No Age Verification for Subliminal Messages

You might recall my recent tirade about Age Verification.

What really annoys me, is that companies say its to protect the children, yet they continue to advertise out in the open in windows and store displays, advertise on TV (especially during sporting events) and invade/bleed over into places on the internet.

Case in point – Today, I went to Weather.com to see if it was going to rain before our game….and notice the slight (almost subliminal) message right before 6:00PM

This is no more nefarious that some of the tweets by alcohol companies that want to age verify prior to you following them.

I see two things at play here -

1.  If the Alcohol Industry can put the responsibility on someone else (even though they are paying for placement), they feel they are not responsible.  In this case, I am sure they think the responsibility is on Weather.Com to make sure they are putting out age appropriate content……so Anheuser-Busch wipes their hands of it.

2.  Any time you put in an age….it is logged.  No shock there, but just remember, now that that member of the Alcohol (or Tobacco) Industry has your IP Address (also logged) and your age – they hand that righ over to their marketing department.  To big industry, information is money…..and they want to target a demographic. 

What can you do about it?  Several Things -

Nothing

Put in a false age (I personally like July 4th 1776…and yes it does work more often than you would expect).

Protest

Spread the word (on Twitter with #AgeVerificationSucks)

Don’t buy their products (I avoid InBev as much as possible).

As you can see….the concern of the industry is NOT to protect the kids, but to protect themselves and to make a more money if they can.

I wish we would just stop living the lie and say exactly what is going on.