Ad description
A YouTube video on the Yogscast YouTube channel, seen in November 2021. The video was titled “What is the Mud Scientist?” and began with Lewis Brindley and Ben Edgar discussing the Yogscast Jaffa Cake Gin. Lewis Brindley said, “Introducing The Yogscast Jaffa Cake Gin”, “Concocted by the brilliant gin masters of Psychopomp. So we have a limited number, brewed here, Bristol, you can’t buy them anywhere else in the UK because of rules, stupid rules Ben” and “The Yogscast Jaffa Cake Gin. Available now. At all good Yogscast stores.” The remainder of the video showed footage of Lewis Brindley, Ben Edgar and others playing the game Trouble in Terrorist Town. The final 20 seconds of the video showed an image of a bottle of Jaffa Cake Gin in the top left-hand corner of the video. If an individual hovered above the image, text appeared that said, “Grab some merch! store.yogscast.com Buy”. The text linked to the home page of The Yogscast store.
Issue
The complainant, who believed the Yogscast YouTube channel had a large following with young people, challenged whether the ad was inappropriately targeted at people under 18 years of age.Response
Yogscast said the Jaffa Cake Gin was their own product and no third party was involved with the product or the video.
Yogscast said that in the past year, 97.9% of their channel’s audience was over 18 and the “What is the Mud Scientist?” video had less than 1% of the audience under 18. They said their content was tailored to an over 18s market with adult themes and regularly featured games that only those over 18 could purchase. They confirmed that Lewis Brindley and Ben Edgar were in their late thirties and early forties.
Yogscast explained that their demographics for Instagram also showed that the majority of their audience was over 18, with only 6.6% of their audience from November 2021 to January 2022 were under 18.
Yogscast said that the Yogscast YouTube channel had been marked as “Not Made For Kids” using YouTube’s internal declaration.
Assessment
Not upheld
The CAP Code stated that alcohol ads must not be directed at those aged below 18 years through the selection of media or context in which they appeared.
The YouTube viewing demographics data supplied by Yogscast showed that 0.8% of the audience for the ad had been under 18 and the overall viewing figures for the Yogscast YouTube channel in the past year showed 97.9% of the audience were over 18. In addition to that, the demographics provided by Yogscast from Instagram showed that only 6.6% of their audience was under 18. Further to that, we considered that the content of Yogscast’s YouTube channel reflected the interests of the older demographics evidenced in their analytics, and we therefore considered that, although those figures related only to users who were logged in, they were likely to reflect the audience as a whole.
For organic marketing communications for alcohol, published by marketers themselves in their own online spaces, the ASA required the marketer to demonstrate that under 18s were not likely to comprise 25% of the audience total. Because the figures provided by Yogscast showed the 25% threshold had not been breached, and were in fact significantly below the threshold, and because we were satisfied that was likely to reflect the wider audience, we considered the ad was not directed at under 18s through the selection of media. We therefore concluded that the ad did not breach the Code.
We investigated the ad under CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 18.1 18.1 Marketing communications must be socially responsible and must contain nothing that is likely to lead people to adopt styles of drinking that are unwise. For example, they should not encourage excessive drinking. Care should be taken not to exploit the young, the immature or those who are mentally or socially vulnerable. and 18.15 18.15 Marketing communications must not be directed at people under 18 through the selection of media or the context in which they appear. No medium should be used to advertise alcoholic drinks if more than 25% of its audience is under 18 years of age. (Alcohol) but did not find it in breach.
Action
No further action necessary.
