Reflected glory

Anti-drink pressure group Alcohol Action Ireland have complained that advertising of alcohol-free beers is being used to circumvent more general restrictions on alcohol promotion. At first sight, this may come across as yet another example of being joyless wowsers, but actually in the context of their own terms of reference they do have a point.

It seems fairly self-evident that advertising of alcohol-free variants will to some extent reflect on the parent brand too. The two products cannot be seen as entirely distinct. This works two ways – if someone wants to drink an alcohol-free beer, they are likely to be motivated to choose one carrying the same branding as a familiar standard beer, while the promotion of alcohol-free variants contributes towards awareness of the overall brand.

Possibly one of the reasons why the previous bout of enthusiasm for low- and zero-alcohol beers fizzled out thirty years ago is that they tended to be stand-alone products like Barbican, Kaliber and Clausthaler, rather the ones sharing an identity with existing brands. It is also noticeable that the share of advertising devoted to alcohol-free beers is considerably great than their actual market share, as the manufacturers attempt to cultivate an image of being socially responsible. Much the same is true of the share of car advertising devoted to electric cars.

If the exact same products were marketed as something like “malt soda”, with no attempt to link them to alcohol brands or imply that they were in any way connected to beer, then these objections wouldn’t apply. Nobody claims that the existence of fizzy apple juice is an attempt to promote cider. But the fact is that they aren’t totally discrete products, and it is distinctly disingenuous to argue that the promotion of, say, Guinness 0.0 does not in any way contribute towards increasing awareness of the Guinness brand as a whole.

This is why alcohol-free beers are treated as age-restricted products, as they carry alcohol branding and are explicitly intended to ape alcoholic drinks, so could be seen as representing the promotion of alcohol to under-18s, something explicitly prohibited in marketing codes. And it is why candy cigarettes, which I remember enjoying as a child, have not been sold for many years.

The real battle is whether to restrict alcohol advertising as such in the first place. Once that has been conceded, quibbling about alcohol-free variants is just an ultimately doomed attempt to find a loophole. If you ban alcohol advertising, this logically follows, and it was never going to be a get out of jail free card for drinks manufacturers.