Influencers and alcohol

New study reveals the massive exposure of alcohol from blogs and influencers. Actis Norway launched in the autumn of 2020 an investigation of exposure to alcohol in social media. The investigation was done by Retriever, a Nordic company providing communication insight.

One of Eurocare’s members in Norway, Actis, has carried out an analysis of blogs and influencers, and examined how alcohol is portrayed and exposed in these channels. In a period of 30 days, they followed 20 Norwegian influencers and collected findings from the influencers pages on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, blogs, Facebook and TikTok. This resulted in 13 183 posts that made the basis for the analysis.

Main findings
-          329 of the posts included exposure of alcohol. In other words, 11 posts with alcohol per day and 82 posts per week. In a year this would be a total of 3948 posts.
-          670 saved posts in Instagram highlights included exposure of alcohol
-          8 percent of previous published posts included exposure of alcohol
-          9 percent of the alcohol posts exposed a logo and brand name
-          All of the posts with alcohol portrayed alcohol as a positive factor  

Blurred lines
The report is done in Norway, a country that has a ban on alcohol advertisement. Even though probably all the posts in the report are not paid-for advertisement, which would have been illegal, it is still hard for an audience to distinguish between what is an advertisement and what is not. ‘

This report shows that an audience is being exposed for what could be perceived as alcohol advertisement – and that there are blurred lines between alcohol advertisement and freedom of speech’ says Mariann Skar, Secretary General in the European Alcohol Policy Alliance.