Remember the DraftKings beer funnel?
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Last year, Molson Coors made its triumphant return to in-game Super Bowl air with a decidedly not-triumphant ad featuring not one, not two, but three of its beer brands, and the sports-betting platform, DraftKings. As the macrobrewer’s corporate blog explained (emphasis mine throughout):
Through an agreement with DraftKings, consumers age 21+ in all states except Virginia* can visit the site or the DraftKings app starting Sunday and predict every detail of what will happen in the top-secret spot – from the number of beers poured to the facial hair of the cast and even the type of dog pictured behind the bar. […] Winners will be announced the following morning to receive their share of the $500,000 prize pool.
David Courtwright, University of North Florida presidential professor emeritus and author of The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business has coined a term for this sort of cross-selling between addictive vice industries. “This is exactly the kind of blended seduction that ‘limbic capitalism’ has excelled at for centuries,” he told Fingers after reviewing “The High Stakes Beer Ad” last year. Far from novel, he argued that the Super Bowl LVII foursome between Miller Lite, Coors Light, Blue Moon, and DraftKings was actually just a particularly transparent example of global vice industries targeting consumers’ lizard brains to promote and normalize excessive consumption.
“There are a lot of people out there with very sharp hooks, and they’re trying to get those hooks into you,” he said. Once you’re hooked, firms do everything they can to keep you there—and, ideally, set more hooks while they’re at it.