by Jane Eisner
Knight Ridder-Tribune
I may not be the best arbiter of cool, but this sure seems cool to me: A lithe, laughing young woman wearing a pair of low-slung jeans and what looks like a black bra is pouring drops of liquid on her bare belly. A lucky young man is licking them up, tongue prominently on her skin.
"Vegetarian by day," says the magazine advertisement. "Bacardi by night."
Now, I'm not an advertising genius, either, but of this I am also sure: With that message, Bacardi isn't looking to get my business. I don't dress like that and, at this stage in my life, don't even wish to. Nor do I generally read Rolling Stone, where this ad appeared last year.
Yet more than 4 million people who cannot legally drink in this country do read that magazine, comprising 35 percent of its audience, and only the blind or the foolish would argue that this sexy scene escaped their attention.
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Correction: The blind, the foolish and the liquor industry. The industry, which gets to regulate itself on this matter, claims that it is doing a fine job ensuring that alcohol advertising does not appeal to underage individuals, and it managed to get the Federal Trade Commission to agree.
"Bacardi by Night" is hardly the only example. Jim Beam pushed its "Real friends. Real bourbon" campaign, featuring what looks like a high school football team, in Maxim (underage audience: 28 percent). Absolut Vodka hawked itself in last month's Vibe (41 percent). And Heineken even appropriated a Nintendo game controller to promote its product.
This attempt to entice ever-younger drinkers comes despite the huge social cost of drinking. Alcohol plays a substantial role in the four leading causes of death for young people: car wrecks, suicides, homicides, and accidents. And research shows that kids who start drinking before the age of 15 are four times more likely to become alcoholics by the time they're 21.
As my colleagues Jeff Gammage and Karl Stark reported in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer magazine, the makers of flavored malt beverages - alcopops, as they're known - are spending millions trumping these sweet, seductive liquor alternatives on television. That's a more pervasive medium, but also more obvious. Magazine advertising tends to fly under the radar screen.
But the images linger, and the message is unmistakable. Worse, it's avoidable.
The wine industry has managed to place most of its magazine advertising in publications read by only a sliver of the underage population. As Jernigan says, that proves it's possible to reach an adult audience without overexposing youth.
Unless this advertising is banned altogether - which raises troubling First Amendment questions - some spillover to younger audiences is inevitable. But the industry's current voluntary code is as squishy as beer-filled paper cups at a frat party. It asks only that advertising not appear in publications in which more than half the readers are under 21.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving wants to restrict such marketing to underage audiences of less than 10 percent. Jernigan thinks 15.8 percent is appropriate - to correspond with the percentage of the general population aged 12 to 20.
Even the FTC, in its 1999 review, suggested that the industry move to a 25 percent standard. According to the center's study, that expectation is being violated big time: Almost one-third of all alcohol advertising dollars are being spent in 10 magazines with at least one-fourth of the readers under 21. Clearly, the FTC has to encourage the industry to revisit this issue.
"It's all about the beer," brags the Heineken ad. It sure is.
