Corona Cero and the Olympics

Televised sporting events are popular with young people, and research has shown that young people under the age of 16 are exposed to alcohol branding which occurs at the venue and is broadcast on television (Alfayad et al., 2022; Barker et al., 2021; Barker et al., 2020; Murray et al., 2018) and there is a positive association between exposure to alcohol sports sponsorship and self-reported alcohol consumption (Critchlow et al., 2019), including in secondary school-aged children (Brown, 2016). This year's Olympics were sponsored by AB InBev to promote Corona Cero, a no or low alcohol product (Olympics, 2024), however, there were concerns that this product was acting as a surrogate brand (Critchlow et al., 2024) to promote Corona (CNN, 2024). Whilst the Olympics were being televised, we were conducting a qualitative study with eight students aged 18-24 from the University of Derby to explore perceptions of alcohol marketing and decided to include a question on perceptions of Corona Cero being advertised as part of the Olympics using photo elicitation techniques. We present participants perceptions of this example of alcohol marketing below.