Netflix’s well-liked Method One present is offering tobacco giants with a quick and efficient advertising car to swerve previous bans on promoting their product, business displays stated Wednesday.
The behind-the-scenes Method One streaming sequence Drive to Survive has been vastly well-liked on Netflix, which lately launched the fifth season.
However campaigners warn that past boosting the motor sport’s recognition, the present can also be delivering into properties worldwide the branding of cigarette corporations that sponsor F1 groups, together with in nations the place tobacco promoting is banned.
In a contemporary report, F1 business monitor Method Cash and tobacco business watchdog STOP charged that in simply the fourth season of Drive to Survive, “a complete of 1.1 billion minutes of footage streamed all over the world contained tobacco-related content material.”
And half of all episodes throughout that season contained tobacco-related branding within the opening minute, in keeping with the report, entitled: “Driving Habit: F1, Netflix and Cigarette Firm Promoting”.
The product branding of Ferrari sponsor Philip Morris Worldwide (PMI) and McLaren sponsor British American Tobacco (BAT) has “closely featured within the sequence, with prolonged plotlines following the groups’ drivers,” the report stated.
“Analysis means that PMI and BAT are reaching new audiences by way of the present, together with individuals who do not in any other case watch F1 races,” it added.
Youthful audiences
Wednesday’s report confirmed that the viewers of Drive to Survive had been youthful than typical F1 audiences, and likewise steered it had contributed in direction of considerably rising viewership of F1 races past the Netflix sequence.
“This enhance in viewers means extra individuals see the branding F1 sponsors place on the vehicles and livery,” it stated.
“Netflix has a accountability to not ship content material that’s selling, even when it is not directly, cigarette firm manufacturers,” Jorge Alday of STOP instructed AFP.
Netflix didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
A worldwide treaty has known as for the elimination of all promoting for tobacco, using which the World Well being Group estimates kills greater than eight million individuals annually.
And the Worldwide Vehicle Federation (FIA), Method One’s governing physique, has for twenty years beneficial in opposition to tobacco firm sponsorship within the sport.
The tobacco corporations have since stopped promoting for his or her conventional cigarette manufacturers with F1, however have in some instances continued to push newer different merchandise like e-cigarettes.
“They dwell on this gray space round what’s and what is not tobacco advertising,” Alday stated.
When contacted by AFP, the FIA stated it “stays firmly against tobacco promoting and continues to face by its 2003 suggestions”.
Nevertheless, it stated, “we aren’t able to intrude with the personal industrial preparations between the groups and their sponsors, or broadcast agreements.”
Method One in the meantime insisted that “all promoting is in keeping with relevant legal guidelines.”
Promoting by way of 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 merchandise “had been probably the most distinguished manufacturers on the McLaren livery all through the season,” the report stated.
It identified that branding for these merchandise appeared at 13 out of twenty-two races, together with on the Mexico Metropolis Grand Prix, regardless of Mexico’s robust promoting restrictions.
PMI, one of many oldest and longest standing F1 sponsors, in the meantime scaled again its spending considerably final yr.
Whereas it remained a Ferrari associate, its logos and designs not appeared on the workforce’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 vehicles and drivers’ attire since 2007.
Wednesday’s report in the meantime claimed that the tobacco big, which has spent almost $2.4 billion on promoting because it first entered the game in 1971, continued to attract branding benefit from the Netflix sequence by way of historic footage.
Report co-author Caroline Reid of Method Cash identified in a press release {that a} single “minute of historic footage featured 5 totally different cigarette manufacturers, together with PMI’s Marlboro.”
