In the past week or two I have seen several television advertisements for hard liquor. I am accustomed to seeing ads for beer and wine but I thought that hard alcohol was banned from being advertised on television and was limited to printed ads like cigarettes. (If cigarettes really *do * have limitations. I could be wrong about that too.)
Did something change or was vodka and tequila not advertised for some other reason?
There is no government ban on liquor advertising on television. The liquor-industry trade group, Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, dropped its 48-year voluntary ban on TV liquor ads in 1996.
Ahhh. It only took me 11 years to notice.
Thank you.
As an aside, cigarette ads were banned from TV and radio (in the US) on January 1, 1971- January 2 per Wikipedia.
I should add that even after the Distilled Spirits Council rescinded its voluntary ban in November 1996, only local television stations would take liquor advertising, until December 2001, when NBC ended network television’s five-decade voluntary ban on liquor ads.
I noticed this a few weeks ago when watching something (I don’t remember what), and I got suckered into watching commercials when my MythTV didn’t automatically skip the commercials. I considered asking about it here.
The ban was voluntary on both the parts of the liquor advertisers as well as the networks. Wasn’t it last year or the year before where it was actually a national news story that someone was going to advertise a hard liquor, and ABC?NBC?CBS gas going to let them? And it later turned out that the network backed out and wouldn’t show the ad?
My amazement was that I just happened to catch the commercial casually, without having heard any of the hubbub this time.
Personally, I hope we start to get the Johnny Walker ads that we have south of the border.
Also… what’s Harvey’s Bristol Cream? I remember those ads all the time as a kid, and it’s the only liquor ad I remember, unless, of course, it’s not liquor. Of course we lived on the Canadian border, so we got all kinds of weird stuff, so that may be it. Maybe related to Harvey’s hamburger stand.
Not liquor, it’s Sherry.
I have a theory that the evil genius who created Zima, the first of the so-called alcho-pop drinks, did so simply as the first stage in getting hard liquor brand names on TV. Smirnoff, Jack Daniels, Bacardi, Capt Morgan etc. all created similar drinks with their brand as the beverage name and, since they were classified as beer, were all able to advertise them on network TV.
IIRC, the intention was to ban cigarette ads at the beginning of the year. A concession was made to the cigarette companies to allow them to advertise on Jan. 1 because of the huge audience for the college bowl games.
I thought they did it so they could get some product on shelves in more areas in the mosaic of lquor laws here in Texas (and other places) where you can sell beer in a lot of places, but not liquor.