Alcohol marketing on the internet: new challenges for harm reduction

While much has been made of the problems of regulating alcohol and other drug promotion in the traditional media of print, radio and newspapers, the 'new media' and in particular the world wide web, provides new fertile ground for alcohol advertisers. In this Harm Reduction Digest Tom Carroll and Rob Donovan apply the voluntary standards of the Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code to six websites for alcohol products available in Australia. They conclude that the internet provides an opportunity for alcohol marketing targeted at underage consumers, that some alcohol-related web pages would be in breach of the Code if it applied to the internet, and suggest that web marketing practices of alcohol beverage companies should be monitored and a code of practice developed to regulate alcohol promotion on the web.