Alcohol marketers find compassion in Bush's Conservatism

David Jernigan, The Marin Institute, San Raprael, California.

George W. Bush has passed his first 100 days in office as American president, and it is a new era in Washington. Gone are the scandals and the government spending initiatives of the Clinton years. In their place are tax cuts, talk of faith-based initiatives and compassionate conservatism.

What signs are there of how alcohol will fare under the new regime? The Bush family's first Clinton-esque embarrassment is reminiscent of revelations during the campaign that George W. himself was arrested for drinking-driving in his early thirties: the President's nineteen-year-old daughter Jenna was picked up by police at a popular club and charged with possession of alcohol by a minor (the legal drinking age is 21).

Yet it is likely that her father will treat her offence as a "youthful indiscretion," the same phrase often used to describe his own arrest for DUI, as well as allegations during the campaign that he had used cocaine. Of perhaps greater interest than the event itself was the beverage she was accused of possessing: a "substance resembling beer," according to undercover police officers. The US is awash in such substances this year. Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser and 49.8 percent of the domestic beer sold in America, has found success with Tequiza, its tequila-flavoured beer.

But the main event in "beer-like substances" is the coming into their own of alcoholic lemonades in the US market. This phenomenon is old news in Australia and the UK. Bass' Hooper's Hooch introduced the category across the US in 1997.

After a slow start, Hooch was tagged the third hottest brand last year by the country's leading alcohol industry periodical. However, the big players in the US market, fearful of attracting the public and governmental criticism that alcopops received in the UK, held back from introducing competing brands until last year.

Then, in late 1999, a small Vancouver-based company introduced Mike's Hard Lemonade. Sales of this 5.4 percent alcohol product have been sufficiently strong to enable it to beat out Hooch for second place on the "Hot Brands" list.

Mike's success won the notice of giants such as Anheuser-Busch and Seagram (now mainly part of UK distilled spirits giant Diageo), who brought out alcoholic lemonades of their own in 2000, battling "Mike" with such fictional characters as "Rick" (Seagram) and "Doc Otis" (Anheuser-Busch).

Earlier this year, the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest fed the controversy over whether these new products are aimed at youth when it began releasing results from focus groups of teenagers confirming that the products were indeed attractive to them. National and local news media ran stories featuring on-the-street interviews with high school students attesting to the products' ability to help young people get the buzz of alcohol without having to put up with a strong alcoholic taste.

Additional heat on the alcohol industry's marketing practices came from a major story in the Wall Street Journal about efforts to use the Internet to sell alcohol to kids. Nominal safeguards such as the requirement to enter a date of birth are ineffectual barriers to web sites that feature opportunities to download teen-oriented popular music, play games and check out colourful and mostly sweet drink recipes.

Philip Morris's Miller Beer found a new angle for Internet marketing. Inside its 12-packs of Miller beer, it packaged a free Miller Racing CD-ROM that tied in with Miller's sponsorship of professional auto racing as well as its website. In a game that simulated the video arcades popular with teenagers, users of the CD-ROM could build their own racing car on their computers, and then compete in auto races either on the CD-ROM itself or with others via Miller's web site.

Syndicated television news show Inside Edition sent its camera crews to cover the parties sponsored by alcohol producers during the spring school holidays. Protests over these events in recent years have forced the producers to move them off of US soil, and this year the cameras tracked busloads of young Americans travelling to Mexico and Panama to party.

The news cameras documented two new trends: a growing number of high school students joining what had been largely a college-aged crowd, and an expansion of the presence of distilled spirits companies. Although the beer companies were still out in force, Bacardi made an even bigger showing. Bacardi buses treated students to free drinks as they carried them from the beaches to clubs where male and female strippers threw glow-in-the-dark Bacardi souvenirs into the crowd. Bacardi also hawked its rum from counters and stages on the beaches themselves.

Whisky producer Cutty Sark kept its promise made last year to give the brewers a run for their marketing money by taking its "Booze, Babes and Bands" approach south of the border as well. The "Cutty Shark" buses gave an ironic twist to what many would consider predatory marketing.

This latest marketing push comes at a time when gains in the prevention of alcohol-related problems among America's young people have slowed or ground to a halt. There are approximately 10 million drinkers in the US between the ages of 12 and 20. More than 15 percent of this age group report binge drinking, and nearly seven per cent are heavy users. There has been little change in these statistics in the past five years. The percentage of young intoxicated drivers killed on the nation's highways has also flattened out at roughly 21 per cent.

Back in Washington DC, lawmakers recently sought to counter the ongoing onslaught of marketing to young people by proposing that the nation undertake a media campaign to curb underaged drinking similar to the one billion dollar campaign that Congress has funded to combat illegal drug use.

The illegal drug media campaign has been run by the Office of National Drug Control Programs, home of the nation's "drug czar." With the new administration has come a new drug czar, who on first glance is bad news for prevention and treatment. A close associate of the nation's first drug czar William Bennett, nominee John P. Walters is a law-and-order conservative who favours interdiction and enforcement over education and treatment. However, in a book he co-wrote with Bennett in 1996, Walters called for limits on alcohol availability and advertising as one means of breaking the link between alcohol use and crime.

The nation's brewers in particular, however, can be counted on to keep any such proposals off of the table. After years of heavy campaign contributions to both parties, the brewers and their close allies the National Beer Wholesalers Association have pinned their hopes on a tax cut of their own. Jeff Becker of the Beer Institute has tagged rolling back the1990 increase in the federal tax on beer as a top legislative priority.

Bush's proposal for a $1.6 billion overall tax cut has garnered much higher visibility than the alcohol tax, as well as criticism that it benefits only the rich. The alcohol tax cut, in contrast, is generally viewed as progressive, which may help the brewers in getting the break they are seeking.

The overall theme emerging from this administration is smaller government, less regulation, and lower taxes. There is at least one area, however, in which there has been little change from the Clinton era. The new president has continued to press Congress for the expanded authority it denied his predecessor to negotiate on a "fast-track" basis further trade agreements such as the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. Such agreements are notorious for extending to corporations the rights of individuals, including freedom of (commercial) speech, and protection against government actions that might impair a corporation's future ability to profit from its investments.

The alcohol industry's use of its apparent rights to unlimited speech in predatory marketing provoked protest in the last administration as well, and the most recent federal investigation of alcohol marketing to young people culminated in a 1999 report by the Federal Trade Commission. While the report documented that US alcohol producers had repeatedly violated their own codes of good advertising practices by targeting young people via the Internet, broadcast media and new product development, it called only for further self-regulation.

In this environment, the alcohol industry has relatively free rein to target young people with impunity. Possession of alcoholic beverages by a minor is a misdemeanour, and presidential daughter Jenna Bush will probably have to pay a fine for her failure in self-regulation. To the company that designed, produced, and marketed the product to her, in contrast, her father may give a substantial tax break. Apparently corporations are to receive the rights of individuals, but not their responsibilities.