NewsHawk: Mark Greer Source: Wall Street Journal, Interactive Edition Pubdate: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 Contact: http://www.wsj.com/ Author: SALLY BEATTY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ADVERTISING THIS HEMP BEER IS DEFINITELY LEGAL, THOUGH ITS ADS MAY HINT OTHERWISE Car ads pay the bills on Madison Avenue, but it's beer ads that make creative reputations. The problem is, there aren't enough plum beer accounts to go around. So when Lee St. James, executive creative director at Ketchum Advertising in Pittsburgh, heard about a new brew called Kentucky Hemp beer, he quickly bombarded the brewer with unsolicited advertising ideas. It wasn't long before the beer's maker, Lexington Brewing Co., in Lexington, Ky., unveiled the result: a series of poster ads that use drug imagery to play up hemp's illicit image. Each ad has a psychedelic pattern in the background. Each features a chilled bottle of Kentucky Hemp with a marijuana leaf on the label. (Stalks of the hemp plant are used in rope; its leaves and flowers produce marijuana.) "Undetectable to police dogs," reads one poster. "Eliminates cotton mouth," reads another, referring to a symptom experienced by pot smokers. "This bud's for you," reads a third, alluding to the bud of the hemp plant -- as well as Anheuser-Busch's Budweiser slogan. Each poster carries a small tagline: "Brewed in Kentucky. Legal in all 50 states." Mr. St. James says about 1,500 poster ads have been printed and are being distributed to bars and liquor stores in Kentucky, southern Ohio and southern Indiana. Hemp Is Hot In case you haven't heard, hemp is a hot commodity these days. Tapping into its naughty appeal, new-product designers are putting it into everything from facial creams to clothing. But growing hemp in the U.S. is another matter: It's illegal. Hemp seeds -- like those imported from Turkey for use in Kentucky Hemp beer - -- can be brought into the U.S. only after the Drug Enforcement Agency has certified that they have been sterilized so they can't be cultivated. For an ambitious advertising executive, the situation spells opportunity. "It's kind of a short putt," says Mr. St. James. "If you can't do fun ads for a product made out of marijuana seeds, what can you do?" Still, the ads appear to violate voluntary beer-industry guidelines barring marketing materials that "imply illegal activity of any kind." Arthur DeCelle, general counsel at the Beer Institute, pointedly notes that Lexington Brewing isn't a member of the association. Anheuser, which is a member of the beer group, calls the "this bud's for you" ad created by Mr. St. James a "clear violation of our trademark rights." In a statement, Anheuser adds: "We are taking swift and strong legal action to prevent this and further violations." Mike Hart, president of Kentucky Hemp Beer Co., owned by Lexington Brewing, says he has heard from Anheuser's lawyers, and has no intention of expanding the posters into a full-blown ad campaign. Anheuser's ad agency DDB Needham, by the way, is a sister to the Kentucky Hemp campaign's creator Ketchum; both are owned by Omnicom Group. Copyright issues aside, the Kentucky Hemp ads focus unwelcome attention on beer advertising in general. "Like many other alcohol products, this seems deliberately designed for a youth consumer base," says George Hacker of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group in Washington, D. C. "Here's a beer being passed off as a drug. I'm not sure that's a positive message -- but at least it tells it like it is." The Federal Trade Commission, which polices advertising content, declined to comment on the new campaign. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which regulates the labeling of beer sold across state lines, confirms that it approved Kentucky Hemp's marijuana-leaf label but didn't offer further comment. 'Never Do That' Rival brewers are less circumspect. "I would never do that -- we're dealing with a controversial product to begin with. We need to be responsible with it," insists Marjorie McGinnis, president of Frederick Brewing Co. The Frederick, Md., brewer positions its own hemp-spiked Hempen Ale and Hempen Gold as upscale microbrews, suitable for beer snobs' discriminating palates. Ad copy brags about "award-winning taste." Alcoholic-beverage makers regularly resort to provocative imagery to sell their wares for a simple reason: It works. Some recent efforts have been protected by the courts. Bad Frog Brewery of Rose City, Mich., made a name for itself last year with a label showing a frog making a crude gesture. Bad Frog's slogan: "So good, it's bad." Eight states immediately banned sales of the beer. But in January, a federal appeals court in Albany, N.Y., upheld Bad Frog's right to use its label on commercial free-speech grounds. "The controversy will probably help them, especially if the product is good," says Bad Frog's owner Jim Wauldron, reacting to Kentucky Hemp's ads. "That's what happened to us." He gets no argument from Mr. Hart of Kentucky Hemp Beer. "We like the controversy; we like the association [with marijuana], because it gets attention," Mr. Hart says. But he also says he has decided not to distribute the poster about cotton mouth. "We do not want to titillate kids with the marijuana association," he maintains. Currently Mr. Hart says he is selling about 7,000 cases a month. He expects that to rise to more than 10,000 cases a month by the fourth quarter, hitting his maximum capacity. Meanwhile, Ketchum's Mr. St. James is dreaming up ideas for future Kentucky Hemp ads. Come September, he hopes to run ads showing beer bottles in a clear plastic bag like those used to transport marijuana; beer bottles in a planter under a lamp like those used to grow pot indoors, and a beer clasped in a "roach" clip, a tweezer-like device used to hold marijuana cigarettes. - ----------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Greer Media Awareness Project (MAP) inc. d/b/a http://www.DrugSense.org/ http://www.mapinc.org - ----------------------------------------------------------------- - --- Checked-by: "Rich O'Grady"