Thursday’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 four-panel box format, featuring illustrations of Scottish football player, coach and manager Joe Jordan. “A former striker, he played for Leeds United, Manchester United, and Milan, among others at club level, as well making 52 appearances and scoring 11 goals for Scotland. As a player he gained a fearsome ‘Jaws’ persona due to having lost two front teeth early in his career.” And that’s the angle played in the ad, where in the first panel he’s holding a mug of Heineken, smiling broadly through two missing front teeth. In the second he’s downing the beer, while by the third panel his missing teeth are back, plus his teeth are gleaming white now. So that’s a pretty impressive beer.
I was a schoolboy living in Leeds when this ad appeared on a billboard on my route to school. Unfortunately this was after Jordan’s transfer to Man U, so every day I saw it’s slow vandalised death.