Thursday, July 26, 2007
And now for the snorting beer labels story
Usually I use this forum to discuss, rant, yell about, issues in the news that are just sitting there weighing on my mind. This may not quite fit in that category, but I just don’t get it….When did the fact that something is cold become a selling point for anything other than a ski resort? Driving along Route 95 today I notice an ad for Bud Light featuring beer bottles turned upside down with the caption ”Flipping Cold”. Not “It tastes good”, or “You’ll get hot chicks in bikini’s” or even “Bud……Weis….eeeeeeer” with some weird-ass talking frogs on a log. Isn’t the fact that beer is cold a lot more dependant on the temperature of your refridgerator? So I get home and turn on some reality show about a tennis player picking a girl from a group of 20 year-olds and 40 year olds competing against each other (it’s a really odd phenomenon on this show. All of these attractive women, but there is something quirky about every one of their faces. Like a nose pointing too far upwards, or too much teeth, or they are just a bitch) and I grab a beer. And thank God I checked the label, for the mountains had turned blue!, assuring me that my beer was, in fact, cold. Whew. That was close. So as I sat down I wondered “If the label turns blue when it’s cold, is it scratch n’ sniff as well?” So I spent the rest of the evening looking as if I was snorting crack off a beer bottle watching tennis players chase hotties thinking of the next Maytag commercial that tells me how good the fridge tastes. I can’t believe I just snorted a beer label. I think it went to my head.
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3 comments:
THE VOID
I'm sitting in the darkness, contemplating freely what my mind instinctively tries to dodge. I can't help thinking about Man, the things Man does, and the things this man does. The world is such an aggravated place and the everyday world I live in is aggravating. There needs to be a revival, and that word sounds like emptiness rolling off the tongue. It sounds like a slogan. So many words sound like slogans now. Words have been so overused, abused, and been given so much power that they lose all their meaning. When people say love, when people say hate, when people say revolution, when people say change; they're only words, words that their minds have picked up over the generations and regurgitated from their mouths. We all believe in these words, believing they have a synonimous power to the things they describe but they don't. The word "love" is not even a shadow of love. The word "change" is nothing without the act of changing. That is truth. I know it is truth because it wasn't something taught to me; it is something I have opened myself to and learned. Self-Knowledge.
Frederick S. Blackmon
Dateline, 2007. Same thing, different time. Once again we have humanity struggling in an era of strife to make so with what little they have. Or maybe not. We are a spoiled generation, competing for the better, and yet still highly unimportant, addition to better (read, simplify) our oh so difficult lives. Do any of them have a use? Indeed they do, but only in very strange cases. Imagine the psychological pain one could be caused by having to feel among the bottles in the fridge to find one that it truly cold. Years of therapy truly await one after such an experience. Nonetheless, this unnecessary addition is just what this generation of consumers is begging for, another way to ensure that valuable energy will not be wasted. So sit back, crack open a nice cold beer, (one that you knew was cold from the blue color of the mountains), and who knows, maybe scratch and sniff to ensure the quality of the beer inside. If this kind of simplicity is so common in cars, why not in more important things, like our beer.
I for one am slightly impressed with the beer company on this one. For decades it has been consistently pounded into our heads that beer = beautiful women = sex. Anheuser-Busch and all the other beer companies with enough advertising revenue to afford it have been laughing all the way to the bank on the fundamental idea that alcohol consumers are total idiots. Even though we know that buying a case of brew isn't going to get a model to strip down in our back yard, Budweiser (and other A.B. products)is still the leading selling alcoholic beverage in the United States. Their marketing department had a really good strategy for a really long time. Now that we've all used the product enough to know that the supermodel theory is bullshit, the marketing department has decided to go ahead and start using an advertising method that we can physically identify with. Damn near every single beer drinker in America will tell you that an ice cold beer is far more appealing and tasty than a beer at room temperature. They are no longer insulting our collective intelligence, but subconsciously telling us something that we already know to be true: Cold beer is better than warm beer. If I see an ad that says Pigs Eye is the coldest beer around, I know it isn't true, but my brain knows that a cold beer IS good. An attractive can glistening with condensation kicks my subconscious into beer mode, and when I go down to the store to buy a brew, my brain immediately goes back to that picture. That picture reminds me of how delicious and COLD that can on the billboard was, and all of a sudden I'm standing at the register with a case of it. Not because that beer is going to get any colder than the case it was setting next to, but because my mind's eye remembers how good that billboard can looked cold. It's all about the memory of the image, and if that image says their beer is the coldest, then I will be more likely to reach for it than the other guys brand. These ads are playing on a different part of our thought process, using psychology instead of hormones in order to get consumers to purchase their product. Personally, I feel less insulted by these new types of promotional slogans than the worn out beer girl images. Sure it's a lie, but at least it's a blatant one instead of some boring attempt at playing on the perceived stupidity of the general public.
Bryon White
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