Maker’s Mark is making a big splash in the TV and advertising industries by airing its first-ever TV commercials this week on the Discovery Channel. I Googled Maker’s Mark TV ad and found an exec from Fortune Brands (the parent company of the Loretto, Ky.) distiller doing an interview on Fox Business News, saying they’re advertising exclusively on Discovery in shows like Man vs. Wild to hit the Male 25-49 age group.
So you won’t be seeing the ad on a local station. But maybe bourbon advertising is becoming OK, as we saw Early Times sponsoring a show on the CW Louisville during Derby Week. The industry has honored a voluntary ban on advertising hard liquor on shows that might have less an audience of less than 70 percent adults, but it sure seems like more and more cable networks are accepting the ads, even if they get criticized for it, as the L.A. Times did with Discovery.
The Maker’s ad abides the rules — no one drinking the stuff in the commercial, and in fact no humans at all, not even recently-retired CEO Bill Samuels, Jr., which makes me wonder if he would have been against such a campaign. Watch for yourself:
