Is Beer Advertising Becoming... Modern?

You might have noticed this lately. It's a marketing trend that seems to be taking hold in 2016. There's a sea change occurring in the world of fermented grain beverages.

Stereotypes and sexism seem (and the key word there is seem) to be on the decline. 

After decades of questionable approaches to beer advertising, running from the paternalistic to the sex-charged, brewers are beginning to drop the old, lad-centric model.

We’ve even said “Hoo-roo” to Foster’s Brad and Dan. Which I have to admit I’m pretty sad about. They had some great ads.

What’s the driver of all of this sudden modernity in the world of beer marketing?

It comes down to women.

One by one, brewers are starting to realise that growing a market that has largely stalled in Europe and the US involves reaching out to more than just one gender.

And when you’re trying to reach out to a demographic that comprises half of the overall population it’s generally not a great move to start the conversation with insults and objectification.

Case in point.

A group in Brazil recently launched a ‘feminist’ beer to protest the portrayal of women in Brazilian beer advertising, where women have only two roles: as eye-candy or as a prize that men win by drinking a certain beer. It was also a critique of the masculine tilt of the Brazilian ad world in general. Do you know how many Brazilian advertising workers are women?

10%.

It's small wonder that Brazilian beer ads follow formulaic, dated tropes about women. And small wonder too that people are sick and tired of it. With this kind of backlash, it’s the right time for brewers to move their marketing into that foreign land that we call the 21st century.

Of course, there are exceptions to the trend.

As I've noted on Idle Advertising before, Bud Light for one has seemed determined to remain depressingly backwards. For a beer that still holds the largest market share in the US, Bud Light acts like a brand in its death-throes, lurching from controversy to controversy, from strange new product line to strange new product line.

Great job guys. Hopefully the latest reboot will change some things.

It’s important to note here that this isn’t about “beer for women”. It’s not about special fruity beer-ish drinks and specially formulated beers to suit a different gender (though these can have their place). And it’s certainly not about writing ads which talk about “women drinking beer, aren’t women all happy drinking our beer, hey women look at this beer, it’s for you! You can have special girl-beer, not like the male beer! Well done!”

From UK beer expert Melissa Cole:

“‘Chick’ beer, ‘clear’ beer, ‘low-calorie’ beer, ‘low-carb’ beer: all have been aimed at women and all have failed. We don’t much like being metaphorically patted on the a--- by the marketers.”

Ads that make a point of explicitly targeting one gender have a tendency to turn off both.

Show, don’t tell.

Italian beer Peroni’s advertising has led the way in this area, by making its core campaigns centre on characters who embrace the Italian way of life, regardless of gender. It's not about telling women that they should drink Peroni. It's about showing that anyone can drink it.

Peroni’s latest ad campaign, Vita al Mare, has just launched. What do you see in it? Glamorous lifestyles. Beautiful people. Golden Age Italy, and the Mediterranean way of life.

You also see men and women enjoying Peroni, with no judgement – or even the suggestion that there’s something unusual about people from both genders drinking a beer. 

Acting as though there’s something ‘wrong’ with a certain group enjoying your product is inherently self-limiting. 

And the best way to get rid of such a limit is to not even acknowledge that it exists.

So, what is the way forward?

Put simply, it’s to treat your potential customers as individuals, rather than as categories. There’s a world of difference between targeting “women”, and targeting individual people who happen to be female. 

Modern consumers are better informed. They have access to an ever-widening variety of content. And they resent being treated impersonally when the brand choice – as with beer – is so personal.

Slapping a label on someone and declaring them categorised is not a good way to build a real relationship. But if we treat both men and women as living people rather than tick-boxes, we’re on our way to a more modern, more productive interaction between our brand and our intended audience.

Cheers.

Estrella, Damn.

Here's another great beer ad for the summer: "Mallorca", by Estrella Damm UK. You can find the spot here.

And there's not actually all that much to say about the ad. 

What makes it powerful is its simplicity and its understatement. In thirty seconds and virtually no words it tells the story of a guy's incredible summer's week on a Spanish island. And then, again without words, it shows in one moment how much he has fallen in love with the place and the people.

It's fun, and it's quick. It doesn't mess around with needless words. It has great music, great humour, and above all it feels enthusiastic about itself.

Like Corona's fantastic "Dear Summer" piece I wrote about recently, what this campaign is selling is bottled sunshine. And again, it isn't groundbreaking - but it is incredibly powerful. To be able to evoke the joy of summer and the Mediterranean way of life in this way - it's no mean feat.

What Corona did with long copy, Estrella does wordlessly.

I truly can't say which of the two I prefer, but I will say I have huge respect for a brand which can tell a story - and tell its own story - so effortlessly.

Here's to the summer.



Find more articles on LinkedIn.

Corona Sells Sunshine

Here's something worth watching.

Corona (with agency The Community) has come out with an interesting and evocative ad for the US, "Dear Summer", which lays out its brand values in the form of an 'open letter' from winter to summer.

There was a recent Business Insider article which underlined Corona's continued growth in the sluggish US market. It credited the brand's strength to its simplistic but powerful formula of "sand, sun and lime wedges", and with this wistful, summery theme, this spot hits the right notes. 

Most importantly, it sidesteps any questions over the quality of its product by focusing solely on its positioning as "the" beer of the summer. Ice-cold drinks are a good way to mask a bad taste after all.

That said, the film bears more than a passing resemblance to this San Miguel UK ad from 2011 in the UK, taking on similar themes and mimicking the art direction of the spot closely. It even takes cues from the popular "Dear Kitten" films by Buzzfeed and pet food brand Purina.

Groundbreaking, it is not.

All of this adds up to a fairly by-the-numbers mood piece, in the model of many other ads aimed at the millennial demographic, setting out brand positions and relying on the charisma of the narrator's voice and a classic piece of music to give it some easy emotional depth. 

Criticisms aside, the film is better executed than most. Predictable or not, it gives an emotive, compelling case for the summer, and sets Corona firmly at the heart of that case.

Game on.

You can find more commentary here: http://adland.tv/commercials/corona-dear-summer-2015-90-usa

A Kids' Book For Beer

AB InBev – the biggest brewer in the world – has come out with a surprising but interesting campaign: “Let’s Grab A Beer”. It’s running with content across digital and social media, with a dedicated website and app. It’s unbranded, with no mention of their products or their company, apart from a tiny disclaimer at the bottom of the site.

The goal of the campaign? To grow the beer market, regardless of the product. Let’s Grab A Beer is all about selling beer as a concept, giving information, building the social element of beer drinking, and above all generating good feelings about beer.

The wisdom of unbranded campaigning might seem a little questionable. But the reality is that with such a dominant market share, growing that market just makes sense for AB InBev, regardless of the lack of self-promotion.

Even beyond that, the reality of the campaign’s premise – the promotion of social beer drinking, of beer as a social event – plays perfectly into the hands of their product offering. Most of the AB InBev brands are not craft beers, designed to be enjoyed on their taste or their craft, but as part of a social occasion, sharing drinks with friends.

So all in all this is a brilliant bit of out of the box thinking from AB InBev. 

Or at least it would have been, if the strategic vision had been matched with creative daring. 

The problem is that while the idea was sound, the execution was conservative. The information given is limited, the jokes and humour are tame, and lack that core quality that social content needs – shareability. The simple reality is that people share social media because they feel a burning desire to, not because of a vague inclination.

So we’re left with half a campaign – a clever initiative without the creativity and boldness to make it work. Perhaps they meant to make it funnier and more daring until the recent waves of criticism of their marketing hit.

As it is, it’s basically a kids’ pop-up book for beer. You’d have to be pretty drunk to think that that’s entertaining.

Bud Light Has A Marketing Department Filled With Lemurs

Or at least, that’s what I assume.

How else can you explain the strange, mad, stupid ideas that have come out of the brand in the past months? If you’re not aware, let me break it down for you.

They have a slogan at Bud Light, which is Up For Whatever. Not a bad slogan, I hear you mutter. True. But in the wrong hands it’s one that has proven extremely easy to fuck up.

The main fuck up in question came in the form of a line on the label of some bottles of Bud Light, which read: “the best drink to remove no from your vocabulary for the night.” I shit ye not.

It’s a terrible misjudgment. Made even more shocking simply by the fact that not one person in the entire company seems to have noticed how bad the line was. That alone says a great deal about the company and its brand values.

A lot of words come to mind when reading that line. Irresponsible. Thoughtless. More than a little rapey. All accurate.

But the most disturbing thing about the slogan is that it is entirely consistent with the Bud Light brand as it exists now.

The core issue is that rather than being a question of individual errors, the flaw is in the overall strategy for Bud Light – they are hooked on an idea of being a 'party' brand, without understanding the risks that that positioning involves if not handled carefully.

Being the 'party' drink can bring dividends, but in the 21^st century you’re kidding yourself if you think that a positioning like that doesn’t bring enormous risks.

But what can Bud Light do? Their marketing department is filled with lemurs.

The Interesting Product Trilogy Part 3

It seems I can’t leave this topic alone.

This is more just a clarification of the underlying point of the previous two posts on motivation and the justification for advertising.

Why do you need to work to advertise boring products?

Why waste money advertising the mundane?

Both of those questions are themselves begging the question. What makes a product boring?

Boring is subjective. That is the issue that too many people don’t understand. What makes great advertising is not the ability to make something boring into something interesting. It’s the ability to make anything interesting. Because boring is not a meaningful term for a product. Boring is a limitation that we work around.

After all, what makes flowery smells exciting? Why do ads about fermented grain fill us with glee?

Beer is not a fun product just because it makes you drunk. That’s a leading factor, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Products are interesting because we decide they are interesting. Sure, we are human. We have biases and tendencies. But ultimately our defining trait is our sociability. That is to say, our ability to change opinions and behaviours based on what others around us believe – or even simply what we think that they believe.

The point is, when dealing with dullness it’s important to remember that dull is not a scientific concept. It’s a human one. And you only have to be limited by it as far as you want to. Or as far as your abilities allow you to stretch it.