Sponsorship/ Advertising in F1
#1

PB wrote in other thread:

I think it's crazy that we can have alcohol. . .  everywhere - yet tobacco sponsorship is banned.
If people are so weak-willed as to take up smoking just because they saw a logo on Lewis' car. . . . . . ."

I thought this was worth a proper discussion, but didn't want to do it there.

The Alcohol comparison is unfair, not everyone who decides to drink will become an alcoholic, but every single person who starts smoking will become addicted, with very few exceptions


1) As an ex smoker, I certainly didn't start because of advertising, but that's another story.  However Tobacco companies are and have been some of the most insidious companies ever to exist.  They didn't give out free cigarettes, during the war out of patriotism, they saw a captive market and once soldiers returned, customers for life.  Now it's becoming more socially unacceptable in developed countries, they have for many years now been flooding under developed countries with cheap and indeed free cigarettes once again.  Personally I would ban the manufacture of them.  Not in it's entirety as there are cultural reasons to smoke, but those aren't rolled up little white sticks with god knows how many chemicals added.  Also with vaping there is a relatively less harmful substitute.  And just to add, I'm no advocate for the nanny state as they say, at all, even though it may seem that way.  They should legalise weed and tax it, oddly enough the states are actually leading the way on this, perhaps we could get the Rizzla sponsorship back then Tongue



2) "Just because they saw a logo on Lewis' car . . . ."

Advertising is an incredibly powerful tool, hence why the spend millions on it, if they weren't getting a return, they wouldn't do it.  I think someone said that Marlborough are secretly still paying SF, hence the bar code on the car, if this is true, I think that should tell you all you need to know about how important this is to them.  

3) I think PB's real issue, is actually because of the loss of ad revenue for teams, so what's the solution?  Yes we need more free to air broadcasting to attract more sponsors to the sport, and we now have some very smart cookies working on this, Zak Brown at McL, and Liberty themselves.  Again they have inherited the current mess, and I think they are the right people to fix it in this regard

The danger lies in going too far & down a fully Americanised model, I have heard that F1 in the states is virtually unwatchable due to the frequency of ads during races

4) And finally as I know this was sparked by Martini's withdrawal from the sport, yes we'll miss the livery, but as PB said himself about the Halo, it's not a beauty contest.  Bacardi's board took the decision as it is no longer in keeping with their overall strategy, I wonder if this could herald other drinks companies withdrawing as well over time, as it has always been a bit paradoxical, for alcohol companies to sponsor motorsport, hence the FIA anti drink drive campaign.  And if this does happen who could take their place?

"I Say, I say . . . . The satisfaction you have in a few minutes when you become champion. It's enough to live forever 
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#2

Sorry Fog, only just caught this.

I accept my view on the situation is somewhat idealistic, and you are absolutely right, it comes from concern about the dwindling cash in the sport(s) more than support for the tobacco consortium. In my opinion it’s just another nanny state decision made to save a few snowflakes to the detriment of the wider community, or just plain and simple common sense.

But from point of view, tobacco advertising was banned because of the awful health issues those little sticks can cause. I am 100% on-board with that. But now the health and social issues associated with alcohol are being overlooked. Drunk drivers, domestic abuse, anti-social behaviour, strain on the NHS - these are all epidemic in this country - and they’re matters that can/will directly affect innocent parties. Before the smoking ban you could sit in another part of the restaurant if someone was smoking - but you can’t avoid a drunk driver, people still need bandaging up after a drunken brawl at a pub.

And that’s just alcohol! Every other advert on TV these days is for betting, heck, Sky even have their own gambling division, with adverts literally seconds before kick-off in football games (it’s only a matter of time before we get a Sky Bet advert instead of seeing the parade lap, I guarantee it) - meanwhile there are record-high levels of debt. We have two whole F1 teams dedicated to Red Bull and Lewis Hamilton is rarely seen without a Monster logo somewhere, those drinks are so full of chemicals they make a cigarette look like a stick of celery.

It just seems to me that banning tobacco sponsorship (which I think was an EU decision not an F1 decision, wasn’t it?) really hurt our sport, but the reasons for which it was done are being ignored for half of the remaining sponsors. And god forbid, I’m not saying we need to ban alcohol, energy drink and betting sponsorship, I’m saying we need to bring back tobacco money. Get the cash rolling again! Otherwise the only teams with money will be manufacturers (count them, 4) and Red Bull/STR


Purple Banana (a.k.a John or JB  Smile )
"The flowers of victory belong in many vases." - Michael Schumacher
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#3

Has there been any clarification on the Phillip Morris/ Marlboro e-cig sponsorship ?

"You live more for 5 minutes going fast on a bike than other people do in all of their life"....Marco Simoncelli
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#4

The decision to ban tobacco advertising was actually taken by member states first, the UK amongst them, way before the EU wide ban. It was actually driven by a WHO campaign, and yup, they also wanted a ban on alcohol advertising. To be fair the issue wasn't advertising per se, it was that the advertising seemed (and was later confirmed by leaked documents from the likes of BAT) to specifically target youngsters, i.e. teenagers and children. Legislators in the USA tried working with the industry to convince them, rather than coercing them to do the right thing. After a decade of trying I think people just got pissed off and used the legislative ban hammer on them, and subsequently when talking to other industries about their practices the tobacco industry serves as a salutory lesson for them, play nice or have your ball taken away.
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#5

(28-02-2018, 10:19 AM)Purple-banana Wrote:  Sorry Fog, only just caught this.

Yep I agree with all of that, and as usual Jody hits the nail on the head. personally I'd ban a lot of advertising tactics by the large corporations, the betting thing is a huge issue, there's reason sweets a placed on the bottom shelves in supermarkets for example. The main issue is that corporate culture is the way the world works now. Recently exemplified by SF and Williams blocking an extra day of testing because it wasn't in their interest, to the detriment of the sport, Horner has said this repeatedly, he doesn't work for F1 he works for Red Bull and so is incentivised to get the best for RB not necessarily the sport.

here's one other example of what corporate culture does - some clever cloggs working for Walmart, realised given the No. of staff they have, they could work out a formula, based on age, lifestyle etc, that they could determine a large enough amount of their staff who were likely to die. So they now take out life insurance policies on a selected amount of their workers, so they are now effectively betting on their employees deaths, with payouts generally around the $100, 000 mark. And No they don't give the families anything,

Case 2) Brazil passed a law that you could not drink inside Football stadiums to reduce violence, this was extremely effective, however because FIFA is sponsored by Budweiser, it was a stipulation that the Brazilian Government overturn this law if they were to award them the world cup

3) Don't even get me started on Mickey Dee's

No Snowflake by any means, but there are some things get my goat, look what's happening with plastic at the minute, but just 20 or 30 years ago if you'd seen some guy with a canvas shopping bag, you'd have said he was some green peace eco warrior nut, guess what those nuts were right, and we are at least 40 years behind these issues

"I Say, I say . . . . The satisfaction you have in a few minutes when you become champion. It's enough to live forever 
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