Just before Cambodia beer made
its recent debut, the government declared that all alcohol advertising should be
banned, to improve road safety among other things. They quickly realized that
that would be impractical and amount to a drastic change since beer posters and
banners are ubiquitous and seemingly are just about the only decoration the
typical local Khmer restaurant or bar has available.
But at least they figured they could
prohibit those pull tab beer promotions, except that Cambodia beer had just
come online with one and, well, since they had no warning of the change it
didn’t seem right to stop them. So okay, that’ll be the last pull tab
promotion. Now several months later the pull tab ban has been forgotten and all
three major beer brands are competing with those same promotions. I personally
have a strong distaste for them for two reasons; they’re not likely to be
recycled and they’re a bloody nuisance.
As to the former, while it’s true
that they are very small, when you’re talking about hundreds of millions of
them, it starts to add up. Regarding the nuisance part, while thinking about
this month’s topic I saw a bar girl cut her finger on one. Okay, a good point
to make but hostesses can be ditzy so not necessarily a strong argument against
pull tabs. Then a few days later as I was formulating this article in my mind,
I cut my own finger. Yes, I am approaching geezerhood and I have been getting
clumsy of late – reaching for things which fly out in all directions instead of
being held in my normally firm grip – but still, is it really a good idea to
have millions of sharp little objects floating around the environment? The tab which
bit me was being crunched up so I could put it back into a can and recycle it.
I used to put them back in while there was still beer in the can – otherwise
they often don’t get recycled – but they would sometimes come back out into my
mug, so I gave up on that one.
Pull tabs were banned in Oregon
in the early seventies so the nasty little buggers are deep in my
consciousness. Digression: I realize I mention Oregon a lot in these articles,
but it is a special place: Oregon is to the US as Cambodia is to southeast
Asia; a small, friendly, easy going, low key place to live or visit. Now I
understand that few readers of this article have any interest at all in going
to America, but if you do, skip New York, Florida and California, the big three
tourist magnets, and head to Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, you’ll be very
pleasantly surprised. If you have to do the big three, at least make a little time
to get off the beaten path.
One of the great things about
Oregon is its 100% public coastline; there are no private beaches and no
private land within the riparian zone; it’s the only state that I’m aware of
where that is true. One of things people most like to do on the coast is walk
the beaches. Before the ban people were getting their feet cut up by pull tabs
strewn around the sand and that was the impetus behind their prohibition.
Personally, I find it hard to
imagine how pull tab prizes would encourage people to drink, only possibly
change their brand. It’s also debatable exactly how much advertising of alcohol
affects the total amount consumed. Alcohol has been around as long as Western
civilization: I never tire of pointing out that Jesus’ first miracle involved
changing water into wine. Supplies were depleted at the wedding at Cana at
least partly because of Jesus’ presence,
since a lot of extra guests came to see Him… He figured it was important to let
the celebration continue. To let the good times keep rolling.
I don’t think my own intake is
affected by advertising, though it’s hard to say what deep, deep subliminal
messages were planted in my brain from an early age. I certainly find it difficult
to go a day without at least a couple of beers; the only exception being if
I’ve got a raging hangover from the night before. Alcohol is a great mellower,
relaxer, easer of tension and obliterator of inhibitions. It’s also been shown
to be benign healthwise when done in moderation. Studies have shown that people
who have two drinks a day live longer than total teetotalers. No need to
mention that serious souses don’t live all that long.
This brings up another ‘big’
question. Does the moderate imbiber live longer in spite of drink or because of
it? Is that moderate amount of alcohol still a negative for your body but its evils
counterweighted by the good it does to your mental attitude? In a perfect world
where everybody is high and happy on life, would there no longer be a market
for alcohol? Would people no longer need an escape? Would drinking become
history?
Clearly, no need to worry about
that now, the insanity and inanity of life demands palliative care – at least
it does for me and most of you out there reading this. What would be good to
know is the impact of advertising on individual consumption and the total number
of imbibers.
The subject of banning alcohol
advertising in Cambodia was brought up again at the beginning of October in a
conference organized by the Ministry of Information, National Road Safety
Committee and World Health Organization. An official from the Ministry of
Public Works and Transport who attended was quoted as saying that “…traffic
accidents, injuries and fatalities can be prevented through… control over
alcohol advertisements promoting drinking.” They no longer seek to ban all
advertising but want to include ‘don’t drive drunk’ messages on labels and
prohibit all audio and text on TV beer ads. Another person interviewed for the
article said reducing drunk driving is more a changing of attitudes towards it
and better enforcement, which I tend to agree with.
Nevertheless, advertising has to
have an effect: when a young malleable mind sees posters or TV ads showing
happy smiling beer drinkers with beautiful girls (or boys) at their elbows, it
has to make an impression. When my son was a teenager he referred to drinking
as ‘romantic’. That’s exactly the image that alcohol purveyors seek to implant.
On the topic of the impact of
advertising, let me refer again to a study done on young children a few years
back. Three- to five-year-old kids were given a MacDonald’s hamburger in a Mac
wrapper and an identical one in a plain wrapper. They did the same for fries
and baby carrots, which MacDonald’s doesn’t sell. In every case, by a wide
margin, the kids said the food in the Mac wrapper tasted better.
So the next time you have a
hankering for a Big Mac, think about it, are you craving it because you’re
hungry and it tastes good, or because you subconsciously expect it to make you
happy? Or help you find the girl or boy of your dreams? Contentment?
Enlightenment? Considering what goes into them – lettuce soaked in a chemical
bath to keep it looking fresh far longer than it ought to – and how they’re
made, taste is probably not your true motivator.
I’m quite certain ads have no
effect on my alcohol habit, or whether I drive under the influence, but there
are a lot of impressionable people out there and it’s not hard to imagine that
a lot of them are encouraged to drink through advertising; we’re all looking
for a good time, no? What’s more, though a couple of beers a day may be
perfectly okay, we all know how easy it is to go overboard. Even many of us who
don’t get flat out, laying-in-the-gutter drunk, still have a tendency to find
it hard to stop at the benign 2-drink level. Let’s face it, every time you wake
up weak, woozy, headachy from an over-the-top bout with alcohol the night
before, you have tortured your body, put it through the ringer. Sure it was
great for your head - you had a jolly old time - but it was equally bad for
your body.
There are many aspects that have
given alcohol its well-deserved bad rep. The accidents, the slobbering, puking,
drunkenness, the craziness, the violence, the diseases, the addiction are all
undeniably points of negativity and danger. Americans thought it was so evil back
in the early 20th century they banned it. Conservative Christians,
Hindus and Muslims are all down on boozin’. (I’m convinced the reason why Arabs
in particular and Muslims in general are so contentious, quick to anger and
prone to indulge in fundamentalism is the prohibition of alcohol, sex and drugs
along with the heavy consumption of strong coffee. Under that regimen, I’d be
freaking mad too.)
On the above basis, I think all
adverts should be banned. People could easily find it without marketing if
they’re into it, but there’s no good reason for encouraging people to drink
more than they otherwise would. There’s also no good reason to allow
advertising to romanticize it by drawing alluring but ultimately false
impressions of drinking that makes it seem so acceptable and benign without also
insuring that people understand the reality, the dark side.
My other major complaint with
alcohol ads in Cambodia simply has to do with esthetics. It totally uglifies
the country to have ubiquitous beer posters marring the countryside and city
entertainment districts. At one point I thought of taking a nighttime picture
of Street 136, but then when I looked I realized all you would see was lighted
beer signs. Tacky, trashy, ugly as sin is what comes to mind.
Instead of interesting, artistic,
catchy logos individually designed and created for each bar, you have a line of
beer signs all in similar colors since all three main brews are very close in the
impression they give. And what do the bar owners get for trashing the visual
scene? They get a free sign in which the top half is beer ad and in the other
half the Khmer name is much larger than the English; by law the Khmer is
supposed to be three times the size of the English. When making your own sign
you can fudge on that requirement. The part that means anything to the bar’s
promotion comes down to about a third of the sign’s area. For that they save a
big $50; the cost of a sign without the beer ad top. They pay tens of thousands
of dollars to create a really nice looking bar and then allow it to be totally tackified
to save a lousy fifty bucks. But maybe people don’t realize how cheap they are;
well now you know.
I can see, for instance, a bar
having a small lighted sign saying which beer it has on tap, but coasters, bar
mats, umbrellas, posters, banners, large lighted signs and more? I can
understand why local funky Khmer establishments would think a free sign is a
great thing because they work on a really small margin and besides have no idea
how hideous their beer-poster décor looks. They have no clue of how tasteless
it is to cover the surface of all your walls with beer ads. But a westerner?
C’mon man, ambiance, style, individuality and taste are important.
All that ranting aside, if you’re
one of the many bar-owner friends of mine who’ve succumbed to the lure of a
free sign, forgive me for being so indelicate. I realize it’s not always that
easy to be different, to buck the trend since most people are doing it. Please
don’t take it personally, it’s just part of venting my loathing of advertising
in general. Money isn’t the root of all evil, advertising is.
While I can’t imagine that beer
advertising will ever be completely banned in Cambodia, esthetically it would
be a wonderful gift for Phnom Penh and the whole country.
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