The SASBE Beer Commercial Archive

Beer Advertising (the next thing to drinking a beer)

 

As Carl Miller wrote in All About Beer magazine, “When Advertising Age magazine released its picks for the best 100 ad campaigns of the 20th century; it was no surprise that the world of beer advertising was well represented.  After all, few can forget Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus arguing that eternal debate, ‘Tastes Great--Less Filling.’

Similarly, depending upon your age and geographic origins, many a beer drinker can still whistle that infectious jingle, "Hey Mabel--Black Label," or sing the words to the Hamm’s beer tune “From the Land of Sky Blue Waters…”  Perhaps he can give a shout out “You only go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto” in homage to the advertising campaign for Schlitz, “the beer that made Milwaukee famous” even though these popular television commercials have not aired for more than 30 years.  So, what made these and other classic beer commercials great?

Surely, from the beer maker's standpoint, a commercial's success can ultimately be judged by only one criterion: its impact on beer sales (“When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer”).  But, we, the biased (and dare I say opinionated) viewers, take a more visceral approach.  More and more, we tend to grade commercials on their ability to, if only in passing, penetrate our popular culture. At their best, we adopt them as part of our collective psyche, muse over them with friends and coworkers around the water cooler or when we ‘belly up to the bar’ and even add their catch-phrases to our vocabulary (can you say "Whassup?").   After all, even if you are NOT from Milwaukee (or these days St. Louis) you “oughta know” what makes a good brew…and a good commercial for it.

Beer makers have been searching for that perfect beer commercial since television exploded onto the American scene in the late 1940s. In those pioneer days, nobody--not the advertisers, not the ad agencies, not the TV stations-- knew exactly what made for a good commercial.  Indeed, the earliest beer commercials consisted of everything from live demonstrations of how to cook a Welsh rarebit using beer to the noisy rumble of a studio audience muddling through a rendition of the brewer's theme song.

Today, unless it has fewer calories or carbs, most beer advertising is about refreshment.  So much so that it is taken for granted by the advertisers and the focus of their work is ‘likeability.’  Identify the target audience (mostly men from 21 to 34) and tune into their wave length.  Show them that you ‘understand’ how they think and feel…entertain them with something they will remember and the next time they are out with the boys “the night belongs to Michelob” (or so the theory goes.)

Here’s an interesting statistic: The AMA has asserted that it “long has focused on how alcohol advertising affects young people, who, studies show, typically will see 100,000 beer commercials before reaching age 18.”   (Amednews, Feb. 24, 2003)

In reality, not a single study has ever shown that young people typically see 100,000 beer commercials before reaching age 18. No such study exists. But even if no one at the AMA had this practical knowledge, simple common sense should have suggested to anyone of even average intelligence its implausibility.

Assuming that even newborns watch television and can understand the content of ads, there are about 6,205 days between birth and the 18th birthday. To see 100,000 beer commercials during that period, the person would have to see more than 16 beer commercials each and every day on average. That fact alone should have caused the AMA to try to verify the veracity of its assertion, which it clearly never did.

And so, our thesis is that most of us have fallen way short of an average 16 beer commercials per day. Therefore, our goal here and now is to help make up that deficit as quickly as we can.  Below you will find many of the better beer commercials: better produced, better performed, better created and better remembered.  As the world has become a much smaller place since the advent of the Internet, we have included commercials for brands from around the world (for our ‘beer-drinking’ brethren in down under Australia to far-away Zambia also know a good thing when they see it.)  Sit back, relax, have a beer and enjoy the commercials.

Check out Rob's complete collection of commercials here on YouTube.