Grumble - Oy! Beer Man!

-by Elfpants

Recently there's been a revolution in the approach taken by major corporations to advertising. No, I'm not talking about the onslaught of the dotcom ads. (Though you can always tell when one of those comes on, can't you? It's always that same vaguely surreal approach, that same too-bright lighting, that same "what the hell are these people actually trying to sell" confusion as to why exactly a sock puppet should be getting us to order 500 pounds of kitty litter. But I digress.)

It used to be that you could rely on a certain basic assumption when it came to commercials: They'd be about trying to sell you the product. Some would be good, some would be bad, but they'd all be pretty straightforward about wanting you to buy more Palmolive or Ford trucks or whatever. Car commercials would generally show you the vehicle in question plunging through a rugged wilderness or along a winding cliffside road at ungodly speeds. Fast food commercials would blurt their jingles, show you grease-laden sandwiches close up and then mercifully fade out. Feminine hygeine product ads would be tasteful and restrained, even though they'd somehow managed to get rotated into the middle of Monday Night Football and a Sylvester Stallone movie marathon.

So it went. There was a certain comfort, a certain predictability to knowing that for eight minutes out of every half our, you were going to be the target of a relentless, but honest, shill. (OK, all of those "Buy our products and attractive, large-breasted women will find you irresistable, plus you'll be able to play basketball like Jordan" ads weren't honest in the traditional sense, but at least they were up front about the fact that they were trying to empty your wallet.)

Sadly, these days are no more. Perhaps it's a secret prophecy of Nostradamus finally coming true, perhaps it's just a new strategy that advertising firms are embracing because, goldarn it, everything else has been done. It doesn't matter why. What does matter is that now, suddenly, advertisers are insisting on showing their products in a light that's not only bad, but occasionally terrifying.

The best example of this is, sad to say, the liquor industry. Let's face it, no matter how lousy the product being advertised might be, you could always count on booze ads to be amusing, clever and occasionally quoteworthy, in a low-brow sort of way. (Come on, admit it - you chanted "Tastes Great! Less Filling!" once upon a time as well.) Watching talking frogs beat the holy hell out of a neurotic lizard may not have been Aeschylus-level drama, but it certainly was both amusing and vaguely reminiscent of much of Woody Allen's later body of work. And if worst came to worst, there was always Bob Uecker, a man who made a career out of the fact that he didn't have a career. (For those of you who don't get the reference, Uecker was probably the worst full-time baseball player ever, a man whose skill with the bat could only be described as "infinitesmal" and whose defense behind the plate brought to mind the best efforts of the French military in the early 1940s. These days, that would get him a three year deal at $2.6M per annum, but that's not my problem.)

But those days are gone, and for all intents and purposes, forgotten. The purpose of liquor ads these days seems to be to send the consumer scurrying in the opposite direction as fast as his little feet will carry him. Presumably, juice sales are up accordingly.

THE HARD STUFF

A perfect example of how things have gone horribly wrong has just hit the newstands. The back cover of the latest issue of Movieline has an ad for Hennessy brand cognac. (Hard liquor ads are forbidden on broadcast media, which means that the guys who make the hard stuff have only one medium to screw up in. Still, they manage it quite nicely.) Hennessy is what's called a "Very Special" cognac, which means less than you think it does -- near as I can tell, cognacs are rated "Very Special," "Really Very Special," "Extremely Special" and "So Bloody Special That You'll Shell Out Twice As Much For a Finger Of This Stuff Just To Impress That 22 Year Old At The Next Table Who's Giving You The Eye" -- and as such, its print ads try to make it look smooth and sophisticated. This one shows two waif-thin, bleary eyed models in low-cut dresses lolling about in the back of a limo. Both of them, a caption tells us, "love Oliver," and we're supposed to jump from this to wanting to drink Hennessy because it's "appropriately complex."

The ad, needless to say, does very little to explain why one should actually go out and buy the stuff (unless, of course, you're named Oliver and you're hoping the guy these two mannequins are mooning after is actually you.) In an extremely unscientific poll, I showed the ad to a handful of people. Their responses were as follows:

43% would have given their left testicle to be this guy Oliver, because if choosing between these two women is as complex as his life gets, he's living La Vida Loca

22% figured that Oliver was going to try to get a threesome going in the back of the limo, and really wanted to see the next ad in the series

17% figured that Oliver was going to try to get a threesome going, but would get himself slapped as the models went off on their own for some wacky lesbian hijinks

15% thought the women were both fans of the musical and were about to break into a chorus of "Food, Glorious Food" because, goddamn, they're both skinny enough to need it

3% wanted the models to start screaming "Whassup!"

And not a one said, "Wow, this makes me want to buy cognac."

WHIMPER, WHIMPER, WINE, WINE

Once upon a time there were two kinds of wine ads on television. One was for Gallo, in which a skeezebucket in a tuxedo tried to convince us that he'd made his multiple million by buying wine-in-a-jug. In theory, this was supposed to impress the woman sharing the limo. Unfortunately, the commercials were as cheap as the wine they hawked, which meant that the stars of the ads generated as much heat as a showing of Eyes Wide Shut in a meat locker. (A note to Messrs. Gallo: If this guy got "Sooooo rich" by drinking your wine instead of, say, something drinkable, he's either drinking so much wine that his liver looks like the Manhattan street map or the FTC is wiretapping his phone as we speak. Plus, he's clearly not sooooo rich as to be able to afford a tux that doesn't get rented out to high school seniors on a regular basis.)

The other ad featured the venerable (and mountainous) Orson Welles, doing the James Earl Jones thing before Jones himself thought of it. In stentorian tones, Welles informed us that Paul Masson would "sell no wine before its time." What Welles neglected to mention was that, by best estimate the average bottle of Masson's time was 3:15 in the afternoon.

These days, however, wine ads are everywhere. As proto-yuppies scurry to appear grown up (and techweenies discover that there is life beyond Mountain Dew), suddenly there's a mad scramble to grab segments of the newly burgeoning wine market. Unfortunately, this is being done with all the grace and subtlety of the Oklahoma land rush, though thankfully with fewer covered wagons.

Perhaps the worst offender is Fetzer, which once upon a time was known as "the only decent wine grad students can afford." However, in 1996 Fetzer stumbled into being "the official chardonnay of the Atlanta Olympic Games," and it's been all downhill from there. Now call me crazy, but I don't quite see why an athletic competition actually needs an official chardonnay. I mean, if they want to start adding events like "The 400 Meter Drunken Stagger," I'm all for it, but in the meantime I find myself strangely reluctant to touch Fetzer, for fear I'll need to do laps after each carafe.

Fetzer isn't the only offender, of course. What all of these ads have in common is that they play to the uninformed consumer, the one who doesn't know diddly about wine but is desperate for a reason to buy one brand or another so he doesn't actually have to learn about the stuff. Why else would Corbel Canyon have the sheer chutzpah to use as a selling point the fact that its bottle has a square bottom? As if the bottle mattered -- though a secondary train of thought suggests that they're going for the "sloppy drunk" market, to whom a more stable bottle is actually a serious plus.

GOT GOOD HOPS?

The follies of wine and booze ads, however, pale next to the atrocities currently being perpetrated by the folks who make beer. Let's face it: beer ads derive broadcast sports. They're front and center every weekend afternoon, they're plastered across every shot we see during a game and they're unapologetic about it. And frankly, that's fine - as long as the ads are good. But these days, omnipresence seems to be enough.

Take, for example, Coors. Now Coors has always been a bit behind the curve when it came to ads -- remember the animatronic penguins they used to try to sell wine coolers? Well, neither does anyone else -- but the triple-pronged approach they're using these days seems calculated to inspire fear and loathing in Golden, Colorado.

First is the "classy" series, wherein ESPN anchor Dan Patrick regales the audience with tales of John Elway, who then announces that yep, he drinks Coors. We learn that Elway ran for a lot of yards, we learn that he threw a baseball over the fence from home plate in college, and so on. One can't help but wonder, however, how many of these feats Elway would have accomplished had he been sucking down Coors at the time. Imagine Patrick saying "In 1987, he puked so hard it went fifteen yards. Did we mention he wasn't even in the game at the time?"

(The bitter cynic in me, not to mention the sports fan, wants to know when Patrick will do a commercial talking about how Elway got pulped in a solid handful of Super Bowls before Terrell Davis came along, or how he held the Colts up for ransom to force a trade, but I don't think that's likely. Alas for truth in advertising.)

The second leg in this unholy triptych is the "Hey! Beer Man!" ads, which enforces the notion that Coors doesn't actually want anyone to be drinking this stuff. The series focuses on a herd (there's no other term, really) of ballpark beer vendors, each of whom has his own unique style of keeping Coors from getting to the customers. (Mind you, in certain circles this might be looked on as a public service, but that's neither here nor there.) One spouts Saganesque musings about the origins of beer, another spills the damn thing and gives a eulogy and so on, and frankly I wouldn't trust any beverage that any of these men handed me.

Finally, there's the "Rocky Mountain Tales" sequence, starring Howie Long. As anyone who's seen Howie's film debut Firestorm knows, he's a thespian of rare power and dramatic range. However, both of the folks who saw that one in the theater have probably missed his beer commercials, which serve mainly to tell us that Coors A)causes natural disasters and B)kills poisonous snakes at a touch. And if that's not a reason to suck the stuff down the gallon, then I don't know what is.

There are other offenders out there, of course. Anyone whose office has echoed with "WASSUP???" for the last month can tell you that. There are even still a few good ads. But the trend is unmistakeable, disturbing and worst of all, no longer entertaining.

Club soda, anyone? Neat.