcohol advertising operates under the voluntary self-regulation of the industry, with oversight and review by federal regulatory agencies. But the online advertising sector has largely evolved without significant public analysis or regulatory oversight.

“There’s a whole stealth world of marketing that occurs in social-media spaces,” says Chester. “It’s a completely Wild West environment.”

“The alcohol industry’s latest marketing tactics make TV advertising look mild,” says Lori Dorfman, director of Berkeley Media Studies Group and co-author of the report with Chester and Montgomery. “With aggressive under-the-radar tactics like mobile and social media marketing campaigns, parents don’t stand a chance, let alone their kids.”

At its best, the Internet is a vibrant, visible and freely accessible communications arena where information and ideas flow freely. Cell phones, social networking websites, information outlets all have their benefits and can be used for learning, experimenting and exchanging critical data.

Yet, the potential for abuse is real.

“We’re not calling for any kind of censorship,” say the authors of “Alcohol Marketing in the Digital Age.” “But we do think these are very serious issues that require attention by regulators and health professionals.”

“Allowing alcohol companies to regulate themselves isn’t effective at keeping advertising from reaching kids, and age verification efforts don’t work,” says Jernigan.

Close to 5,000 people under the age of 21 die of alcohol overuse each year, Jernigan adds. “Virtual worlds show all of the appeal and none of the consequences of alcohol use and undercut efforts to reduce the incidence of underage drinking. At this point, alcohol companies appear limited only by their imaginations and their pocketbooks.”

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Cyber Sales

Today, alcohol brands (like other major advertisers) are promoting their products across a wide spectrum of new platforms – from social networks to mobile phones to immersive, virtual communities.

• Heineken created a virtual world housing and entertainment complex called Heineken City, where a consumer could obtain an “apartment,” along with free storage and email services. The size of one’s apartment was determined by earning points played on Heineken-branded games.

• Smirnoff promoted its Raw Tea with a viral YouTube “Tea Partay” video, which appeared to be a music video spoof featuring preppy rich young adults rapping. When the video was put up on the video sharing site it was viewed 600,000 times in just ten days.

• Budweiser created an “Ale Finder” that “shows you the nearest pubs, bars and restaurants with Bud American Ale on tap, as well as the closest retail outlets where you can pick up a six-pack.”

• Absolut’s Drinkspiration GPS-enabled application for the iPhone is designed to “help you order or recommend a cocktail to match the moment’s mood, weather, color, time, location, bar vibe and more. An interactive encyclopedia that lets you hook-in to up-to-the-minute global drink trends, and then share what you want via Twitter and Facebook.”

• Malibu Rum’s free iPhone game “Get Your Island On” explains that you can “Bowl in a rum shack. Bowl on the beach. Bowl in an underground cave or inside an aquarium. We’ve taken the Malibu Bottles off the bar, and made them part of the game…. The controls are simple. Enter your age (tell the truth!), decide where you want to play, if you want to play alone or with a friend, just grab yourself a ball…. You can turn up the volume, and if you like the music, you can download the ring tones at Malibu-rum.com. When you bowl with Malibu® Rum the lanes are always smooth, and the cocktails are always tasty!”

From “Alcohol Marketing in the Digital Age”