LDAT Spotlight: Alcohol advertising campaign educates Warrnambool
‘Stick to low-risk drinking’ is the message behind the Warrnambool Violence Prevention Board LDAT’s new ‘Drink Responsibly?’ campaign, which explains ‘how much is too much’ and what the consequences can be.
Designed by the LDAT’s members and tested with locals, it’s a home-grown solution that’s getting great engagement across social media.
The challenge
Rates of harmful drinking are high across communities in southwest Victoria.
The LDAT wanted to learn about the behaviours and social conditions that cause people to drink in excess, to help it counter the problem.
Ashish Sitoula, Manager Strategic Community Planning & Policy at Warrnambool City Council, said that local hospital emergency department data from the Last Drinks Warrnambool project and emerging data on alcohol consumption and risk behaviours were used to target the sources of the most prominent factors leading to alcohol-related harm.
“We identified certain cohorts who might be drinking at risky levels,” he said.
“This included young people who have a habit of preloading (drinking at home) before a big night out, women over 35 whose drinking at home may have increased and people shouting rounds socially in clubs and sports settings.”
“We also ran a baseline survey and discovered that there was only 11 per cent awareness in the community about the [Australian] recommended limit of no more than four standard drinks on any day and no more than 10 standard drinks per week.”
“The alcohol industry uses the line ‘drink wisely’ and we have the NHMRC guidelines on alcohol consumption, but what does drinking responsibly actually mean?” explained Ashish.
This was the question that the LDAT set out to educate its community on.
The response
The hard-hitting campaign used short, animated videos to increase understanding of the NRHMC guidelines and provided specific prompts to motivate people to change their behaviours.
One video shows that an alcohol drink is about 1000 kilojoules - similar to a regular cheeseburger.
Most people wouldn’t eat five cheeseburgers in one day, so the video gets viewers thinking about what they’re actually consuming when they’re drinking more than the amount recommended by the Australian guidelines – no more than four standard drinks per day, and no more than 10 per week.
To increase campaign visibility, posters were distributed across town to health service settings, public areas and community sporting clubs participating in the Alcohol and Drug Foundation’s (ADF’s) Good Sports program.
Ashish said that the LDAT also consulted a range of ADF LDAT toolkits when developing the campaign and included the standard drinks message on every piece of collateral.
“The ADF took the view that local data and realities should drive the program and played a really good guiding role.”
The progress
The social media campaign is already seeing encouraging results.
Across Facebook and Instagram, paid advertisements have had more than 112,000 impressions (views) with regional people living within 40kms of Warrnambool. And, it’s been great value, costing about four cents per view.
The numbers speak for themselves – the ads are well designed, the community is interested in the topic and people are watching the videos to find out more. Facebook ads cost an average of 97 cents per click, so four cents per video view is a remarkable result.
It’s a successful collaboration with each LDAT partner actively promoting the campaign in key settings.
“Everyone has come together – Victoria police, the Department of Justice, the Council, Deakin University, Barwon Health and the Western Regional Drug & Alcohol Centre.”
“Having in-house social media experience at the Council has been very helpful. In a few months, we’ll be doing our end of campaign survey and people have already signed up to participate in it,” added Ashish.
Meanwhile, Deakin University’s team is monitoring local attitudes towards alcohol consumption to inform future projects.
