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Portman Group claims alcohol ad report is "flawed"

Published:  19 August, 2008

The Portman Group has criticised a report which looked at how often children are exposed to alcohol advertising.

The Portman Group has criticised a report which looked at how often children are exposed to alcohol advertising.

The 'Not in front of children' report, released last year by Alcohol Concern, claimed that the number of alcohol advertisements rose between 3 and 5pm, coinciding with the time that most children return from school.

However, in a letter to Alcohol Concern sent last week, Portman Group chief executive David Poley accused the report of being "flawed from the very start in terms of its methodology."

Poley said the report took a "simplistic" approach to gauging the extent to which children were being exposed to alcohol advertising. Researchers counted how many alcohol advertisements appeared during each hour of the day over two specified weeks.

"By showing the distribution of alcohol advertisements throughout the day, the report sought to draw conclusions about children's exposure to such advertisements. This simplistic approach fails completely to take account of the size of audience of each programme. Worse, it fails to take account of the audience profile for each programme," said Poley.

Poley also claimed that closer analysis of Alcohol Concern's data showed a drop in the number of alcohol advertisements between 3 and 5pm, as opposed to the "spike" that the report claimed.

Both the Scottish government and UK government have recently issued consultation papers which refer to the Alcohol Concern report, which Poley said suggests it is being used as a basis for policy decisions.

"We are concerned that the government consultations are taking the Alcohol Concern report at face value. In the case of the Scottish consultation, it repeats the false claim that the number of advertisements increases between 3pm and 5pm. In the case of the English consultation, the Impact Assessment that accompanies the consultation paper repeats the above false," he said.

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