that relate mass media generally and advertising specifically to mean-
ingful outcome measures.

Having conducted the review, it is clear that the impact of advertising
on alcohol consumption and abuse has been a topic of much greater
concern to practitioners in the alcoholism field than those engaged in
the study of advertising. As a consequence, there tends to be a limited
amount of work that analyzes data and interprets results from the per-
spective of a media professional. The result is studies that draw conclu-
sions about the aims and goals of advertisers and that are based on
implicit assumptions about how advertising works and the power of
advertising to affect human behavior.

The perspective of this review will be that of an advertising profes-
sional, who has also studied alcoholism extensively. This point of view
will be manifest in the concepts and terminology used to analyze the
literature. Further, the advertising professional's perspective will be ap-
parent in a healthy skepticism, born from years of rigorously evaluating
how advertising affects sales for various products, in the power of ad-
vertising to impact human behavior. We find, more often than not, that
marketplace behavior is no more tractable than addictive behavior.

Perhaps the most commonly held assumption by researchers in the
field is that advertising works. There is a strong belief, therefore, that
advertising affects consumption of alcoholic beverages and is related to
the adverse consequences of excessive use. When, however, no rela-
tionship is discovered, the results are discounted as anomalies, coun-
terarguments are given (e.g., it must work or manufacturers would not
spend so much money advertising), or in the worst of instances, con-
clusions are drawn that are not supported by the data. The belief that
advertising works further colors the interpretation of results and, in the
case of content analysis, can determine how the study is conducted and
what results are found.

In this book we start with the null hypothesis: Advertising does not
influence alcohol consumption and has no impact on alcohol abuse or
alcohol related disease and death. The review is intended to determine
if this hypothesis can be accepted based on empirical evidence given in
the literature. If it cannot, and the research indicates advertising does
affect consumption and abuse, we will attempt to determine the mag-
nitude of the effects and their importance relative to other factors, again
based on the empirical evidence reported in the literature.

The literature on advertising and alcohol use and abuse is broad and
diverse and includes cases on commercial free speech, Congressional
hearings, articles in the alcoholism, advertising and marketing trade

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