Are Alcohol Ad Rules Ready for TikTok Drinking Culture?

A bartender with two million followers pouring something amber into a glass that perfectly catches the light, a stranger’s hands shaking a cocktail tin beneath string lights, or someone constructing a BORG are all likely to be visible if you spend ten minutes scrolling through TikTok. It doesn’t appear to be advertising. In a way, that’s the point.

The alcohol marketing regulations in Britain were designed for a world of billboards and television spots, where a regulator could examine a clip, compare the timing to the watershed, and move on. For the most part, the Advertising Standards Authority still functions in this manner. It removes a Jürgenermeister advertisement for suggesting alcohol makes a party successful, or it censors the rare Au Vodka post for being too amiable with minors. These decisions are significant. Additionally, they are coming almost on purpose after the content has finished its little viral existence and moved on to something else.

TikTok has significantly tightened its official advertising policy. According to the platform’s 2026 Restricted Industry Framework, paid alcohol advertisements in the UK are completely prohibited. This includes wine, spirits, and zero percent alcohol by volume products that pose as something else. Pubs and events can still be advertised, but only to audiences that are eighteen years of age or older. The platform maintains that advertisers cannot circumvent age gating. On paper, it sounds quite tight. Additionally, it’s practically irrelevant because the drinking culture never truly existed in the paid advertisements.

The space between what is regulated and what just spreads is where the real action takes place. According to a widely regarded research, 98% of the 100 most popular TikTok videos that included the word “alcohol” depicted drinking in a good light, and more than half showed people rapidly downing many drinks. Together, those videos have received nearly 290 million views. A media buy was not necessary for any of that. It required a ring light, a recipe, and an algorithm that would push it to anyone who appeared open to it.

Applying twentieth century broadcast logic talent must be 25 or older, there is no correlation between drinking and confidence, and there is no targeting where more than 25% of the audience may be under eighteen to a platform that doesn’t actually have an audience in the traditional sense seems almost charming. When determining what you might like next, TikTok’s For You Page doesn’t know or care how old you say you are. It keeps an eye on what you focus on. If a thirteen year old unintentionally pauses on a cocktail video, they can end up getting more of them.

In its Au Vodka ruling, the ASA appeared to understand this, acknowledging that followers who weren’t teenagers could still view content through algorithmic recommendation instead of direct following. That is a significant compromise. Additionally, it is effectively acknowledging that the tools at its disposal such as content reviews, follower demographics, and after the fact bans were designed for a very different machine.

In the meanwhile, paid campaigns are governed with considerable accuracy by the platform’s own enforcement, a four tier escalation mechanism that was introduced this year: a rejected ad, followed by a pause, suspension, and termination. It’s a neat building. Additionally, it ignores the beer poster trend that garnered 800 million views, the bartender’s recipe video, and the BORG content that features handcrafted gallon cocktails with alcohol contents several times higher than any reasonable rule. Technically, none of that qualifies as an advertisement. In terms of functionality, however, it accomplishes the same goals as advertising, but without requiring anyone to sign a contract or reveal a partnership.

Here, it’s difficult to ignore the peculiar double life that TikTok leads. The sober curious hashtag has received billions of views on its own, and Gen Z drinking rates fell precipitously for a period before strangely rising again by 2025. Researchers believe this was due in part to a post lockdown overcorrection. One aesthetically attractive pour at a time, the same platform that helped popularize abstinence may now be encouraging some of those same people to resume drinking.

On paper, Ofcom has new fangs thanks to Britain’s Online Safety Act, and there is a live debate in Parliament about outright prohibiting minors under the age of sixteen from using these platforms. It is actually uncertain if each metric significantly affects alcohol content in particular. The Act was not designed with beverage marketing in mind, but rather with a broad focus on kid safety. Ofcom has acknowledged this, asking TikTok to provide information on the real behavior of its recommendation engine as opposed to the company’s claimed behavior.

All that remains is an odd impasse. When an issue becomes serious enough to warrant a formal complaint, the existing regulations are reasonably reasonable and even reasonably enforced. They were designed to control messaging rather than momentum, and momentum is the core of TikTok’s commercial strategy. The BORGs and beer posters will probably continue to outrun any rulebook that attempts to catch them until regulation takes that distinction into account.

i) https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/alcohol-promotional-marketing.html
ii) https://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2024/08/tiktok-updates-alcohol-advertising-policy/
iii) https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/au-vodka-adverts-banned-tiktok-32535442
iv) https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2025-09-24/au-vodka-ads-banned-for-targeting-under-age-teenagers
v) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-61969727