Fosters hasn’t quite stopped making beer, but they obviously want to focus on what they do best. They have just appointed Sydney-based ad agency Droga5, creators of The Regulars and the controversial, cynical and extremely successful Raise A Glass campaign, to handle advertising for Crown Lager and Cascade in addition to VB. Expect to watch more advertising brilliance in the future…while you drink something else.
Fortunately, they don't advertise in Russia which prohibits the use of people in beer ads.
In 2004, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service prohibited the use of human or animal images in beer commercials and limited the time that beer advertising can be shown on television to between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
In May, however, the regulator complained that the beer industry was circumventing the law by using images implying the presence of people without showing the people themselves — such as clinking beer glasses and off-screen voices conversing.
Now obviously advertisers use people in ads for a reason. They want to establish a brand identity that their target market will indentif ywith, and will hopefully prompt beer drinkers to think they will look as cool, wealthy or as discerning as the pretty and handsome young things in the ad and hopefully encourge them to buy that brand of beer to cloak themselves in those brand attributes. While this in all probability does have a flow on effect to make drinking seem cool as well, I'm not quite sure that that's the biggest problem that alcohol faces. It's just one of the easiest for government's to tackle and to be seen doing something to pander to the ever louder voices of prohibition. You will still have endless images of footballers celebrating with beer (and the scandalous stories of how the night ended up in the papers for weeks to come), champagne corks popping at Formula One trophy presentations, cocktail parties in the social pages and so on and so on.
Drinking and any problems surrounding it is a huge issue and Government's just tend to distort the problem with half-arsed bans like this one.
I enjoyed the quote from Konstantin Garanin, creative director of the unusually named Reclamafia advertising agency.
“If we’re banned from using people’s voices and other human-related stuff, we’ll just show more beautiful landscapes and flowing water,” he said.