Alcohol advertising on television is making its way back into the mainstream, slowly but surely. Oh sure, it's been on cable for a long time now, but I guess cable doesn't "count." Meanwhile, one of NBC's flagship local stations in NYC is resuming alcohol advertising:
ALMOST six years after NBC ended an experiment to bring the first liquor commercials onto national broadcast network television, the flagship station it owns, WNBC-TV in New York, has started running such spots.
The decision is a small but significant sign of changing attitudes toward advertising of products that many consider contentious. From 1948 until 1996, no TV station or network accepted liquor ads although distilled spirits were advertised in newspapers, magazines and billboards.
Today, hundreds of television stations and networks carry commercials for distilled spirits. But the four biggest broadcast networks, including NBC, do not. They remain skittish about critics who contend that opening television — still the most powerful advertising medium — to the marketers of distilled spirits will more readily expose those pitches to children and teenagers.
Meanwhile, don't think you can just cross the line of marketing to children so easily when it comes to tobacco advertising, as Rolling Stone magazine recently learned when it ran a Camel advertising spread that too closely resembled cartoons:
Camel ads coupled with illustrations promoting rock music in Rolling Stone magazine violate the tobacco industry's nine-year-old promise not to use cartoons to sell cigarettes, prosecutors in various states said Tuesday.
Attorneys general in at least eight states planned to file lawsuits against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. starting Tuesday about the advertising for Camel cigarettes in the November edition of Rolling Stone, officials said.
The section combines pages of Camel cigarette ads with pages of magazine-produced illustrations on the theme of independent rock music.
"Their latest nine-page advertising spread in Rolling Stone, filled with cartoons, flies in the face of their pledge to halt all tobacco marketing to children," Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett said in a news release Tuesday.
So on the one hand, we can't have kids running across playful cigarette ads in rock and roll magazines, but on the other hand, if they simply scroll through their cable channels - and now WNBC in NYC - they'll get all the alcohol advertising the advertisers can afford. Oh, and also, as long as the tobacco ads
don't seem like cartoons, then kids might still run across them in rock and roll magazines. Or on billboards. By the way, do you think the kids have heard about this legal LSD-like super drug called salvia? I think as long as it isn't being advertised by EVERY NEWS OUTLET IN AMERICA RUNNING STORIES ABOUT IT, we might keep the kids sober for an extra week or two.
I'm sorry, I'm high on cough meds right now. I'll stop.
Personally I also don't drink a single glass of wine, beer or any other alcoholic beverage a year - surely a little bit due to "not wanting to reduce my consciousness" (if you read it aloud, read it in a very dashing and authoritary voice ;)), but in fact even more because I just hate this taste. But I understand that most people like it and many are able to use alcohol in a controlled, "cultural" way. So I would be more liberal about alcohol advertising, but with some restrictions. And I'm generally not enthusiastic about advertising generally, but I'm aware that it's here to stay.
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