“Predatory Advertising”
Op-Ed by Alejandro Calvillo in Mexico Solidarity Media reports (originally published in Sin Embargo):
“As a society we are drowning in advertising, to such a degree that we do not fully distinguish it; we have no idea how it determines our habits, our choices.
“The estimated costs of alcohol consumption in Mexico amount to 552 billion pesos, and the taxes paid by alcohol companies are about one-tenth of those costs: 57 billion pesos. Who reaps the profits and who pays the costs?
“Diageo, the British multinational that is the world’s largest producer of spirits, began developing a type of product in the early 1990s that is now very prevalent in the Mexican market: ‘alcopops,’ alcoholic beverages that mimic the characteristics of soft drinks; cocktails that mix alcohol with sweet-tasting, often carbonated, beverages; and drinks with artificial flavours like soft drinks, sold pre-mixed in cans and small bottles.
“These beverages, which fall somewhere between an alcoholic drink and a traditional soft drink, have been described by experts as a strategic gateway to alcohol consumption for children. They are said to have a ‘masked taste’ because the sweet flavour masks the alcohol’s flavour, and they are colourful and appealing to young people and women.
“Advertising spending on these mixed drinks from various brands jumped from $27.5 million in 2000 to $193.2 million in 2002, while consumption increased from 105.1 million gallons to 180 million gallons during the same period.”
Other Articles on Same Topic
- NGO warns about deceptive sale of beverages with low alcohol content – Red de Acción sobre Alcohol alerts that companies omit alcohol content from labels to target young people through convenience stores (La Jornada)
Assessment
This article by Alejandro Calvillo, director of El Poder del Consumidor, names alcohol industry tactics directly and demands accountability. Mr Calvillo links Diageo’s alcopop strategy, Coca-Cola’s predatory World Cup marketing, and the failure of Mexico’s regulatory framework to protect young people from commercial pressures designed to recruit them as alcohol consumers.
Alcohol harm costs Mexico an estimated 552 billion pesos annually, while the taxes paid by alcohol corporations amount to just 57 billion – roughly one-tenth of the social cost they generate. This gap is what pro-health alcohol taxation is designed to address, and it underlines the urgency of the OECD’s recommendation that Mexico reform its alcohol tax system.
The La Jornada article adds concrete evidence of how alcohol industry tactics play out at the retail level. Alonso Robledo of the Red de Acción sobre Alcohol (RASA) describes beverages that contain alcohol but are packaged and labelled to look like soft drinks – deliberately omitting alcohol content from nutritional labels so they can be purchased by minors in convenience stores. This comes at a time when Mexico’s ENCODAT 2025 survey shows that alcohol use among 12–17 year-olds has actually decreased, suggesting that the industry is pivoting to undermine and stop the very progress society is seeing in falling alcohol use among minors. The launch of the Voces Jóvenes por el Derecho a la Salud (Young Voices for the Right to Health) network signals that Mexican civil society is actively building the next generation of alcohol policy advocates.
Mr Calvillo’s framing of “predatory advertising” is powerful. It moves the conversation away from individual “responsibility” and toward corporate accountability – away from asking why people use alcohol and toward asking why corporations are allowed to use deceptive and targeted marketing to maximise consumption of a product that causes massive harm. With the World Cup approaching, the contrast between the alcohol industry’s multi-billion-dollar marketing push and the alcohol policy vacuum in which it operates is glaring.