Wine, Sex and………..Government?
It’s nice to know that with a war in Iraq raging, a new government in Afghanistan to support, a massive debt to service and a major overhaul of social security in the works that the Bush administration’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has the time and resources to police wine ads for “improper” advertising.
According to Michael Doyle, a reporter out of Washington regulators are “adopting what they call a ‘more proactive approach,’ as they search for everything from false health claims and juvenile appeals to “subliminal representations that are obscene or indecent.”
I guess this means my one client will have to scale back it’s plans for their new ad campaign: “Wine Geeks Gone Wild” in which drunken celebrants scandalously lift up their cardigans and pop off their cuff links as they reveal the wine behind the label.
Actually, wine is pretty safe in this new era of morals enforcement. If there is one industry that has an affinity for bland ads it’s wine (unless you consider those new ads For Mondavi and Kendall Jackson in which the founders look lovingly into the camera lens with a come hither expression on their face. In fact the closest thing to a salacious ad is one for a big Champagne producer showing a bathtub full of suds, a pair of black high heels strewn on the floor and a mens tie draped over a towel rod, with a bottle of the bubbly in the foreground. The tag line? “When life takes off.” Nod bad. But will this mean the beginning of the end for this big champagne house have crossed the line from clever to salacious?
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