Depictions of alcohol use in a UK Government partnered online social marketing campaign:Hollyoaks ‘The Morning after the night before’

Abstract

Aims: This study analysed the depiction of alcohol in an online government partnered social marketing campaign: Hollyoaks ‘The Morning After the Night Before’. This was a new initiative, providing Internet-delivered episodes of a popular terrestrial drama targeted at young people.Methods: All the 12 episodes were coded for visual representations of alcohol, drinking acts and alcohol effect references. The drinking setting, point in time, type of alcoholic beverage consumed, drinker's demographics, effects/consequences of drinking, and official and unofficial responses to alcohol consumption and related harms were also coded. Audience comments were then categorized according to their content in order to gain an insight into viewers’ thoughts regarding the campaign.Findings: A wide variety of data is reported. Most representations of alcohol were positively framed, and were depicted without immediate consequence. No explicit sensible drinking messages were included in the episodes. Analysis of viewer feedback indicated a lack of awareness of the intentions of the campaign and little discussion of alcohol-related issues was generated. In contrast, viewers seemed to reject the depictions of alcohol portrayed, and identified with, or admired, the central characters. Further analysis indicated little coherence between alcohol framing in the online campaign and representations in the terrestrial TV series.Conclusions: This article uses the example of KYL/Hollyoaks to draw attention to the emergent use of the internet and other new media in health promotion. New media provides creative new opportunities to engage young people with health-promoting messages. However, although new ways of delivery are important they should be part of a co-ordinated and internally consistent campaign, present realistic depictions of alcohol use, and be based upon clear evidence-based principles.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.