Beer study thirsts for sober truth

What do you get when six social scientists observe an unspecified number of American youths in the act of watching an untold quantity of beer advertising during TV sports programmes? The answer is something close to gibberish.

Don’t take my word for it. The following is a short version of an article in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol published by the Department of Technical Journalism, Colorado State University, pithily entitled “Male adolescents’ reactions to TV beer advertisements: the effects of sports content and programming content”.

The authors are MD Slater, D Rouner, K Murray, F Beauvais, J van Leuven and MD Rodriguez. That six people were employed in this project probably has less to do with its complexity than the requirement to observe some obscure American equal opportunities rule. You will note that these half-dozen Americans are variously of English, Scottish, French, Dutch, Spanish and possibly Irish extraction. The relative anonymity conferred by giving only their initials tells us nothing about the balance of the sexes but it is safe to assume that at least one woman was employed in the endeavour.

The authors begin by arguing that “the effects of advertising on behaviour and attitudes must only accumulate over (considerable) time and, consequently, the standard cause-and-soon-to-follow-effect experiment is not likely to be a proper test of what advertisements really do.”

This is an unpromising start since it suggests the research is doomed from the outset. But when you’ve taken the trouble to assemble a United Nations of social psychologists you don’t give up that easily.

“However, behavioural change and attitude change do not occur in a vacuum: these changes occur because of the generation of antecedent cognitive responses that gradually drive the change.”

This may or may not mean that advertising has a slow, accumulative effect. It all depends on what you make of the phrase “antecedent cognitive response”. Helpfully, the authors add: “These cognitive responses occur in response to real world events and occur immediately after the real world event has been seen”.

What do you suppose is a real world event? How does it differ from an artificial world event or a real world non-event? Well, say the six-pack, an individual might watch a beer advertisement in colour and better accept what is seen than watching it in monochrome. So a real world event is a beer advertisement in colour.

The point, insist the authors, is that the “relative immediate accepting or otherwise is the key feature in driving along behavioural or attitude change (should repeated exposures to the advertisement subsequently occur, and often they might not).”

All this, then, is an elaborate preamble to bolster the credibility of what follows. In a nutshell, what the authors are saying is that, OK, TV beer ads do not instantly affect the behaviour or attitude of the viewer but, should the commercials meet with an instantly favourable response, they might have an effect in the longer term. So let’s measure the short-term reactions anyway.

Well, then, down to business. “In their experiments the authors tested whether beer advertisements with a sport content were more accepted than those with none. They showed that this was in fact a reliable finding.” Well, would you believe it? Sports-mad young American males are more likely to react favourably to ads with a sporting content than those without.

Next, the authors “tested whether the effect of beer advertisements with a sport content was the same when embedded in a sports programme as it was when embedded in an entertainment programme”. And the answer was “yes”.

“This is interesting,” the six declare, rightly implying that everything that precedes it is not. “If this result was securely replicated by other research groups, it would suggest that the vast sums of money that promoters appear to spend on beer advertisements within sports programmes might not be as appropriate as was once thought!” (Their exclamation.)

On the other hand, it might suggest no such thing. Much would depend on whether the alternative programmes attracted as many viewers in the target market.

The authors were not content to accept that beer ads with a sports theme were as effective as their findings suggested. “They took other measures from subjects that might moderate this finding. They measured the extent to which subjects counter-argued the beer advertisements: they took this measure of counter-arguing as an indication of the extent to which the adman’s message had not got across.”

To the authors’ surprise, the young men questioned were critical of beer ads but not others. This leads to the triumphant conclusion that “although public health policy makers might well be concerned that beer advertisements appeal to adolescents, they should take heart that (presumably through health education efforts) subjects were much more cognitively resistant to beer advertisements than to other advertisements.”

Strange no one thought to ask the goggle-boxing boys from Colorado whether they drank beer and, if so, how much, and how often. For, let it be shouted out again, it’s not what people tell researchers that matters; it’s what they actually do in, to borrow a phrase, a real world event. Come to think of it, there’s another phrase that describes social psychologist researchers. It’s “cognitively resistant”.