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Belch: Advertising and
Promotion, Sixth Edition
VII. Special Topics and
Perspectives
21. Regulation of
Advertising and Promotion
Liquor Advertising Almost Makes
It to Network Television
For more than five decades, distilled spirits were
not advertised on television or radio because of a
self-imposed ban by members of the Distilled
Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS).
Council members agreed in 1936 to avoid radio
advertising and extended the ban to TV in 1948.
But Seagram, the second-largest distiller in the
world, ended the U.S. spirits industry’s longstanding
ban on broadcast advertising in June
1996 by airing commercials for its Crown Royal
Canadian Whiskey brand on an affiliate in Corpus
Christi, Texas.
Seagram issued a statement explaining that it
was ending the liquor industry’s decades-old
© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2003
practice of not advertising on TV because DIS-
CUS’s voluntary code of good practice placed
spirits at a competitive disadvantage to beer and
wine, which did not have any such restrictions.
Seagram also argued that the ban had become
outdated as radio and TV have become more targeted
and the company could pinpoint its advertising
message to people of legal drinking age.
Initial reactions within the liquor industry
were mixed. A number of distillers, eager to turn
around the long, slow decline in hard-liquor
sales, watched Seagram test the water with its TV
ads before rolling out their own commercials.
Some held discussions with TV stations but
waited for a formal amendment to the DISCUS
code of good practice before proceeding. The
amendment came on November 7, 1996, when
DISCUS members voted unanimously to overturn
the self-imposed ban on broadcast ads. The DIS-
CUS president noted that spirits makers wanted
to break down the public perception that spirits
are stronger or more dangerous than beer and
wine and thus deserving of harsher social and
political treatment.
After the DISCUS ban was lifted, the four
major broadcast TV networks as well as major
cable networks such as ESPN and MTV continued
to refuse liquor ads, prompting consumer and
public interest groups to applaud their actions. In
fact, it has been argued that it was really the
refusal by TV stations and networks to accept
liquor advertising, rather than the DISCUS code,
that had kept the ads off the air. However, the
major networks cannot control the practices of
affiliate stations they do not own, and many
affiliates began accepting liquor ads, as did local
cable channels and independent broadcast stations.
By fall 2001, DISCUS estimated that about
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