Get 'Em When They're Young: Brewery draws fire for billboard outside primary school

One of the more ghoulish sounding objectives in marketing is the drive to create cradle-to-the-grave consumers. A mind that is still in its formative stages and that does not yet have the capacity to think critically or to visit the website Snopes.com is likely to believe anything, whether it’s religious hullabaloo popularized by ancient tribesman who had yet to understand the germ theory of disease, or the idea that McDonald’s is actually selling something that might fall into one of the four food groups. Indeed, the latter knows that if you include a cheap plastic toy with a youngster’s nutrient-vacant meal, you create a positive impression in that child’s mind and – if he doesn’t’ end up reading “Fast Food Nation” and swearing off that kind of food forever – he’ll likely end up cutting out Mickey D’s coupons out of his newspaper when he’s 45 and about to become a checkmark next to the “grave” portion of the cradle-to-the-grave idea.

Then there are those companies who take matters a step further and hope to “Get ‘em young”, when, legally speaking, they are selling products that the consumer can’t buy until they reach a certain age. Joe Camel, is, of course, the standard bearer in this regard. A chain-smoking cartoon camel that dresses like a pimp might not appeal to your grandpa, but it might make a lifelong brand follower out of a pimply teen who may then later disregard those gruesome displays on cigarette advertising and to whom the threat of impotence might not seem all that important.

Booze companies are also known for occasionally blurring the line between applying to a youthful audience and wanting to replace that bottle of milk in a baby’s mouth with a Mike’s Hard Cranberry.

Tasmanian Brewery Boag may have gone a step too far in the latter direction with its choice of placement for a sign promoting its “St George Beer”: the entrance of a local primary school. As children enter the school, they are greeted with a large advertisement reading “There’s fun brewing”, and while the advert doesn’t show little Johnny tilting one in the sandbox, it does have some local residents concerned that the billboard might corrupt the minds of the youngster.

A 67-year-old grandmother of one of the tots exposed to the advertising was outraged, saying that it advocated binge drinking to impressionable minds. “It's saying, 'Drink, get drunk, it's a great way to have fun'." What the grandmother neglected to mention, however, is that this is 100% true and that getting drunk is in fact one of the best ways to have fun, though it’s the kind of lesson that’s better learned at college keg parties and the like.

Help Wanted: $14 / Hour Boozehound

Everyone has a dream job, whether it's stuffing envelopes in the comfort of your own bathrobe, or walking dogs for the elderly in the hopes that advancing senility will result in an inheritance accidentally willed your way.

For the drinking set, the definition of a dream job is simply one whose rigors can be forgotten as soon as they've skipped off two hours early for a 'dentist appointment' that involves convening at the billiard hall happy hour.

For the seasoned boozer, whose grocery bills are regularly eclipsed by liquor store hauls, scouring want ads for new employment is daunting, especially as emergency savings are pissed away buying rounds for the lady who tap dances on the bar.

A Winsor, England man, posted a gig that is by any tippler's definition, a dream job, and one that, like the forklift guy in the warehouse who spins around in circles, involves drinking on the job (and not the kind of 'get paid to drink' gig that requires a CAT scan or your ability to memorize conversational Spanish scrutinized behind a two-way mirror).

The job poster, who recently put his father in an assisted living home and was concerned that pops was too far removed from his mates, put the notice up in the local job office, seeking a twice-weekly drinking buddy for the old timer, to the tune of $14/ hour, plus "expenses". If these expenses include buying a round for everyone in the bar because you can't believe your good fortune, we'd be willing to submit our CVs and regale the old cacker with tales from our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery. We'd only ask for a pub with a nice big fireplace, two woolen sweaters and pipes to be smoked during our readings.

According to the son, who is likely going to be left out of the will by pawning the old codger off on some neighborhood rummy, his 88-year old pa is "a very intelligent man with a physics and math degree." At least it won't be that much of a challenge calculating how much to leave in the tip jar.

Molson Beer ad campaign fizzles

University administrators, you know, the guys who kept you out of the top three colleges of your choice, relegating you to an institution unfit to grace the bumper of your parents’ Volvo, are slamming a new ad campaign by Canada’s foremost purveyor of bland suds, Molson Beer.

In a Globe & Mail report, critics blasted the brewer's latest marketing initiative as at least as tasteless as the product itself, saying that it is "harmful for students seeking jobs if a potential employer discovered their raucous partying poses on Facebook." Now, as we’ve documented in the Sh*t Faced Femmes of Facebook, the boundaries separating the public and private are often as blurred as your vision after you’ve drank 11 or so cans of Molson's "finest", as people are rarely red-faced when posting compromising pictures online.

The Molson campaign asks college students to post such pictures so that the "top party school in Canada" can be crowned. We Shark Guys, several years removed from dancing a two-step back and forth over that academic probation line, and decidedly bitter over not yet being granted honorary degrees from our respective alma maters, are sadly ineligible for the prize—a public pool urinating, Mexican jail, wake-up-face-down-in-the-surf spring-break Bacchanalia to Cancun for five.

The dean of students at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, a school whose engineering students are known for, among other things, calculating the trajectory and force required to dent a forehead with a can (and vice versa), is "disgusted" by the Facebook ad campaign’s "dangerous disregard for the way it promotes an abusive use of alcohol.”

From what we gather, to put it in standardized test terms, "The Campus Challenge" is to "30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night", what "jejune" is to "lurid", although stomachs will be tested by the odd broad-shouldered frat guy in a less than supportive bra.

The national director of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, said the Molson campaign is "unfortunate" because it stereotypes young people as being interested only in partying, rather than something closer to the truth—partying AND getting laid.