The Icarus theory of alcohol regulation
A Fingers special report on the mid-year Regulatory Roulette landscape
Editor’s note: I’m pushing to finish a long-term project right now, so in lieu of our standard Weekender, I’ve got something a little different for you today. More along the lines of our Buzzwords of The Week of the Year (so far) check-in. Fun! We’ll return to regular programming next week, thanks for your patience as I juggle three jobs.—Dave.
One of the straws that finally broke Joe Camel’s back was Joe Camel himself. By the mid-Nineties, a critical mass of state attorneys general had become convinced that Big Tobacco’s use of human and cartoon marketing mascots was a strategy to recruit another generation of smokers. Alongside a small army of strange-bedfellows—swashbuckling plaintiffs’ attorneys, paranoid whistleblowers, public-health advocates, and many more—the top law enforcers of more than two dozen states began hammering the “outlaw industry” into something like submission, culminating in the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement of 1998. The kid-friendly marketing was what got many of them to finally start swinging.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as the saying goes. But only nerds study history when there’s money to be made, and thanks to the alcopop redemption arc, blurring category lines, and the broader “total beverage” moment, there’s plenty of dumb money flooding the beverage-alcohol industry these days. The American palate writ large being child-like, it stands to reason that the bleeding-edge of booze “innovation” for the past half decade is either making collaborative candy-/cookie-/cereal-flavored versions of existing types of alcohol, or adding alcohol to existing types of previously soft drinks. Many of these brands being originally designed and marketed to actual children with colorful logos and mascots, it also stands to reason that a regulatory crackdown is coming.
This is not, strictly speaking, any of my business, because Fingers doesn’t sell booze; Fingers sells coverage about booze.1 And it’s true that there are meaningful differences between the American cigarette business of the late 20th century and the drinks business of the early 21st century. Still, I find the parallels compelling, and the comparison productive. Somebody—either within the bev-alc business, or an interloper from an adjacent CPG sector—is probably going to fly too close to the sun and bring down the thunder on the whole industry. Who’s it going to be?