Taylors’ Wines CEO Mitchell Taylor is on the warpath after the Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code has twice rejected the pre-vetting application from his family company to run an ad for a $200 bottle of wine with the tagline ‘Life. Drink it in’. Taylor is dismayed that the ad has been prevented from being shown anywhere in Australia.
‘To suggest that this ad might promote irresponsible drinking is palpably absurd’, he argues. Apparently the issue lies around the use of the word ‘drink’, but Taylor says he has found many ads where the same work is ‘front and centre’. As a former chair of Alcohol Beverages Australia (formerly NABIC), he suggests ‘this is political correctness and the nanny state gone too far’.
How the proposed ad would lead to increased levels of alcoholic abuse is beyond me. Australian governments and instrumentalities are more committed than ever before at preventing Australians from harming themselves, but have now moved into extreme levels of over-protection. This is an example of this, and shows the extent to which the wine industry has a battle on its hands in the face of this country’s deeply embedded and omnipresent wowser movement.
