Netflix’s widespread Formula One present is offering tobacco giants with a quick and efficient advertising and marketing car to swerve previous bans on promoting their product, business displays mentioned Wednesday.
The behind-the-scenes Formula One streaming sequence “Drive to Survive” has been hugely popular on Netflix, which recently released the fifth season.
But campaigners warn that beyond boosting the motor sport’s popularity, the show is also delivering into homes worldwide the branding of cigarette companies that sponsor F1 teams, including in countries where tobacco advertising is banned.
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In a fresh report, F1 industry monitor Formula Money and tobacco industry watchdog STOP charged that in just the fourth season of “Drive to Survive”, “a complete of 1.1 billion minutes of footage streamed around the globe contained tobacco-related content material.”
And half of all episodes during that season contained tobacco-related branding in the opening minute, according 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 “closely featured within the sequence, with prolonged plotlines following the groups’ drivers,” the report said.
“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” were younger than typical F1 audiences, and also suggested it had contributed towards significantly increasing viewership of F1 races beyond the Netflix series.
“This increase in viewers means more people see the branding F1 sponsors place on the cars and livery,” it mentioned.
“Netflix has a duty to not ship content material that’s selling, even when it’s not directly, cigarette firm manufacturers,” Jorge Alday of STOP told AFP.
Netflix did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A global treaty has called for the elimination of all advertising for tobacco, the use of which the World Health Organization estimates kills more than eight million people each year.
And the International Automobile Federation (FIA), Formula One’s governing body, has for two decades recommended against tobacco company sponsorship in the sport.
The tobacco companies have since stopped advertising for their traditional cigarette brands with F1, but have in some cases continued to push newer alternative products 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 “stays firmly opposed to tobacco promoting and continues to stand by its 2003 suggestions”.
However, it said, “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 promoting is according to relevant legal guidelines.”
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Advertising through historic footage
Wednesday’s report discovered that PMI and BAT spent an estimated $40 million on F1 promoting in 2022.
BAT’s Vuse e-cigarette and Velo nicotine pouch products “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 sturdy promoting restrictions.
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 accomplice, its logos and designs not appeared on the group’s vehicles, the report discovered.
When contacted by AFP, the corporate’s vp 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 cars and drivers’ apparel since 2007.
Wednesday’s report meanwhile claimed that the tobacco giant, which has spent nearly $2.4 billion on advertising since it first entered the sport in 1971, continued to draw branding advantage from the Netflix series through historic footage.
Report co-author Caroline Reid of Formula Money pointed out in a statement that a single “minute of historic footage featured five different cigarette brands, including PMI’s Marlboro.”
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(This story has not been edited by News18 employees and is printed from a syndicated information company feed)
