BACKGROUND: Alcohol sponsorship of sport is associated with increased alcohol consumption. Little research to date has examined the sponsorship of sport by no- and low-alcohol (NoLo) beverage brands, despite concern that the marketing of these products might be harmful to young people. This study had dual aims: to identify sporting partnerships between NoLo beers and Australian sport, and examine marketing tactics used in social media advertising to promote these partnerships.
METHODS: Our sample included NoLo beers sold online from three large Australian alcohol retailers. First, we performed a qualitative content analysis of partnerships between NoLo beers and sport using publicly available online information. We then analysed the 118 social media posts of NoLo brands linked to these partnerships using a coding framework adapted from the alcohol literature.
RESULTS: Of 34 brands, 13 had sporting sponsorship partnerships across a range of spectator and participatory sports. Key marketing tactics identified on social media were activations, time-and event-specific drinking, influencer marketing, competitions, and corporate social responsibility. In particular, NoLo brands aim to disrupt the sports drink market by advertising their products as healthy recovery drinks, or \'sports beers\', through activation events. Brands are also using influencer marketing and competitions, two tactics shown to be particularly persuasive for young people.
CONCLUSIONS: NoLo beer brands strategically align with Australian sports to promote NoLo consumption. As they are classified as soft drinks in Australia, NoLo beverages are not regulated like alcohol. Future discussions around sports sponsorship and advertising regulation must consider NoLo products.

BACKGROUND: It is well established that the tobacco industry used research funding as a deliberate tactic to subvert science. There has been little wider attention to how researchers think about accepting industry funding. We developed, then tested, hypotheses about two psychological constructs, namely, entitlement and conflict of interest contrarianism (CoI-C) among alcohol researchers who had previously received industry funding.
METHODS: A mixed-methods pilot study involved construct and instrument development, followed by an online survey and nested 3-arm randomised trial. We randomly allocated alcohol industry funding recipients to one of three conditions. In two experimental conditions we asked participants questions to remind them (and thus increase the salience) of their sense of entitlement or CoI-C. We compared these groups with a control group who did not receive any reminder. The outcome was a composite measure of openness to working with the alcohol industry.
RESULTS: 133 researchers were randomised of whom 79 completed the experiment. The posterior distribution over effect estimates revealed that there was a 94.8% probability that reminding researchers of their CoI-C led them to self-report being more receptive to industry funding, whereas the probability was 68.1% that reminding them of their sense of entitlement did so. Biomedical researchers reported being more open to working with industry than did psychosocial researchers.
CONCLUSIONS: Holding contrarian views on conflict of interest could make researchers more open to working with industry. This study shows how it is possible to study researcher decision-making using quantitative experimental methods.

BACKGROUND: Sub-Saharan Africa is important to the future of alcohol and global health because the alcohol market there is expanding rapidly in a relatively young population. This entails a corresponding contest about whether the policy measures adopted will be shaped by scientific evidence or by industry interference in alcohol policy. This study examines how alcohol industry actors use social media.
METHODS: Uganda was selected for study because of high levels of alcohol harm and recent alcohol policy debates. Data on the X (formerly Twitter) activity of the Ugandan companies of AB InBev and Diageo, who are the two main brewers, and the trade association including both, were collected, coded and thematically analysed.
RESULTS: X is used overwhelmingly by alcohol industry actors in Uganda to promote corporate social responsibility (CSR) and alcohol policy framing content. There is little direct product marketing. The framing of policy problems and solutions, and of the actors involved in policymaking and CSR resembles that used elsewhere in the political strategies of the transnational alcohol corporations. Content which appears more emphasised in Uganda includes material on farmers, illicit trade and contribution to the economy. As elsewhere, it avoids giving attention to the policy measures which would make a difference to the levels of alcohol harms endured by Uganda. Rhetorically, X is thus used to create a parallel universe, in which the actual harms and what is known about how to reduce them are conspicuous by their absence.
CONCLUSIONS: The alcohol industry presents itself as indispensable to Uganda\'s future and appears to have developed relationships with politicians, partnerships with government, and built a coalition with farmers. This means the alcohol industry may be well positioned to oppose public health policy measures, even though their arguments lack substance and are at odds with the evidence.

BACKGROUND: There are only two major statements which define alcohol policy development at the global level. There has not been any comparative analysis of the details of these key texts, published in 2010 and 2022 respectively, including how far they constitute similar or evolving approaches to alcohol harm.
METHODS: Preparatory data collection involved examination of documents associated with the final policy statements. A thematic analysis across the two policy documents was performed to generate understanding of continuity and change based on comparative study. Study findings are interpreted in the contexts of the evolving conceptual and empirical literatures.
RESULTS: Both documents exhibit shared guiding principles and identify similar governance challenges, albeit with varying priority levels. There is more emphasis on the high-impact interventions on price, availability and marketing in 2022, and more stringent targets have been set for 2030 in declaring alcohol as a public health priority therein, reflecting the action-oriented nature of the Plan. The identified roles of policy actors have largely remained unchanged, albeit with greater specificity in the more recent statement, appropriately so because it is concerned with implementation. The major exception, and the key difference in the documents, regards the alcohol industry, which is perceived primarily as a threat to public health in 2022 due to commercial activities harmful to health and because policy interference has slowed progress.
CONCLUSIONS: The adoption of the Global Alcohol Action Plan 2022-30 potentially marks a pivotal moment in global alcohol policy development, though it is unclear how fully it may be implemented. Perhaps, the key advances lie in advancing the ambitions of alcohol policy and clearly identifying that the alcohol industry should not be seen as any kind of partner in public health policymaking, which will permit progress to the extent that this influences what actually happens in alcohol policy at the national level.

OBJECTIVE: Some claims on alcohol labels highlight virtuous aspects of brands or products, including in health-, eco-, and cause-oriented domains (including charity partnerships, or ethical or humanitarian certifications). This virtue marketing may create a \'halo\' whereby consumers generalise from specific attributes to a more favourable overall appraisal of the product, brand, or even alcohol or the alcohol industry in general. This study aims to describe the prevalence of and trends over time in virtue marketing on the packaging of new alcohol (including lower and zero alcohol) products on the Australian market.
METHODS: Records of N=4,024 new alcohol products released in Australia between 2013 and 2023 were extracted from Mintel Global New Products Database. Health-, eco-, and cause-oriented claims on packaging were summarised across product types and time, and co-occurrence between claims was assessed.
RESULTS: Virtue marketing appeared on 36.5% of new alcohol products, of which health-oriented claims were most common (32.5%), followed by eco- (6.3%) and cause-oriented claims (2.0%). The prevalence of each claim category and virtue marketing overall significantly increased over time (each p<.001) and varied by product type. New alcohol products displayed as many as eight different types of claims and all claims tended to co-occur with at least two others.
CONCLUSIONS: Virtue marketing is prevalent on new alcohol products in Australia and has recently increased. While product packaging can provide useful consumer information, health-, eco-, and cause-oriented claims may exploit consumers\' motivation to make healthy, sustainable, and socially responsible choices despite alcohol being detrimental in these areas.

BACKGROUND: Alcohol industry organisations occupy a prominent position in UK alcohol policy, but their involvement has been contested by public health bodies on the basis that a conflict of interest (COI) exists between their economic objectives and those of public health. There are ongoing debates in the research literature about how to conceptualise COI and mitigate this in health research and practise. However, less attention has been paid to these issues in relation to the alcohol industry specifically. This article explores similarities and differences in beliefs among alcohol policy actors regarding COI and the implications of engagement with the alcohol industry in the context of UK public health policy.
METHODS: Semi-structured interviews with a range of policy actors (n=26) including medical professionals, parliamentarians, civil servants, academic researchers, health campaigners, and alcohol industry representatives. Interviews with alcohol industry representatives were supplemented with an analysis of industry responses to a public consultation. All data was thematically coded using NVivo software.
RESULTS: Two competing \"coalitions\" were identified, expressing beliefs about COI linked to alcohol industry engagement. Both divergent and convergent beliefs were expressed by the two coalitions in relation to the type of industry actor, form of engagement, the policy issue under discussion and the stage of policy process.
CONCLUSIONS: Alcohol policy is a complex and contested space in which policy actors have differing, nuanced and contingent understandings of COI and identify varying risks associated with alcohol industry engagement. In identifying the areas of convergence and diversion in both understanding and evaluation of COI in alcohol-specific settings, these findings will assist both decision-makers and non-governmental actors in developing policies and guidelines to manage potential COI in future.

BACKGROUND: The global burden of alcohol harm has increased and is forecast to grow further without effective policy implementation. Public-private partnerships aiming to address global health, and other societal challenges, are a burgeoning feature of neoliberal governance. Rhetorically distancing themselves from tobacco, the major alcohol companies are committed to tackling \'harmful drinking\' and have created a distinct type of public relations organization for this purpose. The activities of such organizations are increasingly recognized as an impediment to the implementation of policies to reduce alcohol harm, including in low- and middle-income countries where markets are expanding.
METHODS: The approach of critical discourse analysis is used to examine the discursive tactics and strategies used in Working Together; a \'toolkit\' published by the key global level alcohol industry public relations organization, the International Alliance for Responsible Drinking (IARD). This study considers how it works discursively to set the terms of, and overcome skepticism about partnerships, to define aims and position various actors by constructing their roles. The construction of prospective partners provides insights into the alcohol industry itself.
RESULTS: The toolkit operates as an ideological resource for forming public-private partnerships across the world based on the accumulated know-how of the major companies through IARD. This allows the largest alcohol companies to exercise leadership of the industry, while remaining off-stage. The toolkit relies on a form of rhetorical work which creates distance from obvious corporate interests and the harms caused to population health and society. This is accomplished by working against evidence-informed population level approaches, and thus avoiding policies that will make any significant difference to overall alcohol harm. Unspecific \"complexity\" affords opportunity for preferred types of \"actions\", and \"partnership\" provides opportunity to gain credibility by association, further minimizing the likelihood of any material harm being reduced.
CONCLUSIONS: The toolkit is designed to not only legitimate the inclusion of alcohol industry actors as initiating \'partners\', but also assigns them roles as managers of a set of carefully constructed relationships. This vision of public-private partnership reproduces the hegemonic narrative that has successfully blocked policy advances for decades and led to growing alcohol harm globally.

Alcohol\'s effects on cardiovascular disease (CVD) are controversial. Alcohol industry actors have shown particular interest in this subject, and been extensively involved through research funding, and in other ways, generating concerns about bias, particularly in reviews.
We conducted a co-authorship network analysis of the primary studies included within a previous co-authorship study of 60 systematic reviews on the impact of alcohol on CVD. Additionally, we examined the relationships between declared alcohol industry funding and network structure.
There were 713 unique primary studies with 2832 authors published between 1969 and 2019 located within 229 co-authorship subnetworks. There was industry funding across subnetworks and approximately 8% of all papers declared industry funding. The largest subnetwork dominated, comprising 43% of all authors, with sparse evidence of substantial industry funding. The second largest subnetwork contained approximately 4% of all authors, with largely different industry funders involved. Harvard affiliated authors who at the review level formed co-authorship subnetworks with industry funded authors were seen at the primary study level to belong to the largest epidemiological subnetwork. A small number of key authors make extensive alcohol industry funding declarations.
There was no straightforward relationship between co-authorship network formation and alcohol industry funding of epidemiological studies on alcohol and CVD. More fine-grained attention to patterns of alcohol industry funding and to key nodes may shed further light on how far industry funding may be responsible for conflicting findings on alcohol and CVD.

OBJECTIVE: There is a decline in youth drinking, but also a causal link between alcohol marketing and drinking among young people. Therefore, novel alcohol marketing strategies should be scrutinised, particularly where children are exposed. This includes marketing for zero-alcohol products (ZAP) (containing 0.00% to 1.15% alcohol by volume), which has expanded considerably in recent times. This review examines how the current industry-managed regulatory approach to alcohol marketing applies to ZAPs in Western Australia.
METHODS: The marketing mix (four Ps of marketing: product, promotion, place, price) was used as a framework to examine federal and state government policies and industry managed codes. Policies were included if they applied to marketing of alcohol products, for example, product labelling, promotion and advertising across various media, the place of purchase and pricing measures (taxation).
RESULTS: ZAPs were inconsistently defined, meaning that products between 0.05% and 1.15% alcohol by volume were covered under some but not all alcohol policy measures, and application to products under 0.5% alcohol by volume was limited.
CONCLUSIONS: Government policy should more clearly define alcohol marketing and whether ZAPs and other alcohol brand extensions should be treated in the same way as alcoholic products.
CONCLUSIONS: In Western Australia, the ways in which alcohol policy measures apply to ZAPs are limited and close attention must be paid to how ZAPs may provide additional marketing opportunities for the alcohol industry.

Public health and alcohol industry actors compete to frame alcohol policy problems and solutions. Little is known about how sudden shifts in the political context provide moments for policy actors to re-frame alcohol-related issues. South Africa\'s temporary bans on alcohol sales during the COVID-19 pandemic offered an opportunity to study this phenomenon.
We identified Professor Charles Parry from the South African Medical Research Council as a key policy actor. Parry uses a Twitter account primarily to comment on alcohol-related issues in South Africa. We harvested his tweets posted from March 18 to August 31, 2020, coinciding with the first two alcohol sales bans. We conducted a thematic analysis of the tweets to understand how Parry framed alcohol policy evidence and issues during these \'extraordinary times.\'
Parry underlined the extent of alcohol-related harm during \'normal times\' with scientific evidence and contested industry actors\' efforts to re-frame relevant evidence in a coherent and well-constructed argument. Parry used the temporary sales restrictions to highlight the magnitude of the health and social harms resulting from alcohol consumption, particularly trauma, rather than the COVID-19 transmission risks. Parry portrayed the sales ban as a policy learning opportunity (or \'experiment\') for South Africa and beyond.
Crisis conditions can provide new openings for public health (and industry) actors to make salient particular features of alcohol and alcohol policy evidence.