Beer woes solved, maybe, with new ad campaigns

Throughout the beer industry, fears of wine and spirits are running high. To that effect, over the last six months Anheuser Busch has been lobbying the beer industry for a publicity and marketing campaign to halt the popularity of wine and distilled spirits.

AB has come up with a campaign to do just that and try to re-ignite the purchasing of beer. There is an ad ready to roll, created three months ago by DDB Chicago, for the Super Bowl directed by Iain Mackenzie. AB is trying to get approval from industry groups to air the spot during the fourth quarter. The possible Super Bowl spot is titled "Slainte," (reference to a Gaelic toast), which shows people around the globe enjoying and making toasts with beer. The commercial will direct people to HeresToBeer.com, created by Cannonball, St. Louis. The site attempts to position beer in the same way wine or spirits are percieved, with food-pairing suggestions, recipes using beer and "beertails", suggested ways to mix beer.

Spike Lee has created other spots in which a celebrity is asked who they would like to share a beer with.

The first spot features actor Michael Imperioli, tough-guy Chris of the Sopranos, toasting another tough-guy: Humphrey Bogart. That ad may run during the Winter Olympic Games.

The other commercial, expected to run at the start of baseball season, features Lee himself toasting baseball great Jackie Robinson.

All of this goes back to sluggish sales throughout the beer industry because young and old are turning to wine or spirits instead of beer. It's all part of a "trading up" trend we're going to see for brewers.

Some brands have already started on the path. Miller already started work on two of their brands, Miller Genuine Draft and Miller High Life.

MGD has been overhauled with new ads, packaging and logo. The advertising campaign launches March 1st and will position both Genuine Draft and Genuine Draft Light as having "mainstream sophistication." The new tagline will be "Beer. Grown Up." Currently a bridge campaign is running.

W+K's campaign for Miller High Life follows the theme of "the moments we savor." They brought back the girl in the moon for the campaign (as an attempt to attract more women drinkers). In the ads, the voice over says it's "the champagne of beers", alluding that this beer is for important occassions, not just getting drunk on the sofa watching the game.

Miller High Life- Girl in the Moon:

As we quoted before from the NY Times:

The tenor of the campaign, its storytelling elements and its focus on a female character are meant to increase the number of women who buy High Life, Ms. Hoffman said, as well as the number of younger consumers of either sex who drink it.
While the "High Life Man" was primarily aimed at men ages 35 and up, the "Girl in the Moon" is intended to also resonate with men and women ages 21 to 34.

And they're not alone in realizing that, yes, women do drink beer.

Marlene Coulis, who was promoted to marketing head for AB in August, had this to say when interviewed about Super Bowl ads for the company:

"If there's a new piece of insight I brought to our agencies it's that we have a lot of female beer drinkers, a lot of coed beer-drinking situations," Ms. Coulis said yesterday during an interview in Midtown Manhattan.
"They love beer," Ms. Coulis said of the women who consume an estimated 20 percent of the company's beer volume. "And they're influencers, they have influence over brand choice," she added, "so we want to make sure we equally appeal to males and females."

All I can say is, it's about bloody time.

Only time will tell if the beer industry is able to turn consumers back to beer. It's going to be tough to change preconceived notions of beer, either as part of a cocktail or as champagne.