My wife Diana, who is not a beer drinker and takes little interest in the scene, as it were, has been watching NBA playoff games.
Last week, she asked why television advertisements for America’s “Big Three” multinational megabrewers invariably insult the intelligence (a term I use guardedly) of their own loyal consumers, depicting them variously as leering lechers, bumbling simpletons, and graceless bobble-heads.
It’s a very good question, and I’ll leave it to the marketing geniuses to explain why contempt for the target clientele is such a recurring feature of megabrewery advertising on television.
My current favorite in this genre is the Coors Light commercial that shows the “bus boy” clearing unfinished bottles of carbonated alco-pop from barroom tables, and gleefully escaping into the alley with his bus tub of booty.
Isn’t this fairly grotesque? Was he rummaging through the dumpsters for abandoned White Castles before concocting the “bus boy” disguise? Is this MolsonCoors’s idea of a target demographic?
Granted, in the early “Wild, Wild West” era of Sportstime Pizza, we had a customer who would wander around the room asking people if they were finished with their bottles, and drinking the leftovers on the spot (sometimes without permission, with interesting consequences) … but I doubt that Mountain Man Dave would make a good poster boy for the drinking-in-moderation campaigns that megabreweries must finance as a type of tax for otherwise using their television ads to target minors.
Bear in mind that “bottle babies” never drink the whole beer, and when asked to explain this phenomenon, generally are unable to do so. Perhaps the beer gets warm, or there’s too much spittle and debris in the bottom, or it is part of a mating ritual as yet unrevealed by “Wild Kingdom.”
Isn’t Coors Light sufficiently wretched without being mixed with the body fluids of a stranger?
This sells beer?
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