Inside Facebook

Alcoholic beverage brands spend $2 billion on advertising every year in the US alone. Multinational Monitor says that alcohol companies “aired more than 2 million television ads and published more than 20,000 magazine advertisements” from 2001 to 2007.

It’s no surprise then that, only weeks after Facebook changed its policies regarding alcohol promotion on the Facebook Platform and enabled to Demographic Restriction functionality, alcohol companies are invading the Facebook Platform.

Just yesterday, we covered new Facebook campaigns by Miller and Absolut. Today, Buddy Media told us that it is running two successful campaigns with Bacardi and Anheuser-Busch:

• Bacardi - Over 100,000 adult Facebook members have installed the Bacardi-branded Mojito Party apps since it was launched last week. “Buddy Media developed a social app-vertisment for Bacardi which includes a Mojito bartender game, a Mojito Cocktail Calculator that helps people plan their own Mojito party, and other features that allow drinking-age Facebook users to engage with the Bacardi’s ‘The Original” branding campaign,’ said Buddy Media’s Greg Roth.
• Anheuser-Busch - The Anheuser-Busch “Party Cruise” app just launched on Facebook and is open to the 4,500 winners of Anheuser-Busch’s party cruise contest.  “This VIP micro-site, which adheres to Facebook’s new demographic restrictions API, will serve as the official ‘pre-party’ destination for winners to locate, interact and engage with fellow cruisers,” says CEO Michael Lazerow.

As Facebook wades further into alcohol advertising, it will need to navigate the legal and potential ethical challenges of ensuring that those advertisements are not predominantly seen by underage users. So far, it’s giving robust tools to Page owners and application developers to allow advertisers to take a clear approach to the issue.