Diageo accuses CAMY of ‘scaremongering’

Diageo North America has slammed what it calls a “biased and shoddy” report which claims American youths are being increasingly exposed to alcohol advertising.

Diageo North America’s executive vice president has accused CAMY of reporting “junk science”

The group’s executive vice president Guy L. Smith said the latest report by the Centre for Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY), based at Johns Hopkins University and funded by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, perpetuates “junk science”.

CAMY’s new ‘Alcohol Advertising Compliance on Cable Television’ report uses research gathered over a two-year period to assess the prevalence of non-complaint alcohol advertising on cable TV channels.

Non-compliance was defined as an advertisement that did not adhere to the industry’s self-regulation standards, which require alcohol adverts to only be aired when viewers under 21 years of age makes up less than 28% of the total audience.

CAMY found that in the period, youths were exposed to non-compliant alcohol advertising 3.9bn times, meaning approximately one out of every eight alcohol advertisements were seen by underage viewers.

Among the top 25 “non-compliant” alcohol brands were Hennessy, Disaronno, Jagermeister and Diageo’s Smirnoff vodka and Captain Morgan rum.

“David Jernigan and his ‘research’ group, CAMY, have once again exposed the venerable Johns Hopkins University to embarrassment over CAMY’s biased and shoddy research,” said Smith.

“Using tax-payer dollars, Jernigan and his group have launched a decade long war against the alcohol industry, exclaiming through salacious headlines that alcohol marketers are intentionally targeting youth through their advertising.

“By funding this report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention veers sharply away from their long history of basing activities and pronouncements on solid science. Alas, in this case the CDC is perpetuating junk science.

Consumption reducing

Smith accused CAMY of “scaremongering” and said its research “simply doesn’t square up to facts”. He said the group infers that as alcohol advert exposure increases, so too does consumption, but argued “government data repeatedly shows underage use is going down”.

As such, he suggests CAMY should in fact advocate increasing youth exposure to alcohol ads.

“If Jernigan is correct, and underage exposure to advertising is indeed going up, then one might reasonably conclude that increased exposure is then leading to decreased use,” he said.

“You didn’t read that wrong, but it bears repeating. Assuming Jernigan believes underage drinking is bad, then following his own logic, CAMY should be arguing for increasing underage exposure, since underage use is going down.

“There lies the catch 22 in which propagators of junk science often find themselves. When ultimately faced with accurate data and actual facts, their attention-grabbing press releases lead to absurd conclusions.

“What is truly unfortunate is that institutions that lend their credibility to the likes of CAMY find their own reputations tarnished when the real motives of these ‘researchers’ are exposed.”

A number of studies across the world have criticised drinks groups of exposing young people to advertising, particularly with the rise of advertising on social media in recent years.

However, figures by organisations such as the National Institute on Drug Abuse claim binge and underage drinking in the US now sits at an “all time low”.