Running with Tigger

There has been a considerable amount of outrage this week over the decision by the Portman Group to uphold a complaint against the packaging design of Lost & Grounded Running With Sceptres, which features a parade of cartoon animals. While it does not have the power to prevent the packaging being used, it can recommend that retailers do not stock it, which will obviously severely limit its distribution.

There are plenty of reasons to be critical of the Portman Group – its judgments often seem censorious and heavy-handed, it can act on no more than a simple flimsy complaint, which may have come from someone involved in the public health lobby, and it offers no appeals process. However, it’s important to remember, as Martyn Cornell points out in this blogpost, that it was set up as a voluntary body with the specific objective of staving off the possibility of statutory regulation of alcohol promotion and marketing. Some people may naively imagine that a statutory regulator may offer a more benign regime, but that is very hard to imagine, and in reality it is much more likely to result in much more severe restriction.

So: if you don’t want state regulation of the advertising and marketing of alcohol, don’t give the wowsers reasons to complain by using cartoon images on your cans and bottles that would not look out of place in the children’s section of a bookshop. And if you feel that restricts your artistic liberty, I really don’t have any sympathy: I’d rather see cartoon teddies and tigers banned from beer bottles than a Norwegian-style total prohibition on any sort of advertising or marketing.

Sometimes it may need to act in a firm manner to make it clear to the watching world that it is doing its job. And is defending figures reminiscent of children’s cartoon characters really the hill you want to die on when standing up for the rights of alcohol producers? It can’t be denied that the cartoon tiger looks very much like Tigger out of the Winnie the Pooh books. And alcohol is an adult product – why should anyone even want to use imagery that can all too easily be interpreted as appealing to children? Whether in practice it will do isn’t really the issue.

The charge has been levied against the Portman Group that, considering it is funded by large brewers and drinks producers, it discriminates against small and innovative brewers. However, surely it is simply the case that the large firms have a better awareness of the regime they are operating under and are naturally risk-averse. If small brewers fall foul of the code, it is more likely due to naivety about the nature of the regulatory environment, or indeed in some cases deliberately tweaking its tail for the publicity value, although I’m not suggesting that applies here.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, at least to some extent, craft brewers believe that they are operating on a higher moral plane than the mass-market producers and can thus push the boundaries further. You can’t really imagine George the Bear being brought back to advertise Hofmeister. And this sudden anger against the anti-drink tendency seems very selective and limited in scope – how many of those who are complaining about this have spoken out against much more serious manifestations of the trend such as minimum pricing, which was introduced in Wales only last week? At root, it’s really more concerned with getting at “big beer” than confronting the anti-drink lobby.

If you look into it, the ruling against Oranjeboom 8.5% is actually much more worrying. It is revisiting a packaging design than had already been approved a couple of years previously, and seeking to micromanage the size and positioning of text conveying purely factual information. That is surely much more concerning than objecting to cartoon tigers. Apparently the producers were already going to withdraw this product from the British market, but the precedent has been set. One day this will come back to bite the craft brewers - who have been known to put very strong beers in large containers - on the backside.