Digital Journal — Ah! A Marca Bavaria! Thank God you’ve raised the bar on sexy beer ads! “There are no sins below the equator.” Brilliant!
You have to give them credit, though.
A Marca Bavaria was introduced to Canada in March 2002 and after four months, made it to third place among import beers — not bad, considering Canada imports about 400 different types of beer. Heineken and Corona may sell more, but only a Bavaria commercial can quiet a raucous sports bar.
Go to their website (amarcabavaria.com)And if you go to this website, the relentless humping of your leg by the ad copy can be a scream. Like this: “You can experience it. That moment of complete surrender when thought and reason concede to the possibilities … it could be the gaze of a stranger. The thin of a skin. Sweet fragrance. Hypnotic rhythms that touch you and pull you where you once feared to go.” That’s meant to tout the beer’s “uninhibited spirit.” Read it out loud to your friends in your best Latin Lover voice.
The message seems to be: “Drink this beer and you’ll soon be swapping stories with Mick Jagger about bedding Brazilian supermodels.”
But Bavaria’s sexy ads are a return to the past instead of a bold step into the future, according to Al Middleton, a marketing professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto. The 1980s were a particularly fertile period for “T-and-A advertising,” he says, adding that it goes in cycles.
Looking back, an uproar ad a generation ago was Brooke Shields, then 15, confiding in 1980 that nothing came between her and her Calvins — jeans, that is. Bad boy Calvin Klein has been responsible for a number of sex-related advertising brouhahas in the intervening years. Can you say “free publicity?”
Be that as it may, Middleton cautions that getting curious people to try your over-hyped product is one thing. Making your brand their habitual choice is something else. While Bavaria got off to a quick start, Heineken and Corona still tower above it in sales.
I’m Too Sexy For My Brand
A Toronto-based ad agency, John St., initially handled the Bavaria account (it subsequently went to Taxi). CEO Arthur Fleischmann said in a July 13 Globe and Mail article: “We had done a great job of bringing more substance and creativity and intelligence to beer advertising. And then we seem to have lost it in the last year and a half.” Et tu, Arthur?
Other liquor companies are following suit. Baileys has one (running after 11p.m. on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) where a drop of the precious liqueur falls on a woman’s covered nipple, perking up her male companion. One Labatt Blue Light commercial is about guys rehearsing plausible denials of a strip-club visit.
These products are trying to reach young people who are still in their prime partying years, their mobility and fertility at a lifetime peak. Pleasure is a big part of their lives, and making your brand seem an integral part of that makes good business sense.
Shari Graydon, a past president of feminist watchdog group Media Watch and author of Made You Look: How Advertising Works and Why You Should Know, says today’s ads are more targeted and less likely to offend. The Daily Show is clearly not being watched by those who will take offence at sexually explicit ads, she says.
Middleton argues that since sex is an inherent part of the human condition, what’s wrong with using it in advertising?
My exception would be when the sex is unconnected to the product and it demeans women. GraceNet is a U.S. group of professional women in technology. For a time, they had a DisGraceful award and their October 2002 “winner” was a company called EDA Tools. Its winning billboard ad highlighted the fact you could rent or buy their products on an hourly, monthly or perpetual basis. Above “hourly” was a picture of a hooker. Above “perpetual,” a bride in white. Har, har. It made me wonder if EDA was actually a front for an escort delivery agency.
That was actually the last DisGraceful award ever issued. “We were so successful, we stopped doing it,” says Sylvia Paull of GraceNet. The head of one company even apologized and fired his marketing staff, she says.
Personally, I like hot ads, not stupid or insulting ones. I could watch the Bavaria ads over and over again, but the weird thing is I’ve never drunk a bottle of the stuff. I find some Bud Light ads hilarious, but I’ve never touched a drop.
Middleton says ad people call this the dreaded “video vampire — when the visual, whether it’s sexual or shocking, is not directly related to the brand proposition and so overwhelms it that the consumer take-away is more about the visual than the brand.” This often means they’ll remember the ad but forget its key message: “Buy me.”
It’s What’s Inside That Counts
Maybe I’m not missing much in Bavaria’s case. One reviewer on beeradvocate.com had this to say: “They can throw as many bikini-clad women in as many TV spots as they like. It’s still an uninspired, rather tasteless beer. Being greedy, I figure one should be able to enjoy bikini-clad women and a decent beer at the same time.”
I live in Ontario, and two beers I tend to drink are Creemore Springs and Steam Whistle, both produced by independent breweries. Neither has a big advertising budget and neither offers up imagery that would put a jihadist martyr’s vision of 72 virgins in paradise to shame. But they both produce tasty beers. Why aren’t they with the program?
“I don’t know why we aren’t with the program,” chuckles CEO Howard Thompson from Creemore, Ont., a bucolic town at the base of the Niagara Escarpment. “Many of the brands you describe are commodities. It’s not the liquid inside that differentiates the product. It’s everything on the outside. The message we want to deliver, with the limited amount of advertising we can do, is about the beer.”
Middleton points out that all the imports and microbrews combined only have a 10 per cent share of Canada’s beer market. Labatts and Molson divvy up the rest, but this has been eroding over the last decade.
Molson Canadian, once considered the holy grail of beer brands by advertising agencies, reportedly spends $50 million a year on advertising. Its recent campaign, the “I Am” rant, is now an icon of Canadian nationalism. But its sales are flat and its market share is declining. “It’s in deep trouble,” Middleton says, noting that Molson reportedly is shopping for a new ad agency to revitalize the Molson Canadian brand.
Molson Canadian hasn’t played the sex card lately: nationalism and “good times with your buds” have been its hallmarks. But desperate times call for desperate measures, so I wonder if this venerable brand’s next step will be to sluttify itself.
“I don’t know if they’ll go the sex route,” Middleton says, “but they’ll certainly go the get-you-to-sit-up-and-pay-notice route.”
The sex thing “is very effective at generating attention,” Graydon says, “but it’s often not very effective at ensuring recall or influencing purchase decisions.”
Here’s a thought: Instead of a sexier image or another bold new branding direction, would a better-tasting beer help Canadian’s bottom line?
Yeah, I know: how naive.
This article is part of Digital Journal’s national magazine edition. Pick up your copy of Digital Journal in bookstores across Canada. Or subscribe to Digital Journal now, and receive 8 issues for $19.95 + GST ($39.95 USD).
