Banning booze ads will just make marketers more creative

Nice article – but to me, stopping the advertising of alcohol will have an effect. I agree that most of our habits are learned in the home, but what shapes our cultural approach to drinking is shared equally by the communication & presentation of alcohol outside the home. One single ad may not have an immediate impact, but the overall effect of alcohol advertising ensures that it remains culturally intertwined whether that be with sport or socialising.
I also agree that there will be new and sneaky ways that brands will find to advertise – and not to mention the retail alcohol advertisers (WW/Coles and the rest) who have just as much, if not more of an impact than brand comms.

Just as with the abolition of cigarette advertising…I wouldn’t be unhappy if my kids were exposed to just a little less booze advertising….

Can we start on gambling now??

“Banning booze ads will just make marketers more creative” that’d make a change in Australia.

“legislation will inevitably come”

I see both sides but once they’ve banned cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, meat… won’t we all just die of boredom?

Was the decline in smoking due to the banning of advertising, or the fact that people realised the cigs were killing us?

Or a bit of both?

Has anyone looked at the roll our pop culture is playing in this argument? Particularly top 40 music. Songs that are played at high rotation over and over often feature binge drinking messages. Surely this has more impact than advertising,. Music is something people actually want to immerse themselves unlike advertising where people are trying to block it out.

Lady Gaga’s Just Dance came out in 2008. With words like “I love this record, but I can’t see straight anymore” Those who were 14 then are now 18. Is it any wonder our young people go out and get as smashed as possible when the message from our pop culture is that drinking to excess is the norm.

I’m bemused that we are focusing on advertisng is to blame. There’s always been alcohol advertising and it’s had less restrictions in the past, yet we didn’t have this problem.. Alcohol advertising just informs us a product is there. It doesn’t say go out and get smashed like half of today’s music does.

Because the restrictions on tobacco advertising have done nothing at all?

I completely agree with this article! I think it’s just too easy to blame the advertising for societies problems. First it was the cigarette advertising, now alcohol advertising.. before you know it the only thing we’ll be allowed to advertise is dog food and fruit and vegetables.

How bout promoting healthy choices and stop the talk of banning everything. If you don’t like your kids seeing advertisements for alcohol or sugar products, turn the TV off, educate your children, talk to them and their school, don’t buy the crap, don’t go to woolies, buy organic, exercise, stop eating the ‘crap’. Stop blaming someone else. Let people decide what they want to do with education to back them up.

Another smart-arse “free market” defence of the indefensible.

How many more alcohol-fuelled deaths do there have to be before the ad industry wises up to the simple fact that their alcohol clients are getting away with murder… and how long before self-satisfied twerps like Mike O’Rourke realise that the clients they are aiding and betting in this are as evil (yes, evil!) as the tobacco and cigarette industry, whose disregard for lawful processes has been exposed time and time again. (Long sentence, I know, but this kind of watch-me-avoid-your-controls nonsense gets my blood boiling.)

A few facts (https://ama.com.au/alcohol-use-and-harms-australia-2009-information-paper this is 2009, and it’s got a whole lot worse since then. All the references are in the paper above.)

In 2003, alcohol was the risk factor responsible for the greatest burden of disease and injury in Australian males under the age of 45.

Alcohol is the second largest cause of drug-related deaths and hospitalisations in Australia after tobacco.

Those who experience acute alcohol-related harms are predominantly young and predominantly male.

Among young Australians, the most common causes of death and injury due to risky or high-risk drinking are road injury, suicide, and violent assault.

Alcohol accounts for 13 percent of all deaths among people 14-17 years of age Australians.

It has been estimated that one Australian teenager dies and more than 60 are hospitalized every week from alcohol-related causes.

Underage drinkers are more likely than older drinkers to experience risky or antisocial behaviour.

Evidence suggests that young people with mental health disorders are more likely to drink, and drink with the intention of getting drunk.

There is evidence that alcohol use may contribute to poor mental health.

Young people who use alcohol to cope with mental health or social problems are
more likely to drink at dangerous levels.

Teenagers are developing mentally and physically, and do not have the benefit of good judgement from experience. This makes teenagers vulnerable to alcohol related harm in a way that older drinkers may not be.

That’s evidence based stuff; not my opinion. And those dead kids are dead.

As kids brains keep on developing until their mid-20s, and as excess alcohol permanently damages these tender brains, Mr O’Rourke and his mates are damning Australia to a future where our adults aren’t as capable as we would want them to be. (An antipodean Ireland, if you understand that!)

Mr O’Rourke and his clients are welcome to try selling their products more creatively, but their arrogance in the face of the evidence is appalling. And the refusal of the industry to make even small moves towards behaving in a socially responsible way is – yes – evil.

I agree with Mike. However I don’t think marketers we should be changing our tact, we should be more responsibile.

Alcohol is a societal and cultural problem. Advertising is not the cause of the alcohol issue in this country, certainly. But advertising at the very least reflects cultural norms, and, at its most persuasive, influences, reinforces or even creates cultural trends. The alcohol issue is no exception. Our industry’s core function is to influence behaviour. If that is not glaringly clear to you then what the hell are you doing in this industry?

The problem with debates like this is that PR companies get briefed, PR hacks log on using their private address and suddenly there is an avalanche of well reasoned arguments, an abundance of distractions, and since they are getting paid for it and we are not they just keep going like a Duracell bunny.

If advertising works then alcohol advertising encourages brand choice and encourages drinking too. Only a completely brain dead drinker could argue against that. So the alcohol marketers are between a rock and a hard place: if it doesn’t work then they must stop doing it. If it does work then they must accept that the effects of it on young people must be minimised. Banning it altogether is a stupid proposition. So is doing nothing.

BRIAN SEZ:
advertising at the very least reflects cultural norms, and, at its most persuasive, influences, reinforces or even creates cultural trends..
Our industry’s core function is to influence behaviour.

Yes, advertising is a very important part of the cultural background, and I’m arguing that the industry needs to recognize that the social tide is turning on alcohol just as it did against tobacco.

So when Mike O’Rourke brazenly encourages the ad industry to play wild (creative avoidance of rules = smart arse collusion) with the validated societal concerns about alcohol, he is thumbing his nose at these real life concerns, and ignoring the pain of the parents of the kids who have suffered from their inability to resist those cultural norms which his advertising validates (and yes, creates).

And in my book, that’s worse than the gas-oven-operator defence: they told me to do it, because he’s saying he’s really enjoyed doing it despite the concerns.

AND GROUCHO:
the alcohol marketers are between a rock and a hard place: if it doesn’t work then they must stop doing it. If it does work then they must accept that the effects of it on young people must be minimised.

You’re right. Advertising for alcohol is completely banned on TV in France, and posters have to carry BIG warnings about health.

HERE’S ANOTHER TALE: Where I live there’s a community room which is used for daily meetings of members of Alcoholics Anonymous. These are real-life victims of the marketing and the selling and the glamourising of alcohol, but do you ever see these people in any of the promotions?

Remember that cigarette advertising always showed the young and the healthy, when in reality smoking ages people and kills them.

I know that it’s a tough world out there, but people like Mr O’Rourke should just shut up and get on with their dark arts. This taunting of the regulators should explode in his face: more regulations, please.

Oh dear, anyone else old enough to remember the same arguments being trotted out for cigarette advertising?

The point isn’t that there are other channels for advertising and PR which may be missed. The point is that those channels are less effective. And that’s why regulating access to media for advertising harmful products is worthwhile.

As for parent’s bahaviour being an issue, if advertising doesn’t drive behaviour then what is the point of it.

@Glen I’m old enough to remember the cigarette debate. The PR companies who tried to muddy those waters are the same ones but with younger warriors. Sadly they must have learned something so they will be harder to beat this time. The power of liquor PR is being demonstrated with the current lock out debate.

Seriously? You can’t put brains in monuments. More wastedmoney telling the dumbest people

Brian is spot on. Alcohol is a societal and cultural problem. Looking at advertising is part of the problem. But it’s far from the central issue. Things will only really change in Australia when drinking to excess becomes socially and culturally unacceptable (the way smoking or drink driving became more and more socially unacceptable).

That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon in Australia. As some have mentioned, there are the pop culture influences coming from overseas, in the form of popular music, for example. Just google the lyrics of the recent Taio Cruz hit “Hangover”, for example.

But the most important issue is that Australia (like the UK, Ireland, USA) has a drinking culture. Drinking to excess is celebrated and joked about. Bob Hawke sculling a schooner at the cricket a few months back, to the applause of the crowd and the approval of thousands on social media, was a classic example of this.

Millions of people go out every weekend with the express purpose of getting blind. Not having a few too many over dinner, or knocking back too much home-made red wine at a family feast, as you might see in some Mediterranean countries, but going out to drink and drink and drink (no food – eating is cheating…)

Perhaps attitudes are changing in Australia, with changing demographics, and migration from countries that don’t have the same hard-core drinking culture as those mentioned above.

But until those societal and cultural attitudes change, alcohol will remain a massive problem in this country, no matter how many bans or education campaigns or laws or lockouts we implement.

I see both sides. I still equate a beer with a ‘hard earned thirst’ despite hating VB. My brother was and is a full blown alcoholic sadly with jail time to show for it, yet he’ll be the first to admit it was not the booze, it was him. It was the legality of alcohol and six bottle shops within walking distance that allowed him to try destroying his life as easily as possible, not advertising (he doesn’t watch tv). In my day heroin was a crazily cheap hit so many of my friends succumbed to it, without any advertising or logos on shirts (unless the romanticised life of rock stars counts)…

My personal opinion is that the culture shaped within an individuals own life will go the longest way to shaping how they deal with alcohol. Personally, advertising only shows me the cheapest prices. I say that with a glass of red next to me bought from Dan Murphys.

ADUN: it was not the booze, it was him.

Yeah, sure: the individual is help responsible, but there’s a whole cascade of real-life social things that influence what individuals “choose” to do.

And when something’s bad (alcoholism, let’s say), I reckon that governments have a responsibility to intervene where possible to prevent bad things happening.

This is a fundamental fact about what governments do and are expected to do: Liquor outlets need to have a license, just as car drivers need to have one too. That is: they have to fulfill certain criteria to be allowed to do something that is potentially dangerous.

My argument is that the advertising of alcohol encourages everyone to ignore the bad effects of drinking, just as cigarette advertising did. There is a code of conduct re alcohol advertising which sets out to try to prevent too much of this deliberate misleading,

The call of Mr O’Rourke to be creative in order to get around these controls is irresponsible, and in its own way, as evil as the considerable efforts of the tobacco companies to do whatever they could (breaking the law as creatively as their lawyers advised) to avoid being held responsible for the deaths their products caused.

Beware: creative behaviour like Mr O’Rourke encourages will make governments even more determined to act against liquor advertising and their liquor merchant clients.

Another consideration of the inevitable legislation will be the impact that this has further down the stream. Additional limitations regarding advertising will dramatically impact the way that alcohol companies spend their media dollars – which will impact on those they currently spend it with. Think about the impact to a network like Channel 9, 5 years from now if there are significant alcohol and gambling placement restrictions. They certainly will not be able to afford to pay the billion dollar deals for sport coverage which will impact on the codes themselves. Similarly (although to a lesser extent) for local network-funded programming.
The alcohol companies no doubt have already thought long and hard about what they will do should these restrictions come into effect – but the time is now for those further down the stream to have the same discussions for when the booze-money dries up.

Pee Pee – you seem stressed. Sit back and have a drink

peepee you have nailed Mike with the cold steel of logic.

“if it doesn’t work then they must stop doing it. If it does work then they must accept that the effects of it on young people must be minimised.”

The argument that the advertising has no effect is a particularly bizarre one for an advertiser to make. So are they defrauding their clients? Or are they lying? Neither is attractive.
The argument that advertisers will find other methods is equally bizarre.
It means that there are either equally effective methods of advertising which people are not creative enough to use – again a very, very strange claim for an advertiser to make (aren’t they meant to sell their creativity?) – or it means that there are less effective methods, but because there are no perfect methods then nothing should be done, which is absurb ‘all or nothing’ logic.

This article fails the logic test. You can choose to live your life making invalid and illogical arguments, or you can be a better person.