A TV ad featuring a young man ruining his appearance before going out boozing leads the Home Office's new multimillion-pound anti-binge drinking push.
The campaign, created by ad agency VCCP, breaks tonight. It targets 18- to 24-year-olds with the strapline "You wouldn't start a night like this, so why end it that way?"
VCCP has created two TV ads, one focusing on a young man and one on a young woman getting ready to go out.
The man bashes his head on a cupboard, urinates on his shoes and rips out his earring. The woman rips her stockings and top, vomits in a basin and tears the heel off her shoe.
"I am not prepared to tolerate alcohol-fuelled crime and disorder on our streets and this new campaign will challenge people to think twice about the serious consequences of losing control," said the home secretary, Jacqui Smith.
"Binge drinking is not only damaging to health but it makes individuals vulnerable to harm. People who are drunk are much more likely to be involved in an accident or assault, be charged with a criminal offence, contract a sexually transmitted disease or have an unplanned pregnancy."
The £4m campaign includes TV, radio, press and digital advertising. TV ads will appear in youth programming "before and after a night out", as well as on sport and music channels.
Radio ads will run on national and regional stations, while print ads will feature in youth-oriented titles including Nuts, Zoo, NME, FHM, Glamour, Reveal and Cosmopolitan.
The track in the "male" TV ad is These Grey Days by Eight Legs. The track in the "female" ad is I Just Wait by Paloma Faith.
Scenes from the TV ad will appear in a window display that will run for two weeks in Long Acre in London's Covent Garden. There are plans to recreate the shop window display in town centres across the UK.
The binge drinking ads forms part of a wider £10m government campaign that started last month with a Department of Health TV push, also by VCCP, raising awareness of the units of alcohol in different drinks.
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