About 10 years ago I was in Parliament House in Canberra for a conference. At the time, I was the policy director for the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE).
As I passed a cafe where lobbyists hang out, I saw an in-house representative from a major beer company. They came in and jokingly asked if I could help them with their research question: “How do we get women to drink more beer?”
They thought this was funny. I thought it said a lot about their character.
I've been thinking about this moment a lot lately, as I've been subjected to the annual onslaught of marketing to buy my mom a drink this Mother's Day. “Cheers to all the wine moms,” one online retailer said in a toast.
What initially seemed like a “joke” has now become a key pillar of the alcohol industry's advertising strategy.
By selling alcohol as a treatment, companies are cynically commodifying the guilt, stress, and fatigue that many women feel under the pressures of modern life.
We've all seen the mummy wine meme. The joke is that mothers can't get through the day without a bucket of savvy wine.
Rather than addressing the structural inequalities that leave women bearing a disproportionate burden of childcare and domestic labor, drinking has been rebranded as “self-care.”
During lockdown, we saw retailers partnering with major companies to sell alcohol as a reward for mothers who survived home schooling.
Unfortunately, alcohol companies and retailers are actively pushing women to see alcohol as a solution to the stress of raising children.
Research from La Trobe University's Center for Alcohol Policy Research shows that women who are overburdened by the competing demands of career and family internalize feelings of guilt and exhaustion, resulting in increased alcohol use. It has been found.
We also found that through sophisticated and targeted marketing, alcohol was presented as a panacea for the stress faced by mothers.
With unregulated use of data, companies can now track where women are in their parenting journey, whether they feel pressured to care for their children, what alcohol they have purchased in the past, and whether they seek help for their mothers. You now have access to a set of insights that tell you things like whether you're there or not. Drinking.
This data can then be used to target women at the exact time and in the exact way that the algorithm tells them will have the greatest impact. This often means targeting the most vulnerable people at their most vulnerable moments.
The lack of control over the use of data for the predatory and targeted marketing of addictive products is frankly frightening, and we are already seeing the real-life effects. I am.
Last year Australia hit its highest alcohol-related death rate in a decade, increasing even more year-on-year, this time to more than 9%. The largest increase in deaths was among women aged 45 to 64.
Alcoholic liver disease is on the rise as well, with research in Victoria showing hospital admissions for women have tripled since the pandemic began.
In the past six months, we've heard from four people who have lost women in their 40s to alcohol.
These stories are heartbreaking and involve young children living life without their mothers.
This Mother's Day, you don't need a bottle of alcohol that says “My Amazing Mom.”
I don't want everyone in my life to see a targeted ad telling me that the gift I would appreciate is alcohol.
I wish alcohol companies would stop trying to convince me and other mothers that drinking is the solution to the pressures we face.
Even better, we would like to see the government introduce common sense measures to prevent these companies from exploiting women's increased mental and caring burdens as a marketing strategy.
