On the 42nd floor of the Aon Building in Chicago, the DDB creative teams who develop advertising for Anheuser-Busch are busy getting in touch with their inner knucklehead.
They hover over notebooks, thinking up humorous obstacles that could stand between a man and his beer. Their brainstorms might start with What If? What if, for instance, two befuddled slackers in a grocery are forced to choose between a six-pack and a roll of toilet paper?
And it goes on like this, back and forth, all day long in teams of two, copywriter and art director. Though millions of dollars are allocated to the Budweiser team annually, their job essentially consists of sitting around until stupid o’clock in the morning, cracking skulls, looking for that twist, that phrase, that insight that will inspire beer drinkers to reach for their wallets.
But it’s not all about talking donkeys and toga parties. There are standards, and DDB’s own internal bar, so to speak, is high. Since winning the Bud Light account in 1982 and Budweiser 12 years later, the agency has earned a strong reputation for helping its legendary client establish a clear-cut identity in a culture that changes faster than a couch potato can press the remote button.
As a testament to this, the corners of the creative teams’ offices are stacked with slain layouts and fallen storyboards, all of which sit in memoriam to the many ideas that had to die so that one might live.
But the lone concept that does manage to emerge may be the one that breaks through the ever-coarsening consumer threshold. Bob Scarpelli, DDB’s U.S. chief creative officer, calls it advertising with “Talk Value.” Are frat boys parroting the commercial’s catchphrase? Has it become a punch line in a stand-up’s monologue? The answers would seem to be yes. Much of the agency’s work–Spuds McKenzie, “I Love You, Man,” “Whassup?”–at one time or another has occupied an official place in the nation’s cranium.
Ultimately, though, success is measured not so much by public awareness as it is by the frequency with which beer drinkers reach into a cooler at the local grocery store for an Anheuser-Busch product, and in this regard the brewery is a juggernaut.
The trade publication Beer Marketer’s Insights reports that though Budweiser’s sales have been dropping for the last 14 years due to the shift toward lighter beers, the brand continues to dominate the “premium-regular” beer segment of the market. Budweiser shipped 32 million barrels last year, while its nearest competitors, Miller Genuine Draft and Coors, shipped 5 million and 1.6 million barrels respectively (a barrel is about 14 cases).
Meanwhile, whatever market share Budweiser has lost over the years, Bud Light has regained. The low-cal beer shipped 36.6 million barrels, with Coors Light and Miller Lite both at about the 15.5 million mark.
DDB’s beer-marketing apparatus was built in the early 1980s. The agency–then known as Needham, Harper & Steers–was already handling Anheuser-Busch’s Busch beer account when it won the business for the brewer’s new product, Budweiser Light. Needham’s first effort, showing athletes at peak moments and called “Bring Out Your Best,” didn’t budge industry leader Miller Lite, which essentially owned the category. Scarpelli and company then ditched the aspirational angle and hit on the idea of an unsuspecting dude walking into a bar and asking for a “light.” He is then handed a lamp (or disco strobe or flaming arrow, etc.) before he corrects himself and says, “Make it a Bud Light.” The campaign launched the brand into double-digit growth.
Then came Spuds McKenzie, the English bull terrier who became a cultural icon overnight and brought Anheuser-Busch its first experience with a public relations phenonemon. It wouldn’t be the last. Bud Light was to oust Miller from the top spot in 1994 and DDB would go on to produce a number of other mega-spots for the brand.
The agency has also bumped up the image of regular Budweiser, which was looking a bit stodgy by the early ’90s. Instead of showing footage of Clydesdales running in the snow, DDB’s Adam Glickman and Craig Feigen devised a spot featuring the horses playing football. Nearly 10 years and many campaigns later, the agency talks about Budweiser’s brand as a “badge” that can denote one’s hipster status and studliness.
“If I’m a young guy in a bar and there’s a girl over there . . .what does a beer say about me? Does it say I’m cool or that I’m not so cool?” says Scarpelli. “One of the things I’m proud of is helping restore the image of Budweiser. It’s kind of cool to drink it again.”
Today, DDB gets the bulk of Anheuser-Busch’s ad budget, though the brewer keeps the agency on its toes by soliciting ideas from other shops, including San Francisco-based Goodby Silverstein & Partners, which created Louie the Lizard, and Boston-based Hill, Holliday, whose Clydes-dale/instant replay spot took top honors in this year’s USA Today Super Bowl ad derby. With the pressure always on, DDB creatives are thus engaged in a Scheherazade-like task, having to keep coming up with new ideas or die.
The credit doesn’t all go to DDB, in any case. Anheuser-Busch’s pricing schemes, sales promotions and top-notch distribution channels also helped propel the company to the top of the $70-billion beer marketplace. But DDB has been adept at staking out a niche for the brands. A case can be made that Budweiser “owns” several aspects of the male experience–from masculine camaraderie to men-are-from-Mars/women-are-from-Venus communication failures–in the way Nike “owns” the victory-or-death mindset of serious athletes.
The latest campaigns don’t even sell beer, per se, but instead focus on aligning the brand with what Anheuser-Busch’s marketing braintrust calls “contemporary adult situations.” Recent work–a guy botching his Best Man speech, another buying his girl a Valentine’s Day card at the same low-rent food mart where he’s buying his six-pack– attempts to make an implicit connection between Budweiser and a human moment that’s far more compelling than any product attribute. In fact, both spots end with the tag-line “True,” a reminder that this is how life really goes down.
Ad Age critic Bob Garfield has gone so far as to call some of the spots “art” because of the way they capture universal truths. With these ads, he says, the brewer is acting in a manner befitting a dominant market leader: smart, classy and above the fray.
Couple the Budweiser work with DDB’s reliably funny campaigns for Bud Light and the overall strategy that emerges is a simple one: Leave no drinker behind. Be hip, but don’t confuse loyal older consumers; be crude, but don’t alienate women; be funny, but not too esoteric.
How well this wide-angle approach plays to every beer marketer’s holy grail–the 21-to-27-year-old male–is another matter. “The challenge for a new and rising competitor . . . is to come in from a different direction with different and more relevant meanings that really stick with young consumers,” says industry consultant Tom Pirko.
Any scan of magazine racks and young-skewing TV shows leads to the conclusion that this demographic group responds more to bikini-clad party girls than almost anything else–political correctness be damned. Miller Lite generated a lot of commotion with a recent ad showing two shapely women wrestling in a pit of liquid cement. Is this an appropriate image to be showing in 2003? Maybe not, but the ad was Lite’s biggest hit in years.
Also upping the debauchery ante in the name of more market share is Coors Light, whose recent commercials feature lots of loud music and men behaving badly. “If the advertising is doing its job, the brand should be positioned as the icon of today’s beer-drinking generation,” says Chuck Rudnick, group creative director at Coors’ main agency, Foote, Cone & Belding-Chicago. “It should feel younger, hipper and more insightful.”
FCB has attempted to claim this turf by targeting the twentysomething male’s fantasy of the endless, babe-filled party. Recent ads revolve around various hipsters bumping and grinding their way through the night. “There’s no doubt that one element that touches a chord [with this audience] is women,” says Rudnick.
It’s not exactly rocket science. Using the T and A motif to sell beer goes way back, and includes such infamous ad ploys as Old Milwaukee’s Swedish Bikini Team from the early ’90s. But Rudnick points out that longneck-gripping supermodels aren’t enough by themselves. “If [the ad is] not rooted in a relevant insight it will be seen for what it is,” he says, “an attention-getting, borrowed-interest gimmick.”
The young male demographic is also fickle. A cautionary tale Anheuser-Busch and DDB executives tell involves a Miller Lite campaign from the mid-’90s built around “Dick,” a fictional, Monty Python-esque spokes-man with a flair for the absurd. The work seemed to have all the hallmarks of hipster humor: heavy doses of irony, campy sight gags and bizarre twists on everyday scenarios. In one spot, a young woman’s robot lover is crushed to death and joyously reincarnated as a recycled beer can. But many in the industry believe the campaign led to the legendary brand’s fall from grace, and “Dick” has become the poster boy for advertising that’s too smart for its own good.
“The [domestic beer] market skews very blue-collar,” says Bob Garfield. “It also skews young and unsophisticated. That’s not the same thing as stupid, but, as I once observed, these people don’t get irony; all they get is thirsty.”
“You can’t go to A-B trying to sell them German Expressionism,” says Mark Gross, a creative director on Bud Light who frequently presents new ideas to the brewer. He says the company’s comedic sensibility resides safely in the “guy-humor” realm of “Defending the Caveman.” Couches, grills, refrigerators, yard work and other time-tested male touchstones have all figured prominently in the spots.
Part of the formula for success in a world that has the attention span of a gnat is consistently reinforcing the brands’ “core values.” Like a hard-driving political spin doctor, Bob Lachky, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of brand management and its global creative chief, repeatedly says Bud Light is “fun, young and social,” and every campaign plays that out.
It also doesn’t hurt that fresh ads are frequently introduced to keep the wear-out rate low. The goal is to make sure consumers never associate Anheuser-Busch beers with boredom. The “Whassup?” campaign yielded 30 spots in its 2 1/2-year run, and for the Bud Light brand alone there are, on average, 20 ads produced annually.
Not all are winners. Some may be too risque to be shown outside the brewer’s annual convention; others might be strong individual spots that fail to catch fire. “There’s [a high] expectation that we’ve put upon ourselves,” says Steve Jackson, senior vice president and worldwide account director at DDB. “But you can’t create a cultural phenomenon by saying, ‘We’re going to create a cultural phenomenon.’ You’re probably going to fail if you’re that obvious about it.”
The question being asked about Anheuser-Busch campaigns these days is no longer “Whassup?”–it’s “What’s next?” At this year’s Super Bowl–the event that kicks off the company’s annual ad cycle–five of its agencies contributed spots, which ranged in comedic tone from crude to insightful. Jim Hanas, editor of AdCritic.com, says the unusual variety of pitches stemmed from the fact that “there is no ‘Whassup?’ at the moment, and A-B is looking for a new voice in TV.” Others contend that the uncharacteristic “scattershot” approach is simply a shrewd way for the brewer to continue being all things to all people.
Big hit or not, DDB still churns out a steady crop of effective ads. But in the long shadow cast by Anheuser-Busch’s giant media-buying budget and marketing omnipotence, a development is fermenting that may prove instructive to underdog beer marketers. It involves “grassroots drinkers” and an edgy “new” beer you may have heard of called Pabst Blue Ribbon.
The resurgence of the brand, which has been around since the 19th Century but has long been in eclipse, has left some industry observers scratching their heads. After a steady 18-year sales slide, Pabst has had three years of growth, including a 5 percent spurt last year. All of this without any significant advertising.
“I attribute it to social leaders and influencers who started drinking it,” says Alan Willner, VP of marketing at the Pabst Brewing Co. “And they networked with other influencers, and in a real organic way, the brand started to build in places like Portland and Seattle.”
Willner claims snowboarders, bike messengers and New York City art gallery owners have adopted the brand as their own. In keeping with the beer’s under-the-radar appeal, the brewer has no plans to do any TV advertising. “We’re talking to subcultures in a one-on-one, personal way and through underground vehicles that appeal to them,” Willner says. These might include unobtrusive sponsorship of a snowboarding meet or an underground movie screening.
But before anyone gets too choked up about Pabst’s kinder, gentler, commercial-free relationship with consumers, it’s worth noting that because the Pabst trend has been identified and publicized, it’s probably already dead. Once hipsters realize their beer is no longer “their beer” alone, they tend to move on. The whole idea is to have an unmediated, unmarketed drinking experience.
For Pabst, this might not be a bad thing. The brewer also owns Stroh’s, Schlitz and Old Style among 30 or so other brands, and if people continue embracing bygone beers, either as an ironic gesture or in rebellion against mass marketers, then Willner and company could continue to cash in.
Even so, these brands probably will remain minor players in the beer scene. Pabst’s surge gives it just a 4 percent share of the domestic market, compared to Anheuser-Busch’s 48 percent.
To be sure this tide never turns, DDB puts a mix of veterans and new blood on the team–60 creative types and 40 producers, account executives and other staff. It helps that Budweiser is a with-it account that attracts some of the industry’s brighter bulbs. “[Beer is] in that 10 percent of advertising that people really pay attention to,” says John Immesoete, creative chief on the Anheuser-Busch account.
The perennial ad agency bogey, the phrase “It’s already been done before,” looms over the creative group like a bad hangover. The Bud Light campaign has been using the same strategy–dramatizing the “great lengths” someone will go for a beer–for nearly 10 years, and almost any scenario is old hat. “Two guys stuck on a desert island with one beer between them?” Been there. “A guy stuck in an elevator with a winking, six-pack-wielding drag queen?” Done that.
To guarantee that the work never goes stale, the creatives scour the culture looking for angles. The “Whassup?” idea–not to mention Budweiser’s current tagline “True”–came directly from a short film DDB copywriter Vinny Warren had seen called “True.” The agency has also been making forays into the world of indie rock and “branded content”–the phrase du jour for short films that subtly incorporate, but don’t feature, a product in the storyline.
It’s all in the service of staying on top of whatever it is guys want to see next: Today it might be party vignettes brimming with blonds; tomorrow it might be wacky gags involving grown men in pink spandex.
Then again, the basics never change. “Every time the new [market] research comes out it’s like, `Amazing! Young guys like girls, rock music and beer!” says Immesoete. “It’s always the same; it’s just how you wrap the present.”
