Emerging social media ‘platform’ approaches to alcohol marketing: a comparative analysis of the activity of the top 20 Australian alcohol brands on Facebook (2012-2014)

Abstract

Social media platforms are important actors in the development of alcohol marketing techniques. While public health research has documented the activities of brands and consumers related to alcohol promotion and consumption on social media, there remains the need to develop an account of the native, participatory and data-driven advertising model of these platforms. This article examines the relationship between alcohol brands, media platforms and their users by analysing the activity of the 20 most popular alcohol brands’ Australian Facebook pages in 2012 and 2014. We report that the number of fans of alcohol brands increased by 52% from 2012 to 2014. While the number of posts dropped 12% from 2012 and 2014, total interactions with posts by users increased by 9%. Overall, brand activity and engagement became more consistent between 2012 and 2014. We argue that the changing character of user engagement with alcohol brands on Facebook can be related to changes in the platform architecture. Facebook is orchestrating a shift from exposure to engagement as its key advertising metric, and thus departing substantially from established mass media advertising paradigms. Effective policy responses to alcohol marketing in the digital era depend on a more rigorous examination of the marketing infrastructure of social media platforms.

Keywords:

• Alcohol marketing
• native advertising
• social media
• Facebook
• alcohol policy

Acknowledgements

Nicholas Carah received funding from the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education to collect the data-set of alcohol brand activity on Facebook during 2012. Nicholas Carah was a joint complainant to the Advertising Standards Board and Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code regarding content posted to Facebook by Smirnoff and Victoria Bitter in 2012. Michelle Shaul worked as a research assistant on this project. Tim Smith contributed to the ggplot2 command in R and discussions surrounding the data. Wayne Hall read and commented on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.