On Monday, February 10, the United States woke up bleary-eyed with a vague sense of embarrassment and regret. For Kansas City fans, this came from a heartbreaking end to a masterful Chiefs season. For Eagles fans, this came from realizing they themselves had broken most of the street signs in their area. For the rest of the nation, it came from being bombarded with the most cynical, exploitive, and soul-crushing ad campaigns in existence. As with every year, Big Alcohol was at the vanguard of this advertising blitz. This already creates concerns.
Approximately 55 million households tuned in to Super Bowl LIX, putting alcohol ads in front of tens of millions of underage viewers. The effectiveness of alcohol advertising in raising kids’ interest in drinking is well known.
With nationwide sporting events, kids become essentially captive audiences in their living rooms, enhanced by the often-espoused intention to watch the Super Bowl “for the ads.” (Indeed, the ads have become significant enough that they are given their own teasers in advance of the Big Game.) This feeds into the well-known and lucrative alcohol advertising loop: the younger someone starts drinking, the more likely they are to drink hazardously later. Hazardous drinkers generate the lion’s share of revenue for the alcohol industry—the most hazardous 4% of drinkers generate 23% of the industry’s sales.
This leads to predictable trends in ad content. Nearly every alcohol-related campaign this year leaned heavily into celebrity endorsements, a well-known strategy for drawing youth attention. Yet it was the lone exception—Budweiser’s “First Delivery” campaign—that was the most blatant and most cynical in encourage kids to embrace alcohol.
The ad was another entry in Budweiser’s well-trod Clydesdale campaigns, where the draft horses tasked with delivering kegs do so against iconically Western frontier landscapes. This particular episode, however, begins with the teamster telling a foal that it is too young to pull a delivery. When a keg falls off, the young horse pushes it alone to its destination, and is celebrated on arrival.
The message—that alcohol is for grown-ups, but kids should really want to engage in it, and when they do, they should be celebrated by the adults—is given a sheen of warm Americana by the setting and soundtrack. Yet the message in there reflects a darker America than the one ABI pretends to celebrate: one where the industrial profit motive throws kids under the beer cart to uphold a rapacious profit model.
Long-time supporters will note that Alcohol Justice has run a similar post-Super Bowl takedown nearly every year. That is because the industry has run this playbook for decades, unremittingly and unrepentantly. Whether wrapped in irony, celebrity, or nostalgia, the pitch remains the same and the harm remains the same. And so, the community demands remain the same: Free Our Sports, Free The Bowl, and let the kids grow up beyond the industry’s reach.
READ MORE about the NFL’s toxic relationship with alcohol.
READ MORE about the Next Generation Youth Advocates™ Free The Bowl watch party.
Published on: February 14, 2025