Farhad Divecha, director of AccuraCast, discusses the relationship between alcohol marketing and YouTube's potentially under-age audience.

Brands the world over have grabbed the opportunities presented by social media and video sharing with both hands as an ideal way to reach younger, connected audiences almost without limitation or restriction.  For most there have been few disadvantages, but the innate absence of regulation online is causing problems for the alcohol industry - how do you balance the opportunity to reach millions of consumers with the risk of reaching those who are underage?

Therein lies the problem - our own recent research revealed the extent to which minors are viewing content from alcohol brands on YouTube - Children of any age with access to YouTube can instantly view alcohol-related content and on average, 6% of the views of adult-orientated content are by 13 to 17 year olds.  The maths is simple - if a beer or spirits commercial has had 10 million views on YouTube, on average, 600,000 children under the age of 17 will have seen it - and as we all know, 10 million views on YouTube is pretty common.

So, there’s clearly a problem but where do we go from here? Given the unregulated nature of the web, the answer has to lie in responsible brands working with the government in responsible ways.  In the UK, the NHS and alcohol brands should jointly fund new campaigns to raise parental awareness and provide guidance on how they can monitor what their child views on YouTube, as well as talking to kids about content that they shouldn’t view or be influenced by.  Alcohol companies can, in turn, safeguard their interests and reputations by actively monitoring social channels, and where they find too many viewers are underage, pulling the video in question or limiting access proactively. 

If the alcohol brands don’t become more proactive with this, it’s likely that there will be backlash at some point and the last thing they want is the government regulating their online activities as tightly as they do for TV and in sporting events in Europe, for example.  So, on YouTube, they should mark their content as adult, which would then require users to be signed in on a Google account to view the content. This isn’t foolproof, but at least minimises wrongful exposure to alcohol-related content.  They should also be proactive in identifying the viral spread of their content via other YouTube accounts and either stop it by using copyright content laws or insist on having the video marked as adult content by the users in question.

Progress is being made, with a new set of guidelines jointly announced by the European and US drinks industries which focus on better age checking, content monitoring and reporting structures designed to show that self-regulation is actually working (or otherwise, presumably).  These are intended to apply across social media, mobile and user-generated content platforms, so hopefully YouTube will also be included.

With governments under huge pressure to steer clear of web regulation in any form, the responsibility must fall on the brands themselves to exploit digital channels correctly, and help keep content away from those society says are too young to see it.

Farhad Divecha is director of AccuraCast, a SEO, PPC, social and mobile marketing business. www.accuracast.com