Barhopping with the Bud Girls
Despite widespread publicity about the dangers of teen binge drinking, beer distributors use curvy babes and frat-boy reps to saturate the largely underage college market.

BY JAMES HIBBERD | If you owned a beer company, what would be your ultimate marketing dream?

How about placing a beer commercial in every college bar and fraternity organization? There, luscious, tan line-free women and confident, upper-social-strata jocks would aggressively promote your brands with all the slick enthusiasm of a Madison Avenue production. Imagine these commercials playing in continuous motion throughout the evening without ever resorting to the obvious loops of promotional films. Because this commercial would be live. That's right, real people targeting real college beer drinkers at that crucial moment in their lives when they establish brand loyalty, using no other sales technique than old-fashioned peer pressure.

For Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Budweiser, the dream of student recruitment is real. It wasn't easy or cheap. Or, some argue, anywhere close to ethical. Parenting groups have recently attacked Anheuser-Busch for their animated frog 'n' lizard advertising campaign, but a Salon investigation has found that the brewer does more than create cute cartoon characters to court underage drinkers. By hiring popular fraternity members and attractive female students as representatives, Anheuser-Busch distributors directly target the largely underage college market.

Considering Harvard's well-publicized 1993 study declaring that 44 percent of American college students and 86 percent of fraternity members qualify as binge drinkers, such a marketing program seems ridiculously ill-advised. Isn't hiring college students a potential PR nightmare? After all, 90 percent of all rapes and most violent crimes on campus are alcohol-related.

Such statistics may not have deterred Anheuser-Busch, but they do explain why its college recruiting efforts are managed discreetly. Even the beer industry's most prominent critic, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, was unaware that college reps existed.

"Hiring fraternity members as beer distributor reps on university campuses where the majority of students are under the legal drinking age of 21 is frightening and unbelievably irresponsible," said MADD's national president, Karolyn V. Nunnallee, upon hearing the news. "We urge the U.S. beer industry to re-examine its marketing efforts."

Last November, midlevel supervisors for Anheuser-Busch wholesaler Brown Distributing allowed me to join their college representatives working a Budweiser parade leading to a University of Texas football game and a night of "bar calls" in Austin. While many alcohol companies hire attractive women to push products in bars and sporting events across the country, these Bud representatives seemed to be recruited predominantly from the college population and assigned to a college beat: They frequent popular college watering holes, sporting events and other events such as parties at the U.T. alumni center. Of more concern are the existence of fraternity members who work unsupervised in the promotion of their product for college parties. The access was unusual, and the vice president for Brown Distributing later expressed some irritation, commenting that any media inquiries normally require approval from a high-ranking executive.

In other words: oops.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. A night with the Bud Girls