Terry Prone: Advertisers pushing boundaries to get their message to consumers

Pre-watershed zero-zero drink advertising delivers messages about beer so children are positively imprinted with brands well in advance of making choices of what to drink.

“I might have some surrender business for you,” he said. 

“Might you, then?” I asked in the knowing way I deploy when I have no clue what’s going on. 

You don’t want a retainer client to know that you are pig-ignorant as to what surrender business is.

I made a guess that the term applied to business you didn’t have to tender for, advertise for, or otherwise hold out your marketing begging bowl for. 

This kind of business arrives with its hands up: take me, I’m yours.

“Not saying money is no object,” the client said, “but I’d be putting a substantial budget behind this.”

Holy God, I thought, but didn’t say, because of listening to a small voice singing off-key in my head. 

Although I have always had lovely and sometimes even generous clients, the money-no-object principle was so unfamiliar to me that it made me have doubts about whatever proposition was coming.

“You know we have a regulator,” the client continued. “And that we have never been faulted by the regulator since they were put over the industry?” 

I nodded. His company was admirable in its adherence to the rules.

“I’d like to have an even better relationship with the regulator,” he explained, which was puzzling, because if your regulator has just signed off on you with full marks, and has for several years, why would you want a better relationship with them?

The client explained that he believed it was time to re-imagine the regulator/regulated relationship. 

Traditionally, it was a ‘gotcha’ relationship, with the regulator essentially regarding companies as ready to be evil at the drop of an opportunity, and, on the other side, the companies hating and fearing the regulator.

This made no sense, he told me. The regulator and the industry had identical objectives: to ensure the industry’s product reached the citizen safely, on time, and at an acceptable cost. Correct? Correct. 

So why on earth shouldn’t they have a partnership relationship, one which didn’t in any way reduce the obligations of the industry or erode the control mechanisms vested in the regulator?

Someone connected, like me, could host a dinner to which he might be invited, along with people from the regulator’s office and of course others who wouldn’t be directly involved. 

“Covert?” I suggested, and his mouth tightened just a bit.

Industry leaders cosying up to regulators

Would it be a good idea for aviation regulators, worldwide, I wondered, to be having happy dinners with Boeing or Michael O’Leary and developing warm partnership-type relationships with them? 

Would it be a great concept to have the US Food and Drug Administration and EU equivalents being bosom buddies with lads like the Sacklers?

Bad enough that the Sacklers were burnishing their family name and brand by divvying up millions in arts sponsorships until it began to percolate through to the recipient museums and galleries that the money they were happily taking from these donors might be dirtied, just a little, by coming from addicting the injured and ill to opioids, many of them dying through overdoses.

I told the client that hosting dinner parties with covert motivation wasn’t what we did. Apart from which, there’s a proper boundary between the regulator and the regulated. 

Just as there’s a proper boundary between industries like tobacco, ultra-processed food or alcohol and kids in school.

These industries, according to May Van Schalkwyk, an academic at the London School of hygiene and Tropical Medicine, “have engaged with the funding, promotion, and delivery of education programmes and resources (for example, teachers’ handbooks, lesson plans, fact sheets, films and presentations) to children and young people in schools”.

Dr Van Schalkwyk was one of five speakers at the launch of a short film on the topic. This public health event was hosted by the Alcohol Forum. 

Playbook developed by Big Tobacco

The theme of the film and of the responses in the Q&A thereafter hammered home one belief on the part of the five experts at the top table, it being that the playbook developed by Big Tobacco is now being used by several industries, including, most notably, the alcohol industry.

Wherever the industry can, they indicated, it’s crossing boundaries under the guise of helping parents and teachers develop a full understanding within their children of avoiding harmful alcohol use, providing educational materials that ostensibly make it easier for teachers to deliver lessons they’d be delivering anyway, but without the “benefit” of beautifully produced educational materials.

“We know that these programmes and resources often offer a biased view of those harms,” Van Schalkwyk maintains, citing studies that have shown industry-funded education programmes share common features.

“For example, they often emphasise the role of peer pressure and parental influence as main drivers of children and young people’s choices and behaviours, while overlooking or downplaying other influences such as corporate marketing strategies, including corporate social responsibility activities.

“They prioritise teaching about the actions individuals should take, but rarely, if ever, mention government policies, such as tax or price-based interventions, marketing restrictions and the mandating of public warnings, that are known to be effective in protecting people from harm.”

Similarly, they also do not discuss the responsibility of businesses to act ethically and to protect the public from the potential harms caused by their products.

Paula Leonard, CEO of the Alcohol Forum and an expert on community development, was a driving force in causing the alcohol industry-funded body in this country, which provided educational materials to schools, to cease and desist in recent years. 

At the conference, she talked of the clever marketing angles that persuade women that they “deserve” a bottle of wine at the end of a tough week.

This in a week when someone produced a study that found drinking six glasses of wine increased a woman’s risk of breast cancer. 

Six glasses a day? No. Six glasses a week? No. Six glasses a month? No. Six glasses per year. 

Now, the increased risk was small, but the point is the industry, as Leonard said, is pushing much for frequent wine drinking to women as a reward for coping with normal life.

Driving home at lunchtime that day, I turned on the radio. And what popped up was an ad for alcohol-free Guinness. Seven-year-olds picked from school might hear the commercial.

But, hey, it’s an alcohol-free product, so what harm? 

The harm, according to speakers from the conference floor on that day, is that the zero-zero drink delivers messages about the brand, so that children are positively imprinted with the Guinness brand well in advance of making choices of what to drink. 

The research proves that they can instantaneously identify the brand long before their teen years.

Even if it’s not an ad for alcohol, it’s a warm, positive introduction. Another boundary disrespected.