Tuesday’s ad is for Heineken, from the 1970s. In the later 1970s, Heineken embarked on a series of ads with the tagline “Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach.” Many of the ads were in a sequential panel, or comic strip, format and they were intended to be humorous.
In this ad, a three-panel format, a classical pirate, complete with eye-patch, parrot and peg leg, is holding a mug of Heineken. In the second panel, he drinks the beer, only to have lost the parrot and gain a vulture along with a second peg leg in the third panel. Not only that, but he’s now sporting a second eye-patch, meaning he’s completely blind. So you might be tempted to ask yourself what went wrong? Why didn’t something good happen to our pirate? A careful reading of the text provides the answer. For most of these ads, the tagline is “Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach,” but in this case it “refreshes the pirates other beers cannot reach.” So the beer made him more pirate-y, which explains what happened.
This resembles a Guinness ad that was seen on the walls of the London Underground in 1983. The caption was “Guinness. Some things never change”. There were three or four panels, each showing the pirate, a parrot, and a pirate ship in increasing states of decay. The final panel showed the pirate with two peg legs, two eye patches, and a hook, the parrot dead at his feet, and the pirate ship sunk in the sea in the back ground. The only thing that did not change from one panel to the next was the mug of beer in the pirate’s hand. The Guinness ad seems to work better than the Heineken ad by using the changes in the images to contrast with the unchanging quality of the beer.