Under The Influence: Does Advertising Decide How We Drink?

Picture yourself watching a TV show and an advertisement pops up. You see flashy colours and a refreshing beer for the summer heat. Later, you go grocery shopping and end up choosing that drink, even if you don’t remember the advert from before. A study was done in the United Kingdom (UK) to test how this happens, but with a twist. The advert was not always for an alcoholic drink; it was also for “NoLo” drinks – short for “no alcohol or low alcohol” – that looked almost exactly the same as the alcoholic version.

But first, let’s look at why this topic is important. Alcohol is a big health issue around the world, and research shows that it causes accidents, serious illnesses, and a lot of long-term damage. Many countries try to control how much alcohol is advertised, but despite these rules, alcohol companies have found loopholes. Popular brands now also sell NoLo versions of their drinks. The “Heineken 0.0” drink is one example, which has 0.03% alcohol and is legally considered as alcohol-free. Although this sounds like a good thing, some NoLo drinks are packaged almost identically to the alcoholic version, using the same bottle size, colours, logo, and brand name. We might not even notice the difference, and this may be how companies advertise alcohol without breaking the rules.

So, in 2025 a group of researchers in the UK ran a large experiment where they put people into three groups randomly using a computer software, like drawing names out of a hat. The researchers didn’t know who was placed in which group. Once the groups were created, everyone was shown the same 48-second video (that they couldn’t skip) about how pencils are made. In the first 10 seconds of the video, a quick advert was played. Group one was shown an ad for a normal alcoholic drink, group two saw an advert for the NoLo version of the same brand, and group three saw an ad for batteries, nothing to do with drinks.

After watching the video, everyone was sent to an online supermarket, which had thousands of items. They were told to imagine they were shopping for a barbecue with friends and had to pick at least ten items. It all looked real, but no one paid actual money, it was just for the study, and the researchers watched all their choices. People who joined were all over the age of 18 and had drunk and bought alcohol in the past month. 2,852 of those who signed up fit the criteria to join and were put in the three groups, but many of them didn’t finish the experiment, leaving 1,638 people. The average person was about 49 years old, half were women, and most were white.

The big question was whether the advert affected what people chose to put in their shopping cart; alcohol or the NoLo version. What they found was that the NoLo advert actually worked! People in group two, who saw the NoLo advert were more likely to put that drink in their shopping cart. It sounds like this type of advert could help people stay away from alcohol. They also found that people in group one, who saw the advert for alcoholic drinks, were more likely to choose the alcoholic drink, showing a pattern. But, after some stricter calculation adjustments were made to make sure the result didn’t happen by chance, the evidence wasn’t strong enough to say this pattern is true.

Most people picked alcohol regardless of what group they were in. Interestingly, the NoLo adverts did increase selection of NoLo drinks overall, not just for people who saw that ad. Broadly, these ads seem to push people towards alcohol-free drinks. Strangely however, the researchers noticed something concerning: the people who watched the NoLo ad, had slightly higher odds of buying the alcoholic version too. Again, the evidence wasn’t strong enough to prove this, but it suggests a problem with NoLo advertising.

Another question they asked was how well people remembered the advert. Most said they remembered it, and a little over half in all the groups also remembered the brand that they saw. But here’s the surprise. In group one (the alcohol advert), if people remembered the brand, almost all of them also correctly remembered the exact product! So that means they all knew they saw an ad for alcohol. In group two (the NoLo advert), only about half remembered that they saw the non-alcoholic version, and others mistakenly thought they had seen an ad for alcohol. So, people seem to remember the brand more than the fact that it was alcohol-free!.

Other questions the study explored tell us that people didn’t seem worried about NoLo advertising but didn’t like that companies advertised them to children; and seeing the different adverts didn’t really change how much food (measured in calories) people put in their shopping carts. The researchers also used a tool called the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test Consumption (AUDIT-C) to see if people are at risk for depending on alcohol, meaning they physically need to continue drinking. Then they checked if the NoLo advert affected the people at high risk differently but didn’t find strong evidence. This is probably because they didn’t have enough people to get a clear answer, so this is a topic to study in the future.

The study asked many questions and challenged the idea of NoLo advertising, which can maybe change the way alcohol is advertised. But it seemed like much of the results were unresolved; NoLo ads help choose more NoLo drinks, but they also make you choose alcohol. This was a big study, and they made sure to check with the public about the quality of their work; whether they thought it was relevant and didn’t hurt anyone who participated. The only criticism was that when it’s not your money, you might choose the items differently.

Either way, the study asked important questions using many people, who were fairly assigned into groups. The supermarket was realistic, and they made sure the adverts were all shown the same way (except for the product of course) to everyone in the groups. Future studies can also explore these questions with different types of adverts – images, celebrity sponsorships, or social media posts. The key takeaway is that NoLo adverts can indeed be helpful, but with caution.

The authors, Ru Jia and colleagues are affiliated with the Medical Science Division, University of Oxford; and the School of Psychology, Social Work and Public Health, Oxford Brookes University, UK. The study was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). No conflicts of interest were reported.

Image: ChatGPT