Beer and advertising

Signs, before literacy

The pub sign is the oldest form of beer advertising still in use, and it began as a practical response to a population that could not read. A picture identified a house, and the same names recur across Britain because the images were conventional: the Red Lion, the Crown, the Ship. Some carry heraldry, some a trade, some a joke that stopped being funny four centuries ago.

A brewery-owned house also carried the brewer's name, which makes the pub sign the first branded retail estate. The tie and the sign arrive together, and both are about controlling what a drinker encounters at the point of decision.

Selling identity

Twentieth-century beer advertising almost immediately stopped describing beer. Read in bulk, it sells masculinity, belonging, refreshment, national identity, sport, sex and reward — and the product is a token in the exchange rather than the subject of it.

That has a straightforward commercial logic. If a mass-market lager is broadly similar to its competitors, there is nothing sensory to argue about and identity is the only remaining ground. The consequence runs the other way too: once the category competes on identity, distinctiveness in the liquid stops paying for itself.

The gendering was the most consistent feature and did the most damage. A product marketed at men for fifty years is bought disproportionately by men, which is then cited as proof it is a men's drink.

Craft, which sold identity too

It is worth resisting the flattering version in which craft brewing replaced identity marketing with honesty about flavour. It did put flavour back into the conversation, genuinely. It also built one of the most identity-dense marketing categories in modern food and drink: the artwork, the vocabulary, the founder story, the explicit positioning against corporate beer.

Some of that positioning is now sold by the corporations it defined itself against, which is the cleanest available demonstration that it was always a marketing position as well as a production one.

Regulation, in outline

Alcohol advertising is regulated almost everywhere, and the regimes differ enormously — statutory bans in some countries, industry self-regulation in others, and a wide range in between covering broadcast timing, sponsorship, content rules about appealing to minors, and whether health or social success may be implied.

Two things are near-universal and worth stating: advertising may not target people below the legal drinking age, and it may not link alcohol to social or sexual success in most codes. BeerHQ describes the shape of these regimes rather than their current detail, which changes and varies by jurisdiction.

One live area is alcohol-free advertising, where several jurisdictions are actively arguing about whether marketing a 0.0% product under a brand that also sells alcohol constitutes alcohol advertising. There is no settled international answer.