Always displaying adults in moderate and convivial drinking occasions in spirits ads is the contribution of our sector to creating positive social norms. Advertising and marketing practices are constantly evolving, and it is essential to train marketers and the advertising agencies to keep pace of technological development. To this aim, spiritsEUROPE developed a set of guidelines for responsible marketing communications to assist marketing professionals in the implementation of the laws, regulations and self-regulatory codes of practice.
The Guidelines contain rules on placement and on content of ads, and apply to all media. Members of spiritsEUROPE have also committed to include a responsible drinking message on their advertising, preferably in the form of a consumer information website.
To comply with self-regulation rules, spiritsEUROPE has developed and delivered a comprehensive face-to-face training programme. In three years, our digital marketing workshops reached over 560 marketing professionals directly, in 13 countries. The training helps advertisers understand and use the robust solutions offered by social media platforms to ensure commercial communications are served to adults only. Facebook for example via its registered user database and age-gating system, ensures that alcohol brands pages, and comments, shares, like on these are simply invisible to minors in this environment. Similar safeguard exist on other platforms such Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
The Self-Regulatory Organisations – independent bodies that monitor and regulate advertising practice – have assisted spirits Europe in those training sessions. Read more on the evaluation and feedback here.
The spiritsEUROPE Guidelines and training programme represent an unprecedented effort of the whole spirits sector across Europe to achieve consistency in responsible commercial communications. In a fast moving digital world, all actors must regularly review their practices against changes in the market, in public opinion and consumer expectations. For spiritsEUROPE, this is a constant and long term commitment.
