The Advertising Standards Agency published a ruling today against the Heineken groups recent set of Kronenbourg ads featuring Eric Cantona that was slightly tongue in cheek suggesting French hop farmers were treated as celebrities for growing hops used in Kronenbourg beer that made it taste so special.
Its a ruling that should have sent shockwaves through the brewing industry and community today.
Or at the very least caused a major chill through the offices of the advertising companies who make the ads for the major breweries in what is certainly a multi million pound business. Heineken alone spend close to 2billion euros annually worldwide on advertising their products.
The full ruling can be found on the ASA website and it applies to both the printed ad campaign and the ad itself available to view on everyones favourite internet based video store
Kronenbourg Cantona.
But the summation of it is that the ASA ruled that Heineken had created a misleading advert that implied the beer was brewed in France, not as it actually is in the UK, and in future the ads should "...take care not to emphasise a connection with France to the extent that their ads implied that Kronenbourg 1664 was brewed in France". For some reason they also seemed to think "A Taste Suprême" implied frenchness (actually its "Un avant-goût suprême" according to Google)
Having watched the advert several times, theres nothing that I would have said that implied the beer was brewed in France, theres no shots of brewing equipment, or people being shown brewing, just some French hop farmers being treated as celebrities, theres actually even very little of the beer shown in the advert, and the obligatory albeit blink and youll miss it brewed in the UK text does appear. It is very much in no way any different to many many ads for beers.
And thats the problem and why the brewing industry as a whole should be concerned, as actually quite alot of on the face of it foreign beer sold in the UK, are brewed in the UK not abroad.
But lots of those foreign beer ads, the Fosters, the Carlsbergs, the Stellas,the Becks, the peculiarly hard to understand San Miguels make a play on their connection with the country you most associate with them, Australia, Denmark, Belgium, Germany and Spain, not some factory complex in Northampton or Milton Keynes.
Even the less well advertised beers like the recent influx of Polish beers, and some craft American beers are now all brewed in the UK for the UK market.
And its not just lagers or foreign beers, even UK beers suffer this "location" problem with loads brewed around the country in places that have little association with their original location which the advertising is often based upon.
If the ASA ruling holds and is applied across the board, beer ads are suddenly going to be alot harder to make.
Finally its also worth pointing out this ruling came about, from just 2 complaints
