Recent reports in the New York Times and Wired claim the US National Institutes of Health has withdrawn support for research on underage alcohol brand preferences at the behest of the Distilled Spirits Council, an industry lobby group. The ABRAND studies found that underage drinkers preferred brands different to those chosen by adults whose advertising seemed to target their demographic. Deliberate targeting of underage consumers is forbidden by industry self-regulated advertising codes, as underage and excessive youth consumption of alcohol increases risk of death and serious injury from road crashes, drowning, suicide, sexual risk taking and assault.
Australian research and advocacy based on findings of the first national survey of school students’ use of tobacco and alcohol led by the Cancer Council Victoria (1984) is the direct intellectual ancestor of the ABRAND study. Cigarette brand preferences of underage smokers influenced by brand advertising and sponsorship of major sporting codes were “killer facts” justifying cigarette advertising bans in all Australian media including plain packaging (2012). By contrast with tobacco, Australian alcohol advertising is still governed by voluntary industry administered codes. Governments reject greater restrictions on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Calls for the lessons of Australia’s achievements in supressing tobacco advertising to be applied to alcohol do not refer to research on brands. In the public imaginary, the image of victory against nearly ubiquitous tobacco advertising lingers but with an indistinct outline.
Narratives based upon systematic analysis of publically available documents could sharpen public memory, but the critical period (1975-1989) lies within the zone of copyright control, obscuring the unified or “bird’s eye view” available to digital “distant readers” of historical records online (Phillips et al 2015). The National Library of Australia digital archive Trove promises to “change our relationship with the past” but is constrained from doing so post 1954 by international copyright agreements. Meanwhile, print collections documenting brand power are disappearing from libraries and archives faster than digitisation projects can conserve them. These obstacles to accessing the past have enhanced the appeal of digital archives established by US lawsuits against Big Tobacco at the University of California. Public health advocates appeal for champions to communicate this evidence base as scientific proof that inadequate regulation of industry is a threat to youth. This approach has been criticised by social scientists for scholarly over-reliance on “textual analysis of corporations” when “fine-grained ethnographic engagements” could be more effective (Herrick 2016).
I have tested a potential solution by assembling and interrogating an array of source materials to construct a bird’s eye “flight simulator” using widely available desktop technologies (Endnote/Adobe). For this paper, I have used bibliographic database/document manager Endnote to visualise the documentary record offline while complying with copyright laws. With tobacco archives online as my point of departure, I demonstrate how true stories based on databasing an array of source types can entertainingly relate the campaigns of the past in terms meaningful to historians, advocates, public health researchers, federal regulators, and policy analysts, so together we can all talk about brands.