The high-stakes TikTok booze ad paradox
The high-stakes TikTok booze ad paradox
Plus: How cold IPA got hot!
Editor’s note: Sorry for the late dispatch, I’ve been scrambling because of the upcoming holiday. On that note, I’m taking off for the remainder the week/end. Hope you’re able to get an Independence Day break, too! Fingers will be back in your inbox with regular programming next week.—Dave.
I don’t spend a lot of time on TikTok because I’m almost 36 years old. Reasonable, right? Wrong! Contrary to what Congress might have you believe, the shortform video platform is not just for America’s tweens to learn inscrutable slang like “looksmaxxing” and share dangerous ideas like “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” OK?!?! Like most social platforms, TikTok gained popularity with young users when it first arrived in the United States app stores in 2018, but even a few years in, the platform’s demographics were aging up.
In February 2021, the beverage-alcohol industry was still on the sidelines. “Our folks are very conservative about this, so they’re not going to go forward unless they have a fairly high degree of confidence that the demographics are there,” Beer Institute general counsel Mary Jane Saunders told me in February 2021 in the course of reporting this feature for VinePair about TikTok’s then-in-force ban on alcohol advertising. “I can’t emphasize enough: They’re cautious.”
Like other major trade groups, the BI forbids its members from marketing on social-media platforms where user bases are disproportionately under legal drinking age when compared to US Census data. In 2021, 71.6% of TikTok users would’ve had to be over 21 to meet the booze industry’s self-imposed requirements, and they weren’t. In 2024, 73.8% must be, and according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) they are. Just recently, as Brewbound’s Jess Infante reported, the platform revised its ad parameters accordingly, green-lighting certain trade uses of its coveted ad platform to reach users 25 and up.1
The sum total of these developments is that the social web’s most lucrative attention reservoir is open for booze business. That’s right, folks: TikTok alcohol advertising is a go for newly-ish legal-drinking-age audiences in the US. The timing couldn’t be worse!