But Skinnygirl Vodka? MommyJuice? When did the female drinker become the focus of the spirits market?
I flew to Baltimore to find out. I knew that David Jernigan, the savvy, boyish-looking director of CAMY, would be willing to ballpark a date. Based in his spacious office at Johns Hopkins University, Jernigan has spent his career watching the industry. When, I want to know, did the world begin to change?
Apparently, in the late 1960s: Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, bought Miller Beer, and brought the techniques of market segmentation and lifestyle advertising to the marketing of Miller. They took a relatively regional beer and turned it into the number two brand in the United States—and they did this by using the tobacco marketing playbook. “In response,” says Jernigan, “August Busch III, who was head of Anheuser-Busch, took the thick book of sporting events in the U.S. and threw it at his marketing people, saying, ‘Buy this!’ And they did, everything from tiddlywinks to baseball.” At one point, they were sponsoring twenty-three out of twenty-four major-league baseball teams. It was a sea change: they bought into all the lifestyle marketing that had been pioneered by tobacco. Says Jernigan, “The wine and spirits folks were left in the dust.”
Beer ruled North America in the 1980s and early ’90s. Beer was fun, beer was sport. The spirits industry was seen as stodgy and boring. Suddenly, says Jernigan, it decided to play catch-up: it did market segmentation, looked at who was underperforming, and of course, it saw women. “For the spirits industry, this was a global opportunity. This was conscious: they understood they had to shoot younger and they had to shoot harder.”
Thus was born the alcopop. Also known as the cooler, “chick beer,” or “starter drinks”—sweet, brightly colored vodka- or rum-flavored concoctions in ready-to-drink format. Jernigan calls them “the anti-beer,” “drinks of initiation”—and my favorite: “cocktails with training wheels.” “They’re the transitional drinks,” he says, “particularly for young women, pulling them away from beer and towards distilled spirits. Getting brand loyalty to the spirits brand names in adolescence, so that you get that annuity for a lifetime. An obvious product for reaching this wonderful and not yet sufficiently tapped market of young women.”
According to 2010 data, 68 percent of eighth-grade drinkers reported having had an alcopop in the past month, 67 percent of tenth-grade drinkers, and 58 percent of twelfth-grade drinkers. But in the 19–28 category, fewer than half had had an alcopop in the past month. Broken down by gender, the data showed alcopops were more popular with girls and women in every age group. The height of the craze for alcopops was 2004. By then they had done what the industry needed them to do—reach out to females, and establish a bridge to the parent brands like Smirnoff vodka and Bacardi rum. And of course, none of the marketing shows the consequences of drinking.
Let’s take a second and look at the Smirnoff brand. In 1997, two major alcohol firms merged to form Diageo, the largest distilled spirits producer in the world—both then and now. This British-based multinational developed a sophisticated strategy to reenergize Smirnoff vodka: in 1999 it launched Smirnoff Ice, which became the number one beverage in the alcopop category. With a hefty marketing push, Smirnoff vodka sales grew 61 percent between 2000 and 2008—a sharp contrast to the 1990s, when this brand saw a dip in sales.
“Smirnoff is the girls’ vodka,” says Kate Simmie. At twenty-nine, she has long matured out of her Smirnoff phase: her new love is Blueberi Stolichnaya. But the McGill grad, now a Toronto marketing professional, has a firm handle on her own limits. “I’m five foot two,” she says with a grin. While she has many friends who do shots, she thinks twice before joining them, or having a martini. “I can’t imagine dating without drinking, but I tend to stick to wine,” she says. “I can’t handle shots.”
Shots make a difference. Compared with distilled spirits, it takes a lot more beer or wine to produce alcohol poisoning or impairment, to compromise judgment around risky sex, which is why distilled spirits, in most cultures, are treated differently. And there’s an additional health issue for women. Not only are young women experimenting with the strongest beverage, but they’re more vulnerable because of the way alcohol metabolizes in female bodies. “If you’re female and you’re drinking spirits, and the guy’s drinking beer, you’re at a complete disadvantage,” says Jernigan. “He’s drinking a weaker beverage, he’s metabolizing it more efficiently, and you’re trying to keep up. And you’ve got Carrie Bradshaw saying that this is the image of the powerful woman—a woman with a cocktail in her hand virtually every moment that you see her, except when she’s trying on shoes!”
Can we really blame Carrie Bradshaw for the martini-shots-vodka culture? Can it all be laid at her Jimmy Choos? “Let’s put it this way,” says Jernigan. “We cannot discount Carrie Bradshaw. But if Carrie Bradshaw hadn’t been accompanied by a push by the spirits industry, she would have been a pebble in the pond. As it was, she was a boulder. Women had never been targeted before in the way they were targeted: after alcopops came distilled spirits line extensions—flavored vodkas, absolutely every fruit you could imagine.”
In recent years, several countries, including Germany, France, Switzerland, and Australia, have imposed special taxes on alcopops, addressing widespread concerns about their popularity as a drink of initiation. Germany nearly doubled the tax; Australia boosted it by 70 percent. Many countries found substantial reductions in the consumption of these beverages.
And many other countries haven’t done a thing. “In the past twenty-five years, there has been tremendous pressure on females to keep up with the guys,” says Jernigan. “Now the industry’s right there to help them. They’ve got their very own beverages, tailored to women. They’ve got their own individualized, feminized drinking culture. I’m not sure that this was what Gloria Steinem had in mind.”
In the past decade, there has been a huge amount of effort to stop underage drinking in the United States. Says Jernigan: “It’s made some impact with the boys. We are not getting anywhere with the girls.” The more marketing kids see, the more likely they are to initiate drinking at an early age. This is 360-degree marketing, embedded in Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, on television, and in the movies. Last year, the Australian Medical Association censured Facebook for allowing alcohol companies to target children: “Social networking sites . . . are honing a more aggressive and insidious form of marketing that tracks online and profiles, and tailors specific marketing accordingly.”
More than three-quarters of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds in the United States own cell phones; and of Facebook’s one billion users, 600 million visit the social media site primarily through mobile devices. “This is the ultimate extension of lifestyle advertising,” says Jernigan. “The brand is now a human being. It’s interacting with you in real time. It’s talking to you on Facebook. These are worlds that are being created by the brand in conjunction with, in cooperation and collaboration with, their user base. It is a marvelous innovation in marketing, and it’s a disaster for us.”
Brands mounting their ads on YouTube, launching their own channels: this is known as pull marketing. The consumer is seeking out the ad, rather than tuning out a commercial. They’re focused. The granddaddy of this genre, Tea Partay by Smirnoff—a two-and-a-half-minute ad—has had more than six million YouTube viewers. “This is all about engagement,” says Jernigan. “It’s the future of marketing, and it’s virtually unregulated.”
There’s a strong public health interest in delaying the onset of drinking: the brain is still in its plasticity state during adolescence. Every day in the United States, 4,750 kids under the age of sixteen start their drinking careers. As Jernigan says, “This is a human capital development issue.”
When it comes to deconstructing advertising and the role it plays in our lives, few do a better job than Jernigan and Jean Kilbourne, the woman behind the film Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women. I became intrigued with Kilbourne, reading her brilliant book Can’t Buy M
y Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. In the opening pages, she tells the story of her own early experimenting with alcohol, which taught her that “alcohol could erase pain. From then on, for almost 20 years, my most important relationship was with alcohol.” She saw a doctor about her drinking. His response: she was too young, too well educated, and too good-looking to be an alcoholic. Eventually, Kilbourne says drinking ended up “burying me alive”: “I used to joke that Jack Daniel’s was my most constant lover.” She writes of her perfect verbal score on the SAT, dating Ringo Starr, being in love with Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski, partying at Roman Polanski’s apartment—and confronting her eventual addiction in 1976. Like me, she was in the middle stages of the disease.
Astutely, Kilbourne warns us: “Advertising encourages us not only to objectify each other but also to feel that our most significant relationships are with the products that we buy. It turns lovers into things and things into lovers.”
Two years ago, I wanted to meet Kilbourne, having had a spirited and bracing conversation with her on the phone. I was intrigued. Learning that she was flying to Toronto to give a speech in a nearby city, I offered to pick her up and ferry her to her destination. It was a smart idea. Kilbourne is incisive, savvy, and thoughtful. We had a long drive—good for getting to know someone, poor for taking notes: my hands were on the wheel.
The next time I spoke to her, Kilbourne was laid up at home outside of Boston, having broken her leg skydiving. I wanted to know: why are we so oblivious to the effect advertising has on us? “Ads are so trivial and silly that people feel above them,” says Kilbourne. “And for that reason, they don’t pay conscious attention. The advertisers love it: our radar is not on. We’re not on guard; it gets into our subconscious and affects us very deeply.”
Kilbourne quotes the chairman of an ad agency saying, “If you want to get into people’s wallets, first you have to get into their lives.” And there’s no doubt: the spirits industry has infiltrated the female world. Which makes me want to say: Is alcohol the new tobacco?
“It took a very long time with tobacco, for people to believe that advertising and marketing had anything to do with it,” says Kilbourne. “People perceive the tobacco companies as more clearly evil than the alcohol companies. Of course they’re different: any use of tobacco is harmful, and that’s not true for alcohol. There’s such a thing as low-risk use of alcohol—although that’s not the kind of use that is of any interest to the alcohol industry. If everybody drank in a low-risk way, we’d all be better off—except, of course, the alcohol companies. They’d go under. They depend on high-risk drinkers and alcoholics, and that’s what people need to understand.”
It may be pushing it to say that alcohol is the new tobacco, but the alcohol industry is the new tobacco industry. Says Kilbourne: “They’ve had enormous influence on politicians, enormous influence on the media, and they’ve framed the story: this is about your right to drink, this is about freedom. And like the tobacco industry, the alcohol industry is in the business of recruiting new users. We need to frame this in an entirely different way: this is a public health issue.”
5.
The Age of Vulnerability
THE CONSEQUENCES OF DRINKING YOUNG
The emptier we feel, the more likely we are to turn to products, especially potentially addictive products, to fill us up, to make us feel whole.
—JEAN KILBOURNE
Paris, Summer of 1969
Man lands on the moon. An event eclipsed by a boy with blond hair and an acoustic guitar.
My last night in Paris. I want to kiss him good-bye. Maybe more.
I screw up my courage with Mary Kathleen, and two confectionary cocktails. These are our first real drinks. She wants to kiss her boyfriend, too. Lucky for us: they’re roommates.
Together, we tiptoe down the third-floor hallway of a Parisian hotel.
Together, we fumble in the dark. Where’s the doorknob?
It takes a moment for our eyes to adjust. Two beds—but not two figures.
In fact, there are four. Naked, and asleep. Two boy-men wrapped in the arms of older girls. Women, really.
We know these women.
These are ones who already know how to drink.
I leave Paris the next morning, without saying good-bye. I have just turned sixteen.
I didn’t really drink until my university years. In high school, I did a lot of babysitting, flourished in school, and treasured my friends. Everything changed the summer I turned sixteen: my grandmother sent me to Europe for six weeks, and the world popped open like a milkweed pod. But it was brief. It all blew away when I flew home. Besides, my mother’s drinking had become disturbing. I had no appetite to join her.
So when I meet seventeen-year-old Laura in a recovery group, I ask her out for coffee. All I know is that she has recently survived a small heart attack. I want to know more. I want to know what it’s like to become an alcoholic before you have completed high school. I want her whole story.
We agree to meet in a coffee shop on a crisp November afternoon. A tall girl, with glossy chestnut hair, Nivea skin, and a winsome smile, she pauses and looks away several times before she can begin to talk. She lets her tea steep, wary eyes focused on the long line of cops at the register. I begin to wonder whether she has second thoughts about sharing her story.
Who could blame her? There’s so much to tell. Laura, as she wants to be known, has never had a legal drink—and she hopes she never will. “There are days when I feel like I’m ninety,” says the twelfth-grade student. “My friends say they think I could drink again, but I say no. I’d end up on the top of a building and wonder how I got there.”
Laura tells me she had her first drink at nine, and took to it immediately. “I thought I had arrived,” she says. “I remember thinking: the partygoers will accept anyone—the only requirement is to get ‘lost.’ I felt like I could lift buildings. And I thought: ‘I’ll never love anything as much as I love alcohol.’”
That love affair lasted several years. Sexually abused as a child, “debilitatingly anxious and bulimic,” Laura shuffled homes, from her mother’s to her father’s to various aunts’ and uncles’. Alcohol was a daily constant, often pilfered from relatives’ liquor cabinets. “As long as I didn’t have to be me, I would drink it. I felt like my skin was two sizes too small.”
When she was fourteen, her stepbrother got married. She celebrated by downing nine shots of tequila. “I ruined his wedding,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I threw up my body weight. My grandmother said: ‘I feel sorry for you.’ I didn’t hear her correctly. I thought she said, ‘I’m jealous of you.’ That’s how much I loved drinking.”
The summer between grades nine and ten, she decided to turn her life around. She stopped drinking and joined a rugby team. But when she was injured, she took muscle relaxants, which she downed with alcohol. She overdosed. “My hands were yellow,” she says. “My liver was failing.”
By grade ten, she was taking vodka to school in a chocolate-milk container, drinking in class. At sixteen, she started stealing the anti-anxiety drug Ativan from her uncle, and buying it on the street. She loved OxyContin, did cocaine. At night she kept alcohol in a Gatorade bottle by her bed.
Her voice is very flat, but her gaze is direct. “On December twenty-sixth, I was raped by a family member. In January, I began having panic attacks, so I started mixing Ativan and alcohol. But I ran out and went into withdrawal. Two days later I was called into the principal’s office. While I was there, my arm went numb and my head went backwards. I couldn’t inhale. They called an ambulance. Turns out I had a mild heart attack.”
When she was in the hospital, a crisis counselor asked Laura: “When was the last time you liked yourself?”
“I didn’t have an answer,” says Laura. “It changed my life. Two weeks later, I went to rehab.”
Two months after our first interview, I attend her first-year medallion. It’s a cold night, snowy and dark. She
looks impossibly tall in high heels, standing at the front of the room, in a church basement in a rough part of town. With makeup, she’s poised, radiant. There is no family, in the strict sense of the word. Still, her sobriety sisters are out in full force: all her roommates, many friends in the program—all young women with a past. “Thank you for coming,” she says shyly, blushing at the end of the meeting. “It means a lot to me.” And then she’s gone, bending down for another in a long line of hugs.
Sitting with me several months later, she proudly announces she is forty-five pounds heavier than the day she had her heart attack, and her grades are 30 percent higher as well. Estranged from her family, she now lives with several sober friends and is making a documentary on addiction. She speaks in schools about her experiences, and has made formal apologies to her former teachers. “You know, girls are taken down a lot faster than guys,” she says. “A friend told me: ‘I don’t remember last night.’ I said, ‘Don’t you think that’s a problem?’” Laura pauses. “They don’t see the connection. I know girls who’ve gotten pregnant when they were drunk. But if you believe the Absolut vodka ads, you’re going to sleep with some hot guy.”
What haunts me about Laura’s story is her vulnerability and her resilience, especially with news of the Steubenville, Ohio, rape wrapping up. In this case, a sixteen-year-old girl is said to have consumed a considerable amount of vodka, poured into a flavored crushed-ice drink. Much of the trial focused on the prosecution’s stance that the victim was too drunk to consent to sex. Within weeks of the convictions in this case, fifteen-year-old Audrie Pott of Saratoga, California, hanged herself after photos of an alleged sexual assault were posted on Facebook—photos taken when she was passed out drunk at a party. Pott’s death came within days of the suicide of seventeen-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons of Halifax, Nova Scotia, who took her life following months of bullying linked to an alleged sexual assault that took place at a house party when she was fifteen. In Parsons’s case, her mother said that a photo of the alleged assault was circulated to other teens, prompting relentless torment by her peers and a steady decline in the young girl’s mental health.
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