Mark Twain is generally credited with popularizing the phrase: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” He attributed it to British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, though most historians now dispute that. So even when speaking about lying, there were lies. Today’s neo-prohibitionists would be proud, lying with statistics is something they’ve finely honed into its own kind of science. If you haven’t read How To Lie With Statistics or the more recent Trust Us, We’re Experts!, they both provide great insights into just how it’s been done over the years, and continues to be done with alarming frequency.

Thanks to Jason K. for alerting me to this one, which in the news is being portrayed with the intentionally misleading How Alcohol Ads Target Kids. The story concerns a study sponsored by CAMY (the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth) — itself a bit of an anti-alcohol organization who receives funding from the king of the neo’s, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — that examined alcohol advertising in eleven magazines over a five-year period. The study itself was recently published in The Journal of Adolescent Health with the much less misleading title Risky Messages in Alcohol Advertising, 2003–2007: Results From Content Analysis.

When CAMY released a press release about the study, they re-titled it Alcohol Advertising Standards Violations Most Common in Magazines with Youthful Audiences — also not exactly accurate — and by the time it got to the media (who love alarming headlines) it became How Alcohol Ads Target Kids, which was picked up by such high profile websites as Yahoo News, Live Science and Business News Daily.

All of the news stories rely on the CAMY press release and not the study itself, which seems at least a little strange. So here’s the Abstract:

Purpose
To assess the content of alcohol advertising in youth-oriented U.S. magazines, with specific attention to subject matter pertaining to risk and sexual connotations and to youth exposure to these ads.

Methods
This study consisted of a content analysis of a census of 1,261 unique alcohol advertisements (“creatives”) recurring 2,638 times (“occurrences”) in 11 U.S. magazines with disproportionately youthful readerships between 2003 and 2007. Advertisements were assessed for content relevant to injury, overconsumption, addiction, and violations of industry guidelines (termed “risk” codes), as well as for sexism and sexual activity.

Results
During the 5-year study period, more than one-quarter of occurrences contained content pertaining to risk, sexism, or sexual activity. Problematic content was concentrated in a minority of brands, mainly beer and spirits brands. Those brands with higher youth-to-adult viewership ratios were significantly more likely to have a higher percentage of occurrences with addiction content and violations of industry guidelines. Ads with violations of industry guidelines were more likely to be found in magazines with higher youth readerships.

Conclusions
The prevalence of problematic content in magazine alcohol advertisements is concentrated in advertising for beer and spirits brands, and violations of industry guidelines and addiction content appear to increase with the size of youth readerships, suggesting that individuals aged <21 years may be more likely to see such problematic content than adults.

There’s a lot gobbledygook and psychobabble jargon in that, but happily the news reports picked up the additional information in the press release to help out those of us who can’t afford to pay to see the full article. The so-called “study” is not exactly scientific, despite the academic journal publication and pedigree, but suffers greatly from how it’s defined and how the ads were characterized — how those “risk codes” were applied. As the study was sponsored by a particular organization with an agenda, it’s hardly a surprise that the conclusions would support that agenda. After all, they bought and paid for it.

One of the premises is that the 11 magazines they examined were ones with a “substantial youth readership,” which is important since they’re claiming that alcohol companies are targeting kids and/or violating advertising standards. I’d love to know which magazines they targeted, but that information has not been made readily available, even though you’d think that with such a dire problem they’d want to warn parents which magazines not to let their impressionable young children read. Should we wonder why that is? What it really comes down to is how they define “substantial youth readership?” For the study, that meant at least 15% of the readership was estimated to be underage, which is presumably what they mean by “youth.” I think most people would be hard pressed to consider 15% of anything “substantial.” So right from the get go, the study seems flawed; unless of course your goal is to manufacture a particular conclusion.

They further claim that these ads “frequently showed alcohol being consumed in an irresponsible manner.” First of all, how you define what “irresponsible” means is at best very subjective and certainly prone to be interpreted differently by different people. One of the examples of what they mean is “showing alcohol consumption near or on bodies of water.” Since when is that the hallmark of irresponsible behavior? Beer can’t be consumed responsibly, or safely, if there’s water nearby? Seriously, WTF?

Other examples they give include “encouraging overconsumption and providing messages supportive of alcohol addiction.” But those are both so vague as to be almost meaningless, and very open to interpretation. They further suggest that “sexual connotations or sexual objectification” were seen in “nearly one in five ad occurrences.” Again, pretty vague and subjective, but beyond that, so what? Isn’t “sex sells” the number one rule of advertising? Even if true, is alcohol advertising the only group using sex to sell their product? Or is that tactic literally everywhere. I remember being shown in an advertising class during college how the word “sex” could be found in the hair of the colonel in Kentucky Friend Chicken advertising. Sex is everywhere. Shock, surprise? Hardly. It’s the reason we’re all here. If you go looking for it, you’re going to find it. And frankly, under the circumstances, finding less than 20% of the alcohol ads with sexual content seems positively rock bottom, and something that they should see as a positive, wouldn’t you think?

But despite such vagueness, CAMY is undaunted, and finds exactly what they’re looking for. CAMY director and study co-author David Jernigan makes this claim. “The bottom line here is that youth are getting hit repeatedly by ads for spirits and beer in magazines geared towards their age demographic.” He goes on. “As at least 14 studies have found that the more young people are exposed to alcohol advertising and marketing, the more likely they are to drink, or if already drinking, to drink more, this report should serve as a wake-up call to parents and everyone else concerned about the health of young people.”

But another similar study by CAMY done in 2010 found that Less Alcohol Advertising Makes No Difference. In that study — covering nearly the same period of time — they found that youth exposure to alcohol advertising in magazines fell by 48 percent, alcohol advertising placed in publications with under 21 audiences greater than 30 percent fell to almost nothing by 2008, and youth exposure in magazines with youth age 12-to-20 audience composition above 15 percent declined by 48.4 percent. So apparently with that no longer a problem, they instead turned their attention to magazines with a youth readership of less than 15%. That must be the problem. There has to be a problem, after all. Without problems, there can be no fund raising. There can be no clarion call to arms against the heathen drinkers and alcohol companies.

This is the modern era of non-profits. There always has to be a problem. Now matter how much progress their organization makes against whatever problem they believe exists — and they will crow about that progress — the problem persists ad infinitum. It has to. But this particular problem has already been disproved. In 2003, a “‘Federal Trade Commission report to Congress indicate[d] that its comprehensive investigation’ found no evidence of targeting underage consumers.” See Alcohol Ads Target Youth? for the full story. The media may call this “How Alcohol Ads Target Kids,” but I can’t help but see it as just the opposite. When you look closer, it seems to me more like “How Neo-Prohibitionists Target Alcohol.”