How Sexy is Your Alcohol?

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Recommended: Portrayal of male and female in advertising

For this assignment, I would like to take a closer look at alcohol advertisements. Working in the bar industry, I see many alcohol ads a day that promote and try to sell their product to their target audiences. According to results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, people between the ages of 21 to 25 years old drink more than any other age group (Aldworth 32). At this age, my peers and I are a large portion of the target audience for alcohol companies. For most of our lives we have heard that college is the time to live it up and party. The Federal Trade Commision claims that underage groups have a high exposure to alcohol advertising (1999). Another study conducted found that 1.2 alcohol commercials were found per hour during college sports programming (Grube 54). Think about the last time you saw an ad for alcohol. What did it look like? What or who was the focus of the ad? How did it make you feel? What message was being sent to you? Many print advertisements promoting alcohol use sex to sell their product. I challenge you to search “Alcohol ads” in Google Images and see just how many of those print ads contain some sort of sexual aspect. Whether it is a partially naked, thin, and busty woman, or a woman placed between a man’s legs, or an image of a woman who looks as though she is undressing, sex is everywhere in alcohol advertisements. It has become so prominent that sex in alcohol ads increased by 12% between 1983 and 2003 (Reichert, Childers, and Reid 1).
Skyy Vodka, for example, has been the center of many sexy alcohol ad controversies. One ad depicts a slim, tan, very busty white woman, lying down between the legs of a man in a tux standing over her holding a bottle of Skyy Vodka and two martini gla...

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...iew of Content, Effects, and Functions of Sexual Information in Consumer Advertising.” Ebscohost Publishing (2003): 241-273. Ebscohost Academic Search Premier. Web. 18 March. 2014
Reichert, Tom, Courtney Carpenter Childers, Leonard Hall. “How Sex in Advertising Varies by Product Category: An Analysis of Three Decades of Visual Sexual Imagery in Magazine Advertising” Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising 33 (2012): 1-19. Print.
Reichert, Tom, Ignatius Fosu. “Women’s Responses to Sex in Advertising: Examining the Effect of Women’s Sexual Self-Schema on Responses to Sexual Content in Commercials.” Journal of Promotion Management 11 (2005): 143-153. Ebscohost Academic Search Premier. Web. 18 March. 2014
Sturken, Marita, Lisa Cartwright. “Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture.” New York, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2009. Print.

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