Ad campaign aims to lessen drinking at U.

In a move to reduce binge drinking among Penn students, University officials and student groups have begun a "social marketing campaign" to inform students about the realities of alcohol consumption on campus. The effort, which began last month with an ongoing series of weekly advertisements in The Daily Pennsylvanian, is designed to show students how much they overestimate the drinking habits of their peers, Alcohol Policy Coordinator Stephanie Ives said. The project is sponsored by the Working Group on Alcohol Abuse in conjunction with various Penn organizations, including the office of the Vice Provost for University Life and the Drug and Alcohol Resource Team. The ads provide data on what an average Penn student's drinking habits are. The first ads feature the slogan: "The majority of Penn students drink once a week or less." The amount of alcohol students actually drink and the amount that students believe their friends drink are always very different, Ives said, and publicizing the differences always surprises students. "The people who are most reluctant to believe the information are the heaviest drinkers," she added. The initial data used in Penn's campaign came from a survey conducted last spring by the Health Education Office and DART. A new Web-based survey will be conducted at the end of this month, Ives said, with new ads using this year's data. It is scheduled to be released after spring break. Social marketing campaigns began more than 10 years ago at Northern Illinois University and have been used successfully to reduce binge drinking at campuses across the country, according to Ives. H. Wesley Perkins, a sociology professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges who has done extensive research on social marketing and teaches a course on alcohol abuse, said college students misperceive their peers' behaviors "in a very exaggerated fashion." "It's a theory and a strategy that's catching on nationally," he said of social marketing. "The strategy is simply to give [students] the truth of what their actual norms are." Social marketing campaigns, also called "social norms campaigns," have been very successful in reducing binge drinking among college students, Perkins noted. "It's the only strategy that's demonstrated any success at all," he said, adding that campaigns focusing on the health risks and negative societal views of alcohol tend to have no effect on student drinking habits. Perkins said a recent study found that over a two-year period, schools with social norms campaigns saw binge drinking reduced by 20 percent. Though Ives said she expects the effort to take a couple of years before showing noticeable results, Perkins said social norms campaigns can often show results very quickly. Binge drinking by Penn students could fall by 15 to 20 percent, he said, though he noted that the actual change is impossible to predict. Ives said the campaign will be conducted mainly through ads and posters, but will also include the Internet and live presentations. "It's not just a print campaign," she said. "The ads are there to spark the conversation." Wharton senior Bill Conway, the former chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly who served on the WGAA -- which recommended undertaking an effort to reduce heavy drinking -- called the current project "a very good step forward." "We saw a lot of statistics about the perceptions about how much students drink," Conway said. "We found there was a wide discrepancy there." And College sophomore Jo Piazza, who chairs the UA's Alcohol Committee and is a 34th Street magazine staff writer, said she believed that, for many students, the ads will be "a reinforcement of what they already know" and will allow them to feel more comfortable about drinking less.