AAF Recruits College Students To Fight Binge Drinking

by Wendy Melillo, Feb 24, 2009, 7:00 AM

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The thorny problem of binge drinking on college campuses has sparked some pretty controversial campaigns lately. The one from the Amethyst Initiative is sponsored by college presidents from various institutions, such as Dartmouth, Duke and Ohio State, who want lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18.

Infuriated, Mothers Against Drunk Driving has counterattacked. MADD wants parents to question the safety of colleges participating in the Amethyst Initiative when considering their child's academic future.

Now, the Century Council, the liquor industry group dedicated to fighting drunk driving and underage drinking, is asking college students to devise a solution. It hopes to kick off a $10 million campaign "that will help combat dangerous over-consumption of alcohol by college students," as part of the American Advertising Federation's 2009 National Student Advertising Competition.

This will be the first time in its 36-year history that the AAF competition is featuring a public service advertising campaign focused on behavior change. (It's only open to AAF's college chapters.)

AAF President and CEO James Edmund Datri applauds the empowerment angle, calling binge drinking--defined as consuming five or more drinks in two hours by men and four or more in two hours for women--"a dangerous trend on our country's campuses." Some 40% of college students reported binge drinking in the past year, according to the Monitoring the Future study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which surveys the behaviors, attitudes and values of college students and young adults. An Associated Press study of federal records from 1999 through 2005 found that 157 college-age people, 18 to 23, died from drinking themselves to death.

It's about time somebody asked the students about an issue that directly involves them. We tell them to vote when they are 18. We ship them off to war at 18. But when it comes to alcohol, we eliminate them from the discussion. We've also given the states little say in the matter. That's because states with a drinking age lower than 21 can be denied federal highway transportation funds. The Amethyst Initiative is pressuring lawmakers to consider whether the 21 drinking age is effective public policy, or whether it's driving drinking underground and fueling the binge-drinking problem.

Here's why some of the college presidents signed onto Amethyst Initiative. (The name is taken from ancient Greece, where the gemstone was believed to ward off drunkenness.) "My 35 years in higher education and my 30+ years as a parent to three sons convinced me that the 21-year-old drinking age is hypocritical, ineffective, guilt-inducing and counterproductive," says Donald R. Eastman III, president of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. "It is a form of mini-prohibition and needs to be replaced with education and a focus on the value of moderation, not intolerance."

When it comes to young adults, prohibition and intolerance are words that strike fear in the heart of any savvy cause marketer. People who understand how to change behavior know that the forbidden fruit approach for teens is a dead end.

Remember Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign? That didn't work, Richard Earle points out in his book "The Art of Cause Marketing: How to Use Advertising to Change Personal Behavior and Public Policy," because telling teenagers in treatment for drug abuse to just say no is ridiculous. Asking teens who have already experimented with drugs to just say no is equally foolish. Earle's conclusion: The anti-behavior approach doesn't work.

Cynics would say that the Century Council, supported by money from liquor giants such as Bacardi, Brown-Forman and Diageo, is only interested in boosting industry profits; lowering the drinking age would hasten that end. That reasoning is shortsighted. The campaign's goal isn't to encourage consumption, but to ask students how we can solve a serious problem that impacts them.

"The behavior is taking place, and the best thing we can do is reduce the harm," says Ralph Blackman, the Century Council's president. Blackman says having the target audience--college students--work on a campaign is what makes the AAF student competition so attractive. He wants to see what they can create--particularly using tactics such as guerrilla marketing and social networks.

Having a national debate about the drinking age is part of a viable democratic process. Asking college students to research the causes behind binge drinking, then develop a campaign to combat the behavior, should enhance the project's credibility.

In the last two years, the AAF's student competition featured Coca-Cola and AOL as clients. Let's hope we see more socially responsible efforts in the competition's future. It underscores a valuable industry goal: Advertising does more than just push products and services. It's key to changing behavior. Thanks to public service advertising, most of us wear seat belts when driving.

Wendy Melillo is a contributing writer to MediaPost and an assistant professor in the School of Communication at American University.

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0 comments on "AAF Recruits College Students To Fight Binge Drinking".

1. Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited
   

   commented on: February 24, 2009 at 10:10 a.m.

   Lower the age to 18 and 15 and 16 will be the new 18. If the 21 year olds cannot show responsible behavior, what makes anyone think 18 year olds who brain is even less developed can be that responsible? Note: 18 year olds going to war is a job vs going on at that point to higher education. Voting is supposed to come with a full time job as in earning a full time salary.

2. Jeffrey pipes Guice from BWS Newsletter
   

   commented on: February 24, 2009 at 10:34 a.m.

   Wendy,
   Please send me an email with your phone number and I'll give some some information that should have been included in your article, and tell you why both The Century Council and MADD are both wasiting their money trying to combat "binge drinking" on college campus.
   The National Institute on Drug Abuse and author Richard Earle are only trying to sell their messages for profit, and refuse to adress the very real problem.
   I look forward to hearing back from you.
   Jeffrey Pipes Guice
   Editor
   Beer, Wine & Spirits Industry Newsletter
   www.bwsnewsletter.com
   

3. Erica Moulton from The Century Council
   

   commented on: February 25, 2009 at 8:49 a.m.

   By using the word “now” to introduce readers to the American Advertising Federation/Century Council/Ad Council/American Council on Education initiative to fight college binge drinking, some readers may be left to assume that the 2009 National Student Advertising Competition is a last minute attempt to enter the drinking age debate. Nothing could be further from the truth.

   The Century Council has assisted colleges and universities, students, parents and others in the community with innovative strategies to promote alcohol education and responsible decision making on campus for more than ten years. Our longstanding and unwavering support for the current legal drinking age of 21 and dedication to the enforcement of it provide a solid foundation for the Century Council’s efforts to curb underage and binge drinking among college students.
   

4. Jeffrey pipes Guice from BWS Newsletter
   

   commented on: February 25, 2009 at 1:15 p.m.

   Thanks for all of the calls and emails.
   Please allow me to address them all here:
   Most students drink because the want to be accepted and need the "courage" to fit in with their peers.
   Binge drinking is simply a part of a much larger problem called alcoholism.
   In a nutshell, alcoholism is a genetic disease that's inherited. The reason there's a focus on binge drinking is because the college campus is a wonderful place for alcoholism to rear it's ugly head because most young adults are, for the first time in their lives, making their own decisions without their parents around. Let me point out that most binge drinkers have already experienced "blackouts" while in high school or even earlier.
   Alcoholic or "binge" drinking has absolutely nothing to do with the age of the drinker!
   What The Century Council and MADD can't seem to agree on, because of their different political agendas, is that they are working towards the same goal which is to make people act as socially responsible and law abiding citizens.
   But if they would agree to work together, along with the high school and college campuses, they could help "educate" our Country about the disease of alcoholism, and we would eventually have little or no incidents of binge drinking, date rapes, or automotive fatalities related to alcohol.
   Attached is a link to all of the information your students need about the problem and the solution of alcoholism:
   http://www.aa.org/?Media=PlayFlash
   
   Again, what The Century Council and MADD should be doing is working together and using the information supplied by Alcoholics Anonymous to develop a media campaign and study groups to educated students at colleges and high school across the Country about the disease and why one should never start drinking if they have a history of the disease in their family.
   It's really that simple.
   This should be one of the easiest As the students should ever earn - Don't Drink, Go To Meetings and Read The Big Book.
   Thank you,
   Jeff G.
   Editor & Publisher
   Beer, Wine & Spirits Industry Newsletter
   

5. Thorsten Rhode from marqueteer
   

   commented on: February 25, 2009 at 7:07 p.m.

   Drinking age in Germany is 16, 18 for hard liquor. (FYI: I grew up there.) However, you can only get a driver's license at 18 -- so many teens will already have had their hang-overs and 'bad experiences' with alcohol well before they are allowed to get behind a wheel (one of the main issues MADD is working on, but coming at it from the wrong angle, I think).

   As many have said before me, teens will engage in this behavior no matter what the 'official' drinking age is. Criminalizing drinking results in underage / binge drinking, because drinking needs to happen away from the public eye and/or before going out -- further increasing the dangers, because no one is around to keep a watchful eye (let alone call 911 and incriminate yourself, if you have a friend with alcohol poisoning on your hands). Believe me, getting drunk in a pub, with adults around who will call you on 'drunken behavior' has a sobering (pun intended) effect on an impressionable teen. All the peer pressure in the world does not outweigh the rest of the pub staring at you. With pity.

   So yes, lower the age to 18, introduce your children to alcohol instead making it taboo (we all know what that does to the young'uns, dont' we?) and stop acting as though we never were that age. Take the prohibitionist stigma off this self-created drinking discussion, treat it normally...and you end up with bright, young twenty-somethings who go on to engineer some of the best cars in the world and navigate'em on highways without speed limits (it worked for Germany -- and it looks like the US could use some of that, right now...).

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