Last orders for alcohol ads?

The Independent reports that the Government believes the drinks industry has gone too far with their laddish jokes and sexy puns. The ads, it says, encourage antisocial behaviour and unsafe sex.

Chief executive of the Marketing Society, Mr Burkitt told The Independent: "If you go back five years there were very few complaints about alcohol. We are seeing more and more now. The ads are stepping over the boundaries of taste and decency."

Alex (adlist) weighs in: "Britain has always had this ambivalent attitude to sex. We do it like rabbits, but we don't talk about it. Not directly anyway. "Cover up the piano legs, Dorothy, the Vicar is coming for tea." And it will never change until the last people born in the 40s and earlier have died. Maybe not even then.
I do think though, that creatives -especially male ones - will always try to get a sexual angle into a campaign where they can. Not me, of course, oh no. Never."

The Independent

In a clampdown, ministers are considering new laws to ban alcohol commercials on television before the 9pm watershed and to end self-regulation of the advertising industry.

The Independant lists ads that "went too far" among them Bacardi:

TV advertisement that uses Vinnie Jones and shows him surrounded by women has been criticised for suggesting that the fact someone drinks Bacardi leads to enhanced sexual attraction. A pose struck by Jones with two bottles of the drink, making him look like an assassin holding two guns, has also been criticised.

I remember when holding "two guns" made you look like a cowboy. Assasins are stereotyped to have long-range rifles or explosives.

Eric Appleby, chief executive of Alcohol Concern, said:

"The fact of the matter is that we have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe and the highest rates of teenage drinking. Huge numbers of teenage sex happens when they are drunk. These ads are just adding to that problem."

The Daily Lobo is the University of New Mexico student newspaper, where the ad decorating this article ran in 2002.