From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [55]
Beer advertising can be very tricky. Young & Rubicam turned out some terrific ads on Bert and Harry Piel, the Piel Brothers. Everybody liked Bert and Harry, all the intellectuals loved them. Good old Bert and Harry: they laughed at the product, they had fun. The big mistake with that campaign was that it got people to taste Piel’s Beer. A guy would take one sip of it and say, ‘Screw Bert and Harry, like they were a lot of fun and I like to look at them on the late news but they’re not going to make me drink this stuff.’ It’s a case of ‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,’ especially if he’s tried the stream once and it tastes terrible. And that was it. Bert and Harry never came back.
As far as I’m concerned, the best beer advertising today is Schaefer’s. It really gets to the beer drinkers; it has a very simple, very meaningful message for the real drinkers. ‘The one beer to have when you’re having more than one.’ Boy, does that message come across to those guys. They really understand it. Wow! And the guy grabs another can of beer. What a red flag that line is! Here I am, having more than one. As a matter of fact, I’m having seventeen at one sitting, and my eyes are getting glassy. And Schaefer is the only beer that will make me feel great when this binge is all over.
Schaefer is done by Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne. They’re an agency that hasn’t distinguished itself for much other than Schaefer, Pepsi-Cola, Dodge, and Chiquita Banana. (But they were brilliant with Chiquita Banana. They sold bananas without laughing. They gave the banana an identity and, you know, they literally made banana history. I mean, you never see any other banana commercials, do you?) It’s an interesting thing when a good campaign comes out – there usually are a hundred guys who take credit for it. I know of at least nine guys who modestly say they came up with the line about the one beer to have when you’re having more than one. A number of friends of mine at B.B.D. O. tell me that a guy named Jim Jordan, who is a creative director, is the guy who did the campaign.
Compare the Schaefer campaign with the Ballantine Beer campaign created by Stan Freberg – the campaign using the takeoff on Portnoy’s Complaint, except they call it ‘Ballantine’s Complaint.’ Very cute stuff but it falls into that trap of having the wrong initial premise: How many beer drinkers have read Portnoy’s Complaint? Forget the book. How many beer drinkers can read? One of the commercials shows a guy named Ballantine lying on a shrink’s couch complaining about how he left the brewery in the hands of his family while he went on a trip and the family loused up the beer. How many beer drinkers give a goddamn if Ballantine had a problem with his family? How many beer drinkers have ever been to a shrink? How many of them ever heard of Philip Roth? As far as they’re concerned, that beer is off the books. They might have had a can of Ballantine at a ball game once, and that’s it. They won’t drink Ballantine for anybody any more. These guys know where they’re understood and loved – and I mean loved: Schaefer.
Rheingold nowadays is doing things with ten-minute heads. Nonsense. There isn’t a beer drinker alive who will sit and watch the head on his beer disappear in ten minutes, timed, by the way, with a stopwatch. Your beer drinker figures he can put two and a half beers away in ten minutes, forget about your head.
Pabst Blue Ribbon does nice commercials with a nostalgic twist – usually a bunch of people in straw hats at a picnic. But I’m convinced that the only kind of nostalgia that will sell beer is a guy standing in a bar saying, ‘Hey, let’s have a beer for