• by September 15, 2005

THAT'S THE SPIRIT -- Is it possible that the Riff has uncovered a controversial new trend in the field of sports marketing: one that links the consumption of alcohol to high-profile sports heroes, and by proxy, to the tacit suggestion that booze enhances sports performance? And will it be a divisive industry-wide scandal on the scale of tobacco, prescription drug and food marketing? Nah, it's just more of the same old alcohol industry shenanigans. But we couldn't help noticing that less than a week after Heineken unveiled a massive global ad strategy tied to an important international soccer tournament, that an even more controversial alcohol product - distilled liquor - is sponsoring professional boxing's Golden Boy. Remy Cointreau Wednesday announced a deal in which premium cognac brand Remy Martin will sponsor a series of bouts leading up to and including Oscar de la Hoya's return to the ring next year. Okay, so we're still a little fuzzy on the cognac thing. Is it a fermented, or is it distilled? It begins as champagne, but ends up with the kick of a spirit.

That may not seem like something to snift at, but the media business has always made some important distinctions over the booze it chooses. Historically, it's been okay for media like TV to carry ads for brewed and fermented products like beer and wine, but not for distilled products like whiskey, gin, vodka and rum. We never understood the double standard, especially after Seagram ran that brilliant ad campaign during the 1980s showing a beer mug = a wine glass = a shot glass. In their respective volumes, argued Seagram, each form of alcohol is equally as intoxicating. Yeah, well that still doesn't explain why we've never thrown back another shot of tequila since our bachelor party - but that's another column. And yes, we're still happily married.

Anyway, the double standard thing always bugged us, because while liquor was safely locked away in the media cabinet, beer and wine were free to promote themselves with relative impunity in the most blatant media outlets imaginable: youth-oriented, hero-worshiping TV sports events. In fact, it became a point of industry pride during the great beer wars of the 1980s when Anheuser Busch, and a once influential Miller Brewing Co., battled over TV sports bragging rights.

The irony is that while beer and wine were free to market on the airwaves, reaching a fair amount of underage viewers and listeners, distilled spirits were barred by the broadcast industry's self-imposed guidelines. It was ironic, because the big concern about over-the-air advertising of liquor is that it would corrupt America's youth. We don't know about you, but in our youth we couldn't stomach beer, much less hard liquor. Our poison of choice was the super sweet wines that were heavily marketed on TV and radio back then. Brands like Blue Nun, Mateus and Boones Farm Apple Wine. Remember wine sacks? Wine marketing never really caught on the airwaves, unless you consider Paul Mason's brief dalliance with obese, eccentric, washed-up film director Orson Wells: "We will serve no win before its time."

Ultimately, we were weaned from wine to beer, but we never acquired a taste for the hard stuff. For us, liquor has always been a natural temperance. Nature's way of saying, "What are you nuts?" Actually, it's always been our stomach's way of saying, "Uh-uh. Put that down here and you're going to find yourself over there - praying to porcelain gods." So as far as we were concerned, the broadcast industry got it backwards. It should have been advertising all the booze it could to America's youth. It was the transition thugs like beer and wine that should have been prohibited. Perhaps the worst mass media offense of all was the wine cooler craze during the late 1980s. Backed with massive media budgets and ultra hip spokesdude Bruce Willis, Seagram probably did more to get underage drinkers drinking than all the hard liquor ads it could possibly have run.

Now the TV industry appears to be correcting the alcohol marketing imbalance. Mainly it's been on edgy cable networks like E!, FX, and Comedy Central, which have a target audience and sensibility that seems appropriate for hard liquor brands, but every once in a while booze oozes onto the airwaves. And at least one hard liquor brand - Bacardi - has gone the celebrity spokesperson route, signing "Sex in the City" star Kim Cattrall to plug its Bacardi Breeze brand in TV commercials.

We're not sure that's right or wrong, but we don't think there should be a double standard concerning beer and wine and liquor.

Now a liquor brand is taking a play out of the beer marketing playbook and sponsoring professional boxing matches. In fact, it's using almost exactly the same strategy the Busch Media troika - Chuck Fruit, Tony Ponturo and Jerry Solomon - used decades ago to break into pay TV, at a time when even "acceptable" advertisers weren't allowed on. Fruit, then the chief media maestro at A-B, devised a strategy for sponsoring professional bouts carried by HBO. Budweiser didn't get any commercial time, of course, but its logo was seen throughout the fight, especially when one of the pugilists hit the ring mat. Now Remy Martin is sponsoring fights produced by Oscar de la Hoya, including his return bout, which are being televised on HBO and pay-per-view. But to tell you the truth, we'd need a few slugs of Remy before we'd step in the ring.