Netflix’s well-liked Formula One show is offering tobacco giants with a quick and efficient advertising and marketing car to swerve previous bans on advertising their product, trade screens mentioned on Wednesday.
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The behind-the-scenes Formula One streaming sequence “Drive to Survive” has been massively well-liked on Netflix, which just lately launched the fifth season.
But campaigners warn that past boosting the motor sport’s recognition, the show can be delivering into properties worldwide the branding of cigarette corporations that sponsor F1 groups, together with in nations the place tobacco advertising is banned.
Tobacco-related branding
In a recent report, F1 trade monitor Formula Money and tobacco trade watchdog STOP charged that in simply the fourth season of “Drive to Survive”, “a total of 1.1 billion minutes of footage streamed around the world contained tobacco-related content.”
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And half of all episodes throughout that season contained tobacco-related branding within the opening minute, in accordance to the report, entitled: “Driving Addiction: F1, Netflix and Cigarette Company Advertising”.
The product branding of Ferrari sponsor Philip Morris International (PMI) and McLaren sponsor British American Tobacco (BAT) has “heavily featured in the series, with extended plotlines following the teams’ drivers,” the report mentioned.
“Research suggests that PMI and BAT are reaching new audiences through the show, including people who don’t otherwise watch F1 races,” it added.
Younger audiences
Wednesday’s report confirmed that the viewers of “Drive to Survive” have been youthful than typical F1 audiences, and likewise prompt it had contributed in the direction of considerably rising viewership of F1 races past the Netflix sequence.
“This increase in viewers means more people see the branding F1 sponsors place on the cars and livery,” it mentioned.
“Netflix has a responsibility to not deliver content that is promoting, even if it’s indirectly, cigarette company brands,” Jorge Alday of STOP advised AFP.
Netflix didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
A worldwide treaty has known as for the elimination of all advertising for tobacco, the usage of which the World Health Organization estimates kills greater than eight million folks every year.
And the International Automobile Federation (FIA), Formula One’s governing physique, has for twenty years beneficial towards tobacco firm sponsorship within the sport.
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The tobacco corporations have since stopped advertising for his or her conventional cigarette manufacturers with F1, however have in some circumstances continued to push newer various merchandise like e-cigarettes.
“They live in this grey area around what is and what isn’t tobacco marketing,” Alday mentioned.
When contacted by AFP, the FIA mentioned it “remains firmly opposed to tobacco advertising and continues to stand by its 2003 recommendations”.
However, it mentioned, “we are not in a position to interfere with the private commercial arrangements between the teams and their sponsors, or broadcast agreements.”
Formula One in the meantime insisted that “all advertising is in line with applicable laws.”
Wednesday’s report discovered that PMI and BAT spent an estimated $40 million on F1 advertising in 2022.
BAT’s Vuse e-cigarette and Velo nicotine pouch merchandise “were the most prominent brands on the McLaren livery throughout the season,” the report mentioned.
It identified that branding for these merchandise appeared at 13 out of twenty-two races, together with on the Mexico City Grand Prix, regardless of Mexico’s robust advertising restrictions.
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PMI, one of many oldest and longest standing F1 sponsors, in the meantime scaled again its spending considerably final yr.
While it remained a Ferrari companion, its logos and designs now not appeared on the staff’s vehicles, the report discovered.
When contacted by AFP, the corporate’s vice chairman of worldwide communications Tommaso Di Giovanni insisted that the partnership between Netflix and F1 “has nothing to do with us,” insisting that it had discontinued product branding on vehicles and drivers’ attire since 2007.
Wednesday’s report in the meantime claimed that the tobacco large, which has spent practically $2.4 billion on advertising because it first entered the game in 1971, continued to draw branding benefit from the Netflix sequence by means of historic footage.
Report co-author Caroline Reid of Formula Money identified in an announcement {that a} single “minute of historic footage featured five different cigarette brands, including PMI’s Marlboro.”
By Garrin Lambley © Agence France-Presse
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