Big Alcohol’s Tactics: Heineken Normalizes Alcohol for Teen Audiences at The Town Festival

Heineken, through its Eisenbahn brand, has positioned itself as the official beer sponsor of “The Town 2025,” a major music festival in Brazil. This raises serious concerns about Big Alcohol’s tactics to embed its products into events that attract a younger audience. The festival, with an age rating of 16, explicitly allows entry for teenagers, making this sponsorship troubling from a public health perspective.

By associating its brand with a high-profile cultural event like The Town, Heineken gains significant visibility among young people, many of whom are not of legal age to use alcohol. The festival setting – music, socializing, and a celebratory atmosphere – normalizes alcohol as a core part of youth culture. Sponsorships like these blur the lines between marketing and lifestyle, embedding alcohol brands into the memories and habits of young attendees.

Big Alcohol frequently justifies these partnerships by promoting so-called “responsible consumption.” However, evidence shows that such messaging is ineffective in mitigating harm. Instead, it serves as a smokescreen to distract from the risks associated with normalizing alcohol use among teenagers. This tactic aligns with Heineken’s broader strategy of cultivating brand loyalty early, even before legal drinking age, to ensure lifelong consumers.

Promotion, or any marketing strategies, is Big Alcohol’s activity to drive alcohol availability and acceptability, to perpetuate the alcohol norm, and to place alcohol at the center of people’s thoughts and preferences, communities’ practices, and societies’ customs. The focus of this DUBIOUS FIVE strategy is the people and their beliefs about alcohol products, the public and their attitudes about and behavior around alcohol products, and the consumers and how much, how often they buy and consume alcohol brands.

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