This week, a new campaign, set up by the European Forum for Responsible Drinking (EFRD), has started promoting responsible marketing practices for the alcohol industry on social media. Members of the EFRD include Bacardi, Martini and Diageo, who last year signed a significant deal with Facebook, the world’s most popular social network site.
The campaign, called Market Responsibly, is targeted at alcohol brand marketers and agencies. The initiative springs from cooperation with America’s Distilled Spirits Council intended to create self-regulatory guidelines for advertising alcohol ads on social media sites.
The new guidelines apply for all brands of Bacardi, Martini, Beam Global Spirits & Wine, Brown-Forman, Diageo, Pernod Ricard and Moët Hennessy. Among the content of the guidelines, can be found Facebook-specific strictures: a commitment to remove inappropriate user-generated content from brand pages in 48 hours of posting, as well as restricting Facebook users under 18 from accessing alcohol brand pages.
Brandchannel.com, highlighted some of the questions contained in the guidelines, intended for marketers to ask themselves, before launching a campaign:
1. Would you feel comfortable describing the marketing communications activity to parents at your sons’/daughters’ school or in a town hall meeting?
2. Would you feel at ease to stand up in a law court and defend your marketing communications activity as legal, decent, truthful and honest?
8. If this scene in your marketing communications activity were real, would the person featured be at risk of harming him or herself or others? Would you feel comfortable defending it as ‘safe’ at a later stage if someone had an accident (whether fatal or not) as a result of copying the action portrayed?
“If you have developed digital media communication tools for your client (brand website, apps, Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc….) you must comply with specific rules in particular”:
12. Have you asked consumers to affirm their age when interacting directly with you through any digital media communications?
14. If you have created download content, have you inserted an instruction that such content should not be forward to people below 18 years old?
Source: Brandchannel.com 02/15/12