Smirnoff’s update to the popular Tea Partay video released this week, Boyz in the Hillz, is a playful sendup of the Cali nouveau riche, but it served to remind me that in the wild west of online video, there are some ethical questions about advertising sweet, green-tea flavored beverages spiked with grain alcohol in the ironically-inflected colloquial style familiar to any young person.
For fifty years, the friendly corporations that serve you hard liquor voluntarily declined to create commercials for broadcast television, but then changed their minds in 1996. During that time, advertising for other mood-altering substances came and went — cigarette advertising was banned on television, while the ban on advertising pharmaceuticals was lifted here in the United States.
Now, I’m not calling for a repeal of the repeal of prohibition, but since YouTube and most other popular video sharing sites have taken the hard line on nipples, why isn’t anyone asking the same question about the promotion of booze, pills and cigarettes?
For all my griping about the creepy age verification procedure at Bud.tv, at least they attempted to respect American laws and customs intended to curb underage drinking. But you can find any of a number of Bud.tv clips on YouTube, working their viral magic. The Smirnoff Raw Tea site does have a nominal age verification system, but what leads me to believe that neither company will be issuing DMCA takedown notices any time soon?
Though I have to admit, old cigarette ads like “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette” are pretty hilarious, but you can see why people didn’t think they were really serving the health of the body politic. In the legal psychotropic category, plenty of folks are smoking salvia divinorum and filming themselves. Or if illegal narcotics are more your thing, you can watch Kate Moss blowing rails — a double whammy of copyright infringement and a potential relapse trigger!
As for Boyz in the Hillz, there’s at least an illegibly tiny “Please Drink Responsibly” disclaimer and Smirnoff trademark notice that appears for a few seconds at the end of the clip. Which is the only indication that what you just saw was a advertisement for alcohol from a multi-billion dollar, international purveyor of distilled beverages. Naturally, Diageo would be right to point out that they have as little control over people copying and distributing the commercial as anyone, but for agencies like JWT which produced the spot, that’s the selling point, not an area for concern.
But like the the hooky jingle that accompanied Hamm’s Beer’s cartoon-animal ads which I can still hum after all these years, I wonder if minors today might similarly remember that funny YouTube video when they come of age in a few years, and while picking up a sixer of Smirnoff Raw Tea, beatbox the backing track under their breath unconsciously and fantasize about getting a rub-down from a waifish lass in a bikini.
While the news media works everyone into a lather over sexual predators online in an effort to think of the children, advertisers are already in the bedroom entertaining little Dick and Jane with vodka-fueled minstrelsy. I’ll be the first to stand up and defend their free speech rights to do so, but it certainly makes the censorship of erotic content on the grounds that its tasteless vulgarity seem pretty damn arbitrary.
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