The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS), the self-regulatory group for the U.S. distilled spirits industry, just released new guidelines for advertising distilled spirits online. The guidelines were drafted in cooperation with the European Forum for Responsible Drinking, which is the European counterpart to DISCUS.

The full guidelines are available here, and include lots of common sense strategies for responsible online marketing, e.g. identify marketing as such, provide and honor a privacy policy for user data, age gate, market only to adults, and include social responsibility statements. The guidelines also get specific, instructing advertisers to only place ads in media where 71.6% of the audience is the legal drinking age. Recent Nielsen data shows Facebook at 82% 21+, Twitter at 87% 21+ and YouTube at 81% 21+.

Digital marketing communications that are intended to be forwarded by users, such as with a share, download or email “button click”, should include instructions to individuals downloading the content that they should not forward these materials to individuals below the legal purchase age. On a related note, if users provide content on the advertiser’s site or a site controlled by the advertiser, the advertiser should be monitoring and moderating the content every day, or at a minimum once every five business days, to remove inappropriate content.

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