The Department of Health’s Responsibility Deal Alcohol Network (RDAN) brings together the drinks industry, local authorities and health experts to encourage drinking within recommended guidelines.
But ministerial belief in the power of “nudging” to tackle binge drinking is misplaced because drinks companies are “nudging strongly in the opposite direction” via official pages on sites such as Facebook where users celebrate “alcohol-fuelled culture.”
The damning verdict comes from Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, chairman of the Alcohol Health Alliance and a former president of the Royal College of Physicians, and Dr Adrian Bonner, a specialist in addiction at the University of Kent.
RDAN was established in 2010 but ran into trouble when health groups including the British Medical Association and the British Liver Trust withdrew the following year, warning that voluntary actions were not enough.
The government moved to address alcohol pricing last year and proposed a minimum price of 45p a unit for the sale of alcohol in England and Wales.
But according to Sir Ian and Dr Bonner agreements such as RDAN still risk failing because the industry is not held to the same level of corporate social responsibility in all activities.
Writing in the journal Addiction, they call for a comprehensive cross-departmental government alcohol strategy like that “attempted by the previous [Labour] government in its attempts to tackle social exclusion.”
“The RDAN aim to ‘foster a culture of responsible drinking’ , and the Coalition government places much emphasis on ‘nudging’ to bring about this cultural shift,” they write.
“But the alcohol industry is surely nudging strongly in the opposite direction, for example, with a multi-million dollar contract agreed between Diageo and Facebook.”
Diageo, the UK-based company whose brands include Smirnoff, Guinness and Baileys, agreed the deal with Facebook in September 2011, saying its brands in the US had enjoyed a 20 per cent sales increase “as a result of Facebook activity.”
The company said more than 950 of its marketers had trained in ‘Facebook boot camps’ and users of the site have since flooded pages dedicated to their favourite alcoholic drinks with hundreds of thousands of comments and ‘likes’.
Sir Ian and Dr Bonner pointed to “sophisticated digital marketing engagement” around the Smirnoff NightLife Exchange project, which involved 50 countries and was fronted by Madonna last year, as a particular cause for concern.
The project involved events where cities and countries ‘exchanged’ their nightlife for themes from other locations.
“An effective alcohol policy is needed to counterbalance the alcohol-fuelled culture promoted by user-generated activity in Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange,” the authors wrote.
“The concept of (social) responsibility deals as in RDAN and the European Alcohol Health Forum (EAHF) will be significantly undermined unless corporate social responsibility is consistent in all activities across individual organisations and the whole sector.”
Diageo, which signed up as an RDAN partner, has recently replaced the Nightlife Exchange Project with new campaigns such as Smirnoff Midnight Circus and £YoursForTheMaking, which seeks “new nightlife ideas” from music industry figures to be shared on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
The core commitment agreed to by all those signed up to RDAN reads: “We will foster a culture of responsible drinking, which will help people to drink within guidelines.”
Drinks producers and retailers who signed up to RDAN undertook pledges of voluntary action.
They include providing health information on labels (80 per end of bottles and cans should have information by December 2013), better provision of alcohol unit information, wider availability of low-strength beers and no advertising posters within 100 metres of schools.
Sir Ian and Dr Bonner said “it remains to be seen whether or not these voluntary ‘pledges’ will be translated into reductions of alcohol related harm”.
A spokesman for Portman Group, the social responsibility body for alcohol producers, said: “There are strict rules which apply to alcohol marketing on social networks which are operated by the Advertising Standards Authority and the Portman Group which ensure that alcohol is only marketed to adults and not in a way that could encourage excessive or inappropriate consumption.”
A Diageo spokesperson said: “Diageo only ever markets its products to over 18s. Its partnership with Facebook complies with all the codes governing the marketing of alcohol and the brands also use it as a platform to promote responsible drinking to their followers.”
