Reducing the harm from alcohol – by regulating cross-border alcohol marketing, advertising and promotion: a technical report

At its 146th session in 2020, the WHO Executive Board asked the Organization to develop an action plan for the period 2022–2030 to boost implementation of the Global strategy to reduce the harmful use of alcohol (referred to below as the “Global alcohol strategy”) as a public health priority. To contribute to the development of the action plan, the Executive Board’s Decision 146 (14) requested the WHO Director-General to develop “a technical report on the harmful use of alcohol related to cross-border alcohol marketing, advertising and promotional activities, including those targeting youth and adolescents” (WHO, 2020).

In order to produce the technical report requested by Decision EB146 (14), the WHO Secretariat commissioned a scoping review of cross-border marketing and a series of background papers to inform the process of developing the technical report; summaries of these commissioned papers are included as Annexes 1–4 to this report. The objective of the scoping review was to inform the development of the technical report by critically reviewing the key concepts underpinning the harmful use of alcohol in relation to cross-border alcohol marketing, summarizing the relevant research literature and research methodologies, and describing the main types and sources of information available. The Secretariat also convened several meetings with experts to discuss and elaborate on cross-border marketing of alcohol. A detailed outline of the report was also discussed at the third Forum on Alcohol, Drugs and Addictive Behaviours in June 2021, and elements of cross-border marketing were discussed with economic operators in dialogue meetings in 2020 and 2021.