Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Maybe We're All Morons

Happy Fall everybody. The combination of worsening weather and the start of the football season has drawn me once again to the television. Other than a very select few shows, I watch sports on TV. When you watch sports regularly, you see a lot of advertisements for beer, cars, investment firms, and erectile dysfunction medication. These commercials give me lots to laugh about, of course. Some because they are funny, and others because they show us all just how dumb we as American consumers really are. But apparently the dumbest are those in the target demographic for alcohol ads.

Everybody knows Bud Light has the best beer commercials. Every year during the Super Bowl, at least two of the best four or five commercials are from Bud Light. And some don't even make it to TV (see swear jar on youtube). So the other two light beers, Coors Light and Miller Lite, are forced to try gimmicks to sell beer.

Surely you've seen the commercials for the cold-activated mountains on bottles and cans of Coors Light. This is for the person who wants to know if their beer is cold enough to drink, but is too lazy or afraid to utilize their sense of touch. Seems reasonable to me; you never know when a beer can has boiling beer inside and could therefore give a consumer third-degree burns.

Or how about Miller Lite? You may know it's "Triple Hops Brewed", because they say so on the commercials. Does anybody know what that means? For all I know they're trying to tell us they re-heated the beer in the microwave three different times, then pass it off as something good. But people probably buy it, then sit around on their patio and say things like "this tastes like it's been triple hops brewed, don't you think Larry?"

But the best thing Miller Lite has ever done is create the "Vortex Bottle". This is an ingenius bottle that has grooves in the neck. How many times have you been drinking from a bottle of beer and said, "dad-gum, this beer pours out too straight. I wish it was all swirly when it got in my mouth."? Problem solved! Miller Lite has eliminated straight-pouring beers. Thanks, Miller Lite!

One Miller Lite commercial compared the bottle to a wine decanter with grooves, which somehow aids in the oxidation of the wine. If you're a total wine snob, you understand this. If your snob-ish-ness extends to beer, you don't drink Miller Lite. But I'm guessing beer, being carbonated, doesn't need this.

Another favorite of mine is a commercial for 1800 Tequila. In this commercial, Michael Imperioli (Tony Soprano's bed-wetting nephew in The Sopranos) shows why 1800 is better than Patron Tequila. 1800 can pour a shot into the top. It's so much easier than other tequilas, because all you have to do is turn the bottle over and wait until the top fills up. Then, apparently, you take the top off and either drink directly from the top or pour it into a shot glass. This saves so many steps! With Patron, you have to take the top off and...well, that's pretty much it. The end of the commercial shows Mikey chastizing the poor top of the Patron bottle, asking what it can do, then he answers his own question with a smug "nothin'".

So the moral of this story is that drunks are morons. That's not my opinion, that's obviously the opinion of the people making these commercials. This stuff is as dumb as a car company putting an arrow on the hood of a car to show what direction that car is facing. But I guess somebody could convince us we need that.

3 comments:

  1. You read my mind Creamer. The only thing I have to add is in the vortex bottle commercial it says, "It lets that great pilsner taste pour right out..." Hilarious!

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  2. Don't forget the Old Spice commercials. Topic for your next blog.

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  3. These advertising campaigns are pure genius as they appeal directly to their target audience. What half-buzzed guy, watching football has not shared a similar "invention" with his buddies and felt it was going to revolutionize the world of alcohol consumption? I have to hand it to the advertisers, they really know how to prey on a weakened mind state. Some guy is probably yelling from the couch, at this very moment, for his wife to run to the store and grab a twelver of his favorite, mountain-chilled, triple hopps, vortex-ready beer.

    Thanks for sharing, Dave. Your blog is the one I actually look forward to reading.

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