Wayyyy Over the Line

Some of you know that I spent several years working in the beer business. One of my roles at the company where I worked had to do with regulatory conformity. Perhaps the single most important part of this concerned what is commonly termed "label approval". The governmental body that has primary and almost sole responsibility for this is the Alcohol Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) in Washington, D.C.

I'm not sure anyone would debate that alcohol's role in human history has been and continues to be turbulent....the swizzle that stirs the drink in certain circumstances, so to speak. Ever since prohibition in the 1920's and early 30's, the TTB has had an explicit restriction against making any "therapeutic claims" for alcoholic beverages. Basically, this means that a beer or wine company cannot claim, even implicitly, that their product can make you feel or perform (in any way) better after consuming it. I saw some ingenious attempts at circumventing or navigating, rather, the spirit of this regulation....the best of these, for better or worse, originating from my own company.

The most obvious (and terrifically worn out) tactic is to throw a few pretty and scantily clad women into your ads to make a man (men drink the vast majority of beer after all) think he might meet similar women if he drinks "X" beer. All the big brewers do this and it's long accepted that the consumer can draw his own conclusions regarding his own probability of meeting similar women.

When a brewer wants to communicate something that promises more 'efficacy', they have to take a more subtle approach. A typical ploy could involve sending a message to potential consumers that your product might enhance the male sex drive or make a drinker feel more masculine. Designers (not the company I worked for) might try to communicate this (and did, however ineffectively) by including the image of a Rottweiler dog on their beer can. In their print advertising they (again, not my company) might claim that their product could make you 'last till the dawn'. Most all efforts treading into this 'claim' territory are caught by the specialists at the TTB leaving a legacy of fairly straightforward communication based on brand and quality. Until relatively recently, even claims of alcohol strength were discouraged by the TTB.

Nonetheless, beverage marketers continually try to step just a little further over the line with the designs they submit in an attempt to get the upper hand on the competition thereby putting out a product about which they can build 'myth'. See, if you have 'myth', you can play on that to differentiate your product from all the others. But myth is a subtle thing and the dance the TTB does with it's constituent manufactures actually helps enforce a subtlety that, ironically, lends any embryonic myth credibility. In other words, because of the TTB's long record of managing therapeutic "claims", if a marketer went too far over the line in its claim, no consumer would believe the hype. Conversely, if a marketer got something through TTB...perhaps the 'word on the street' is true.

I have recently discovered, in India, they apparently regulate alcohol marketing by using somewhat different guidelines. The US beer market is relatively conservative. My experience allowed me to see plenty of interesting ads and labels that all pushed the envelope but all that was within an admittedly prudish marketing environment. My horizons have now been broadened and I have now, offically, seen EVERY LAST THING...






And if you had any doubt at all...

















I'm not even sure what this communicates. I am, however, absolutely certain that I will avoid drinking "Fire" at all costs.