PULLMAN,
“Underage potential drinkers see things in the ads that are very appealing to them and that experts might not be picking up while analyzing the same ads, and this suggests that there are effects going on that we, as researchers, are underestimating,” said coauthor Erica Austin, professor and interim director of the WSU Edward R. Murrow School of Communication.
“Almost three quarters of the students reported that at least one of the ads viewed appealed to them personally, and 84 percent thought at least one ad seemed targeted to underage drinkers,” she said.
The study compares the analyses of printed alcohol beverage ads in popular magazines by trained student coders and untrained college students who ultimately are the message receivers. The differences emerged primarily in the perception of instant gratification, achievement and success, portrayal of a college feel and the existence of moderation and heavy drinking messages in the ads.
When comparing both groups, the trained coders, whose analyses are used by researchers, found moderation messages more frequently than the group of message receivers, whose perceptions of the ads reflect those of the average underage college student. Additionally, the trained coders found encouragement for heavy drinking less frequently than the students did.
Austin, her colleagues Bruce Pinkleton and Stacey Hust, and graduate student Amber Coral-Reaume Miller found some of the differences between trained coders and message receivers’ results striking. For example, message receivers saw appeals to instant gratification in the ads 36 percent of the time, while trained coders did not report any inferences of instant gratification from the alcohol beverages ads they saw.
In the study, the authors said that “message receivers noticed many specific features more often than coders trained to search for these features did, suggesting that these characteristics were more salient to the message receivers, as indeed an advertiser would intend.”
Untrained coders perceived portrayals of underage drinking in the ads 13 percent of the time while trained coders did not report any instances of portrayals of underage drinking in the same ads. Although both groups thought some ads were appealing to individuals 21 years old or younger, trained coders reported that the ads seemed appealing to that group 21 percent of the time, while message receivers indicated that the appeal existed 40 percent of the time, about twice as often.
Other results published in the journal show that even for information such the number of males and females portrayed in the ads, trained and untrained coders differed in their data, with message receivers reporting a higher number of males and females than trained coders.
The two groups also reported differences on the extent to which ads portrayed men as sex objects or as tough, had appeals to wealth, success, love and included sexual connotations. The exception, where both groups agree on what they perceived, was on the reported frequency with which the theme of friendship was portrayed in the ads.
