I will go on in further detail as to why I picked this ad in particular, but if you search up “Mike’s Hard Lemonade commercials” on Youtube, you will see that this was one of the only class-appropriate advertisements that this company had to offer. Their print ads are mostly consisted of their signature bright yellow, the title of their company in a lemon, and a catchy slogan that makes one think that only good times will come after they have this refreshing, fruity beverage. We will see throughout this blog that this is not the case.

 

To start this blog off, I am going to be painting you a little picture that is a memory from my childhood. Now I know that many of us as children often saw our parents drink the casual beer or glass of wine with dinner, my parents loved their red wine and as a child I wondered why they would drink the same thing every night. So as the curious child I was, when they were not looking I would sneak a sip, they would know I did it, and more so they would know that I would have the look of disgust on my face as they turned around. Parents do not really worry about kids drinking at such a young age because our taste buds have not matured yet and we can not really handle the “refined taste” of wine or even beer.

 

Fast-forward a year or two and I remember being at our outside dining table, eating dinner on a hot summer day, and my parents had something other than wine or beer at the dinner table. What was it? It was a translucent yellow liquid in a beer-like bottle with the words “Mike’s Hard Lemonade” on it. My 11 year old brain jumped at the idea of some fresh lemonade at dinner (I was only allowed to have water at meals), so I asked if I could try it and they said  “sure”, expecting me to be utterly disgusted like with their other “adult beverages”. I took my first sip and a fruity and fresh taste hit my lips, I kept drinking and could have drank the whole bottle if my mother had not yanked it away from me saying “Corinne, this is not a drink for you!” It was not until then I realized that it was actually alcoholic. I do not think I’m the only one who had this experience at a young age, because this drink in my opinion, is advertised towards young people, and there inlies the problem.

To give you a little bit of background about the alcohol I will be doing my blog on, Mike’s Hard Lemonade was first introduced in Canada in 1996, it started out as a mixture of malt liquor, natural flavors and carbonated water. Mikes hit the markets in the United States in April 1999 and it changed to a mix of lemonade flavor and an unflavored malt liquor base, due to differing tax and beverage laws. (Mike’s Hard Lemonade Co.) The company was founded in 1999 by Anthony von Madl. The company it’s headquarters from Colorado to right here in Seattle in 2005 to be closer to it’s parent company (Mark Anthony Group Inc. in Vancouver B.C.)  Just recently in 2013, the headquarters moved again, this time to Chicago.

When Mike’s hit the markets in the US, they changed the recipe because of the popularity of FMB, according to the Forbes website, Ronald Holden wrote in 2017; “It was part of an explosive new category called FMB, flavored malt beverages, which originated in the 1990s. Producers realized that a malt-based beverage, regardless of flavor, was taxed at the same rate as beer, whereas wine coolers would pay double that rate and spirit-based beverages as much as ten times that rate.”

Nowadays, Mike’s Hard is one of the most diverse products on the market. Mikes Hard lemonades come in over 40 different flavors ranging from ones such as Mike’s Hard Raspberry Elderflower Lemonade, Mike’s Hard Chocolate Cherry, to Mike’s Traditional Margaritas!

Now the mastermind behind Mike’s Hard Lemonade was Anthony von Mandl, as I stated before. Von Mandl is the founder if The Mark Anthony Group, a private alcoholic beverage company in Canada, also considered the parent company of Mike’s Hard. He had his own ideas of what the main consumer of this drink would be and that becomes apparent when you watch the commercials used to advertise these products. According to Origlio Beverage in a post written in 2015, Anthony von Mandl is  quoted saying; “We found that up to 25% of guys didn’t particularly want to drink beer, but couldn’t be seen holding anything else in their hand.” So that is what prompted them to make a tasty, alcoholic beverage that wouldn’t look too girly, since it is still in a beer-shaped bottle.

 

We can conclude from this that their target audience has always been young men. This is pretty obvious from the content, creativity, and placement of their advertisements.  

 

Now in the specific ad I chose, you can see the number of sexual innuendos and crude humor instances that is involved in the commercial. Now what if I told you that this was one of the tamest commercials that I could find? If you would like, you can do your own youtube search for Mike’s Hard Lemonade commercials and be subjected to the vulgar ways of advertising that this company uses, you can not say you were not warned. . In my opinion, this company probably uses bright colors, sexual jokes and attractive, young people to pull in the youth and make their product seem like a fun thing to buy. They use the abundance of penis jokes to appeal to the immature audiences that are more likely to start drinking their drinks at a young age because they taste good and are not really considered an adult drink (e.g. whiskey,vodka, etc.) . The fact is that young (probably younger than 21) adults are the most subjected to these ads (found on youtube or tv), there are young people featured in them, they are all about sex, and the jokes are immature and definitely not very clever.

 

Now I will tell you, I tried my darndest to find a whole ingredients list for Mike’s Hard Lemonade but the thing just does not exist! On the Mike’s Hard Lemonade Website, it is stated; “mike’s® products are classified as beer under Federal law which does not require ingredient or nutritional labeling on beer as regulated by the Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)”. So basically, the general public does not really know what are all the ingredients in a Mike’s hard lemonade, but the active ingredient would be considered malt liquor, it is the fermented malt grains that create the alcohol that gets one drunk. As we have learned in class, alcoholism is a huge problem in the United States, so obviously it is considered addictive. According to the 2015 NSDUH, 15.1 million adults ages 18 and older had AUD (Alcohol Use Disorder). This makes it very obvious that alcohol, especially one that tastes like candy and is very easy to binge-drink on, is very dangerous and addictive, especially when it comes to young consumers. It is also worth noting that Mike’s Hard lemonade has over 20 grams of sugar in one bottle! So Mike’s actually has two addictive substances in one, tasty bottle.

 

As I highlighted before, Mike’s hard lemonade uses many advertising techniques to get people interested in their product and a lot of these techniques are most likely geared toward young consumers. In the specific advertisement that I referenced in the beginning and many of their other advertisements, the attention grabber that they like to use is the sexual jokes or images, they use the word “hard” or “harder” to suggest multiple meanings in their commercials. In a shorter commercial that you can watch here

 

They are heavily relying on animation, bright colors and child-like, cartoony acting and imagery. There is nothing that will grab someone’s attention like sex jokes and a distorted reality that might imply that if a consumer drinks their product, their life will be full of beautiful people, sex, and giant tricycles? They also always end their commercials or even their print ads with a catchy slogan at the end such as “Drink on the bright side” or “What laughter tastes like”.

 

I would never recommend this drink to a friend or family member. After extensive research on this product, I can conclude that first of all, it is chalk-full of empty, sugary calories that will make one feel horrible a couple hours after drinking. Also, since it is so low in alcohol percentage, but it tastes just like regular juice, it is easy to abuse and especially easy to binge-drink for teenagers. And lastly, I make a point not to buy or endorse products that sell sex and exploit men and women to grab the attention of young people, I hope those of you reading this will feel the same after reading my blog.

 

Work Cited

 

Mike’s Hard Lemonade. (2017). FAQ. Retrieved from https://www.mikeshard.com/faq/

 

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. (June 2017). Alcohol Facts and Statistics. Retrieved from https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics

 

Oran, Olivia. (February 2015). Mike’s Hard Lemonade Up for Sale- Sources. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mikeshard-m-a/mikes-hard-lemonade-up-for-sale-sources-idUSKBN0L820M20150204

 

Holden, Ronald. (May 2017). America’s Fastest Growing Beer Brand. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronaldholden/2017/05/22/americas-fastest-growing-beer-brand-mikes-hard-lemonade-to-refocus-on-25-29-year-old-males/#17bb1d524d7c

 

Origlio Beverage. (July 2015). Anthony von Mandl: Founder and Chairman of Mike’s Hard Lemonade Co. Retrieved from http://www.origlio.com/blog/anthony-von-mandl-founder-chairman-mike%E2%80%99s-hard-lemonade-co