Savour this message in moderation.
We love to drink in this country. Absolutely fucking love it.

Even moderate media will occasionally let rip with a potent word guff admonishing the evils of Binge Britain; their pages adorned with photos of drunken youths dribbling technicolour yawns into their shoes, or intoxicated and vulnerable young girls stretched out on the pavement with dishevelled glad rags exposing scantly contained private bits to the cold night air.

And we, the drinks industry in which I'm gainfully employed, tie ourselves in knots trying our hardest drive our profits perennially skyward, while kowtowing to the self-regulation that prevents the industry following our nicotine based buddies down the path of almost zero publicity.

We bleed hypocrisy.

Drinks ads so frequently shout sophistication & refinement or history & provenance. We bang on about the quality credentials implicit in a product that has been lovingly savoured for millions of years, all in the hope that you'll glutinously throw it down your gaping necks in vast quantities. Then we gently nudge your eyes to a small scrap of text in the bottom right hand corner, hinting that you might think about enjoying it in moderation.

Diageo, the world's largest liquor peddler, has filled our screens with adverts demonstrating the downside to binge drinking. The ads are well made, simple and effective, but they lose all credibility when their responsible drinking message is underlined by the logos of some of the biggest brands to be spewed onto the streets of Britain every weekend.

The Portman Group, the industry's nosey neighbour, busies itself banning brands that don't conform to its guidelines, but has no capacity to prevent Tesco from implementing the deep discounts that allow youths to drink themselves to the point where they're too inebriated to fight or fuck each other senseless.

I love the industry; I get lots of free drink to savour in all the moderation I want, but I can't help laughing at the hypocrisy that bubbles from each bottle we flog at cut price rates, at watching my marketing colleagues try their hardest to find ever more subtle ways of telling people that buying such and such a product will make them seem cool, make them seem successful or, as it remains the most effective message an advert can carry, just make other people want to fuck them.
( Moey, Fri 20 Feb 2009, 15:56, 1 reply)

Disagree
The whole point about advertising and marketing is that *it means you don't have to deep-discount*. And so Diageo's brands *aren't* the ones that kids are drinking, because no self-respecting underage drinker would pay £12 for a bottle of Smirnoff when a bottle of Kulov is only £7.50...
(stalinism, Tue 24 Feb 2009, 18:10, closed)