Alcohol content must not be aimed at people under the drinking age

The requirementstatement

Alcohol brands, and drinks designed to resemble alcoholic ones, must not be marketed in a way that appeals to or targets people under 21.

Severityseverity: BlockingBLOCKINGBreaking this rule gets the submission rejected. There is no partial credit.
When it bitesphase: Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
What is checkedobject: campaign.sample[] + campaign.description
Where it liveslayer: Message contentMESSAGE_CONTENT
How Ekas settles itdetectability: AI · formAI_FORM; A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria.
What the fix involvesfailureClass: Hard stopHARD_STOP; Not remediable. Resubmitting will not help, and anyone offering to fix it is selling you a rejection.
Who requires itauthorities: T-Mobile
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

An age gate is the whole basis on which alcohol messaging is permitted at all, so copy built to appeal to minors defeats the mechanism rather than failing to install it — which is why T-Mobile treats this as its own refusal rather than as an age-gating defect. Alcohol-resembling drinks are named explicitly because they slip the gate by construction: an alcohol-free brand extension in the same livery is sold to the same audience with none of the restrictions, and the brand association is the marketing. The innocent cause is a genuine 0% product line marketed on exactly the assets built for the alcoholic one.

How to fix itremediation

Remove the youth-facing appeal — the cartoon, the school or campus timing, the sweet-confectionery framing, the under-21 talent — and market the drink to adults. Note that the age gate is not the answer to this finding: gating the site is already required for alcohol content, and a campaign that targets minors is refused whether or not the gate exists.

Common mistakespitfalls

A zero-alcohol product does not escape this when it carries the parent brand's identity — the brand is what is being marketed, and it is an alcohol brand.

Provider rejection codescodes

The code you get back when this rule is what failed, and whether that provider lets you resubmit.

Provider	Code	Resubmit
Bandwidth	706	Yes
Twilio	30456	No

Rules you will hit next

6 other rules read campaign.sample[] + campaign.description. Fixing one field to satisfy a single rule is how a resubmission trades one rejection for another, so read these before you change anything.

MSG-034Samples must not be framed as test, demo or machine-to-machine trafficBlockingBLOCKING MSG-045Samples must not impersonate another organisationBlockingBLOCKING MSG-175Content must not invade privacy, defame, or otherwise cause harmBlockingBLOCKING MSG-177Content must not depict or facilitate substance abuseBlockingBLOCKING MSG-209A charity programme may not run games of chance or recurring donationsBlockingBLOCKING MSG-DECEPTIVEContent must not be deceptive, misleading, or impersonatingBlockingBLOCKING

All message content rules

MSG-179 is one of 122 message content rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.