Advertising or the lack of.......

As a member of the Fullers' Real Ale Club I did get the email telling me all about their new TV campaign but it was only last night I actually saw one of the adverts. I'll be honest as well as being a beer drinker, I read a lot and listen to music rather than watch TV. In my opinion there is barely anything on TV worth the license fee and I'm not yet old enough to be a grumpy old sod or whatever the female equal is.

As adverts go, it wasn't loud, annoying or irritating but it showed the product and was mildly amusing. So I was impressed and it got me thinking that part of the reason why beer has a old bloke's image is that fact that there are very few breweries who advertise in popular media forms. When I look at Beer in the Evening website, no adverts for beer pop up, instead the pop ups are all for either travel or laser eye surgery. Hardly the type of advertising one is interested in when looking for a pub to go to that weekend or evening is it?

Papers do have beer adverts on the odd occasion but magazines don't. Small hint if you want women to look at beer, how about a good quality advert campaign in magazines? The wine industry do it after all, Cosmo and similar have full page wine adverts.

I know partly the lack of advertising is down to money, campaigns do cost a lot. But advertising in my experience is like a ball, takes effort to start it rolling but once it's going the costs do become cheaper so the product is better known.









And yes before someone comments, I do happen to like James May.

Eat, Drink & Take Responsibility

Apparently according to our hard working researchers, real ale is better than red wine for you. With it not affecting levels of homocysteine (a chemical linked to heart disease) whilst red wine raising the levels by 8%. And for us ladies half a pint of real ale contains a quarter of our daily intake of silicon which could help prevent osteoporosis.

Great news for now, but with all research be it dieticians doing it or scientists this is only current for the moment. Like the good news over red wine or certain vegetable benefits it won’t be long before another study (possibly funded by a wine company or by a government misery group) will put the downers on these possible health benefits.

Personally I take these studies with a big pinch of salt, figures can mean anything you want them too. I should know working in the accounting field myself this small fact of life.

Health benefits are great but like many health benefits doing them to excess doesn’t mean they do you any better usually the opposite. Too much exercise can be worse than no exercise sometimes and this is the same with food and drink benefits. Eat and drink what you want but always take responsibility for your own actions and decisions.