Freaky Formal Friday! (also on Flickr)

Must be my week for taglines…

News coming out of Milwaukee (or is it Colorado?): Miller is, once again, resurrecting the “Tastes Great, Less Filling” tagline. I say to this: ugh.

As a former director of marketing at Miller (but never on Miller Lite, for the record) I understand the intense pressure on management from beer distributors to run advertising they love. And boy do they love “The Debate.” But, my God, that line, written in 1981 by Bill Backer, was intricately linked to very masculine ex-athletes, like Mean Joe Green and Boog Powell, precisely because light beers were brand new. The campaign was brilliant, in 1983, when regular guys would never be caught dead with a “diet” beer. The ex-athletes made it okay to drink light beer and the “Tastes Great, Less Filling” line and debate was a simple and catchy creative device. BUT, it’s 30 years later and light beers are more popular than regular beers and this argument, this “debate,” is completely irrelevant.

Can’t Miller find something else to say?

And, for the record, the article states that the last time Tastes Great, Less Filling was used prominently in a campaign was 1991. So not true. Miller is conveniently trying to forget the late ‘90’s brilliant execution starring two scantily clad ladies who wrestle it out in a public fountain. This ad was over-seen by a good friend of mine, Tom Bick, who at the time was charge of content at Miller (and is now a strategic planner at Hill Holliday.)

Here’s the ad, as if you need to remember it. I pulled this quickly from YouTube and particularly love the rogue cut-in two-thirds of the way from some dude who looks kinda like Jonah Hill.

So I am flipping through Food & Wine magazine this morning and I happen on a page that looks like wallpaper, literally. It’s got a thin texture and an old-school European hotel type design. It looks like this:

I looked on the prior page and on the next page and there didn’t seem to be any connection between this piece of wallpaper and those pages. Then I looked closer and discovered a tiny brand mark for St. Germain, a new imported liquor brand made from elderflower blossoms. Nice. This is what print advertising should do. Make you interact with it. Make you try to figure it out. What the F is this? Hmmm. It’s interesting. What is it for? Oh, I see, cool. Something surprising. It works. Print ads can work. I then went to the web, looked at their website, remembered some in-store POS I saw. Brand identification cemented. Bravo.

I mentioned this to my lovely wife Caroline and she told me that there was actually an insert attached to the front of that print ad (on the left). I was slightly disappointed – because I think a hard to figure out print ad is singularly bold – until she fished the postcard out of the trash and gave it to me. It was an old school postcard that looked like it was from 100 years ago with a provocative photo on the front and overall it was “aged.” Nice.

This is my new favorite booze brand. I’m not sure how it tastes. Next time I’m at Milk & Honey I’ll give it a go.

Merger talks in the beer industry have got everyone wondering whether or not Budweiser is gonna fall into foreign hands. AdAge article today suggests that if a Brazilian company takes over the All-American company and the All-Americanist of brands, Budweiser, that drinkers may revolt, or at least that’s what the distributors are saying. Crap. I believe jingoism and commerce went wayside with Y2K.

A-B is not going to change its brand strategy. It’s still gonna be Budweiser, the American beer. It’s not gonna become Companheiroweiser just because a few Brazilians own the most shares.