While I support the Occupy Wall Street movement, this is something even nearer and dearer to my heart. I don’t know who came up with it, I saw it when Firestone Walker tweeted it, along with the hashtag #OccupythePub and the simple message: “Craft beer drinkers unite. We might only be 5% of the market but we are 95% of the noise!” What a great slogan and a great idea to build awareness for craft beer. We are the 5%!
While searching for more information about yesterday’s featured artist for my Beer In Art series, I discovered a second artist named Ben Sanders, this one working as an illustrator in Australia. Perhaps more importantly, he’s actually worked on a campaign to reduce drunk driving down under. The campaign, sponsored by the Motor Accident Commission, was designed to try and reduce drunk driving in the rural areas of southern Australia. Called Prevent Mate Morphosis, it employs a device you’d never see used by our own government and especially not by the neo-prohibitionists: irreverent humor.
Here’s how they describe the campaign:
Just like on the footy field, mateship is the glue that unites regional communities.
Mates look out for mates — it’s a big part of the Aussie culture. And they’d never intentionally do anything that would cause us harm. It’s just that sometimes, our mates can turn into blokes who, let’s just say, make bad decisions. Especially on the roads.
In this advertising campaign we’ve come up with a new name for this change in a mate’s behaviour. We’re calling it “Matemorphosis” — when your mate gets behind the wheel and morphs into a knob.
They continue by saying it’s “For Country People, By Country People:”
This is the first road safety campaign that’s specifically made for country South Australians, by country South Australians. The TV ads don’t use actors, but real people from different regions across SA and were filmed at Callington Football Club oval.
The campaign acknowledges that too many deaths occur on our roads because country roads are different to anywhere else. We all know we can’t change where we drive, but we can change how we drive. And the campaign makes the point that it’s up to all of us to make country roads safer.
But they sure seem like they’d get your attention far more effectively because they stop and make you think. Then they make you laugh, which in my mind would make them more memorable, as well.
Obviously, not all the idioms would translate to American English, but surely we could come up with equally effective and equally funny ones. Not that the folks in MADD and their ilk would, or even could, embrace any strategy that might involve humor. They’d undoubtedly complain that you can’t make light of so serious a problem. But if it furthers their supposed goal of reducing drunk driving, it really shouldn’t matter how the message is communicated, so long as it’s effective. Frankly, I’ve always believed you’d get a lot further being reasonable and human than constantly hammering the same serious propaganda.
And below is one of the billboards in action. I’d much rather see this on the road than a frying pan with an egg in it telling me that’s my brain or a needle sticking out of a bottle of beer equating it to heroin. Such heavy-handed imagery doesn’t work because it doesn’t ring true. It looks like propaganda because it is propaganda. Maybe a little humor would be better? It’s making me laugh … and pay attention.
At least a dozen people have e-mailed me a link to this video, so I bow to the will of the people and share it with the remaining couple of people who may not yet have seen it. It’s a simple idea, using beer bottles (and some liquor bottles, too) in place of dominoes, but is fairly well executed. Enjoy.
Here’s another fun design project by Minnesota illustrator David Schwen. It’s a poster depicting nine beer cans representing characters from across varying pop cultures. The identity of some of the cans are fairly obvious while others were inscrutably unknown to me, presumably because I’ve become more old curmudgeon and less with-it-hipster (though to be fair I was happily never one of the cool kids). I can say with certainty I knew 6 of 9 — itself a pop reference — or one-third of them right off the bat. Two more I figured out, more or less, and the remaining one I never got, though now that I know it, it makes sense. Think you know them all? Leave a comment identifying all nine.
You can even buy a print of the poster in five different sizes at Society 6.
Thanks to Angelo from Brewpublic, who posted a link to this on Facebook. A couple of days ago, the humor paper The Onion posted the hilarious picture below in their News in Photos section with the headline Samuel Adams Apologizes For ‘Boston Sucks’ Pilsner.
With Father’s day less than two weeks away, I thought I’d share this fun project done by the folks at Every Guyed, where they designed eight beer can dads.
Here’s the idea:
To celebrate Father’s Day, EveryGuyed and Moxy Creative House have teamed up once again to deliver the second installment of the ‘Cheers!’. This time we had creative director Glenn Michael raise a glass — and his brush — to 8 iconic animated dads, re-envisioning them as beer cans.
When you were a kid, Father’s Day was a pretty boring affair. Now you’re of age, and all of a sudden you have the chance to do something with your dad that he’ll actually enjoy: share a cold one together.
See if you can guess all of the cartoon dads. The answers are below, just under the slideshow, where you can see the eight individuals posters for each beer can dad.
Now I want my own dad can. What would yours look like?
You can even buy any of the prints as a poster at Moxy Creative House.
I confess I don’t “get” the humor in this 2006 cartoon. I imagine there’s an inside joke here that would be apparent if I was a regular reader of Buffalo with Buffalo, a comic strip written occasionally by a Buffalo, New York blogger. But it is all about beer, so I thought I’d share. If you think you understand the joke, please leave a comment with your best guess.
Watch in horror as several pallets of beer miss their calling to be imbibed and enjoyed and instead end up creating a river of beer inside a warehouse at an undisclosed location. The only clue is that the language of alarm heard in the background does not sound like English. Apart from that, it’s anybody’s guess. Oh, the horror!
Sixpoint Craft Ales in Brooklyn, New York is having an art and beer contest called “Beer Is Culture” as we speak, and you can see the entries at their Facebook page. One in particular I thought was pretty funny, a flowchart by Melissa Schmechel where all the choices lead one to beer. But beyond the humor factor, it does nicely showcase just how versatile beer is, because despite the fact that every path leads to beer, few people would disagree that the flowchart isn’t 100% accurate.
Source.
Ray Daniels of the Cicerone program tweeted this link yesterday, but I didn’t get a chance to watch it until this morning. The creator of the video, Liquid Horseplay, must be an insider because he’s knows a lot of the right people. The video was made using the Xtranormal movie making architecture and is a hilarious spoof of the uber beer geek. Make sure you watch it through to the end, because it just keeps getting funnier.