No offense to advertising professionals and their huge corporate
clients, but your craft does not mean you have to abandon every
last glimmer of ethical standards.
No offense to advertising professionals and their huge corporate clients, but your craft does not mean you have to abandon every last glimmer of ethical standards.
Alcohol abuse by kids is an epidemic, as chronicled by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration:
– Every day, 5,400 young people under 16 take their first drink of alcohol. In 2005, one of six eighth-graders, one in three 10th-graders, and nearly one of two high-school seniors were current drinkers.
– More than 7 million underage youth, ages 12 to 20, reported binge drinking – having five or more drinks – on at least one occasion in the past 30 days.
So policy makers, voters and worst of all, business leaders let alcohol companies craft advertising and product designs that specifically attract kids. It’s naked opportunism.
“If our firm didn’t create the advertising, then another advertising company would do it anyway,” is an oft-heard retort. Excuse us if we don’t hold any empathy for that excuse.
All told, alcohol companies placed more than 87 product promotion commercials in 2001 – the latest year figures are available – for every ad about not driving after drinking or not drinking before age 21, according to the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth.
Spending on responsibility advertising accounted for less than 3 percent of the industry’s television advertising budget. In 2001, the alcohol industry spent a total of $811.2 million on measured television advertising for products, $23.2 million on responsibility TV advertising (ads about not drinking and driving and about the legal drinking age), and $13.4 million on other corporate, community and civic TV advertising. Responsibility TV advertising represented 2.7 percent of expenditures and 1 percent of ad placements in 2001.
Alcohol laced Popsicles and booze-filled Jell-O cups are the prized 21st Century accomplishment of marketing executives.
It would be our hope that the answer to this despicable practice is not more regulation, but we doubt that’s possible. Distillers and marketing people seem to have a hollow conscience when asked to self-regulate. Children and teens are vulnerable to the fast-talking gurus of Madison Avenue, who cajole our kids into believing drinking alcohol is as harmless as eating a Popsicle.
