Advertising: The Audience is Listening
As the bus chugs up a busy Toronto street, people pause to stare. Clearly,
it's not your average TTC vehicle. Between the windshield and the rear window, every scrap of metal is painted like the inside of a tall, bubbly
vodka and tonic. This billboard-on-wheels, which promotes a popular brand of vodka, stops to collect some students on their way home from school. One
by one, the teenagers board the bus and seem to get swallowed up by the moving cocktail.
Fully painted public buses are one of the newest marketing mediums, but
public transit users have been exposed to alcohol advertising on bus shelters, the side panels of buses and inside vehicles for years in various Ontario cities.
"It is important to remember that alcohol is the only intoxicating substance
that we allow to be mass-marketed and mass-advertised in our society...Along
with alcohol's very preferred treatment, must come appropriate legislation".
—Robert Solomon, University of Western Ontario, Faculty of Law, Symposium on
Alcohol Privatization/Deregulation, November 20, 1995
Daily, Ontarians and Canadians are bombarded with advertising's powerful
images in many other ways. New research could help gauge advertising's full effects on attitudes and drinking behaviour.
Catchy jingles on the radio, provocative television commercials,
eye-catching billboards, colourful magazine ads and interactive
promotions and contests are all designed to influence our
purchasing decisions. Advertisements have also cropped up on park benches,
in elevators, on movie theatre screens, and on tabletops and trays in
fast-food courts—any place that people gather, it seems. Small poster ads
for beer have even been spotted in the men's washrooms of bars and restaurants.
Another form of advertising — one that is less obvious — exists in corporate
sponsorships. While these help pump much-needed funds into
struggling arts programs, amateur and professional sports, and other good
causes, those interested in public health and safety have specific concerns
about their effects — and that of all forms of alcohol advertising for that
matter. For example, some are concerned about how sponsorships influence
minors who are exposed to corporate logos on everything from programs and
marquees to caps and T-shirts. Sponsorships may lead people of any age to
perpetually link certain events with alcohol products. This association,
particularly in relation to activities where even low levles of impairment
could result in injury or death, is a valid public health concern.
Currently, alcohol advertising laws and guidelines exist at the provincial
and federal levels:
Concerned individuals want to ensure that alcohol advertisements, including
corporate sponsorships, continue to adhere to general guidelines and that
they do not:
- encourage non-drinkers to start drinking
- encourage minors to drink
- encourage drinkers to increase their alcohol consumption
- encourage risk-taking behaviour in connection with drinking
- imply that personal success or the enjoyment of a recreational, social or cultural activity is enhanced by alcohol use.
Others suggest that restricting televised alcohol ads to late-night spots,
when most children are asleep, will lessen advertising's influence on young
people. Many support mandatory independent ads featuring health information
to counter, or balance, the alcohol "lifestyle" ads that abound.
In general, national and provincial policy-makers, public health advocates,
parents and anyone concerned about Canadians' health and well-being need to
continue to examine ways of ensuring advertising regulations balance
industry concerns with the public's best interest.
(Parts of the above have been taken from APN's Priorities, Developments
in alcohol policy in Ontario, 1995-1996, pg 71)