Friday’s holiday ad for New Year’s Eve is a Miller High Life ad from 1948 features their iconic “Girl in the Moon” sitting on a crescent moon toasting the world with a beer. It seems a fitting way to finish 2010 and welcome the promise of a new year. Hoppy New Year everybody.
Saturday’s holiday ad is for Miller High Life from 1949 and features their “Girl in the Moon” wishing everyone “Seasons Greetings.” I normally don’t keep the “Beer in Ads” series running through the weekend, but there’s just too many great Christmas beer ads not to. And mores specifically, “A Holiday toast to you from the National Champion of Quality … Miller High Life.”
And here’s a close-up of the artwork.
Friday’s holiday ad is from 1951 and is for Miller High Life. I love the retro cartoons, they remind me of the Schlitzerland ads from around the same time. There’s the Santa suit, hanging the mistletoe, putting on the feast and greeting the guests with the Christmas tree in the window.
Wednesday’s ad is for the malt liquor Colt 45 and a contest where someone could win a “completely unique weekend on Playboy’s Jet.” I picked the ad because I’m getting on a plane early tomorrow morning and it is decidedly not the Playboy Jet. Does Playboy even have the jet anymore? My guess is no, and for that reason I have no idea when this ad is from, though it seems like the 1970s is a safe bet. But as the text for the contest begins, which makes me wonder, “do I deserve [a] Colt 45 weekend?” Does anyone?
Friday’s ad is the fourth baseball-themed one, which I’ll be continuing through the World Series. The ad is from 1982 and features baseball personality Bob Uecker, who Johnny Carson dubbed “Mr. Baseball.” This was one his earliest ads for Miller Lite, when they started trying to convince men to drink a low-calorie beer. It features Uecker’s signature self-deprecating humor with the line “Great ballplayers drink Lite beer because it’s less filling. I know. I asked one.”
Monday’s ad is for a bock beer in honor of the Dutch holiday, Bokbierdag. I don’t know when, but at one point Miller Brewing made a bock. The ad features the iconic Miller witch riding a white goat.
And here’s a label for the beer, though I’d guess it’s older than the ad.
Tuesday’s ad is for Miller High Life, most likely from the late 1950s or 60s, when ping pong in paneled rec rooms was all the rage. And how about that tagline? “Sparkling … flavorful … distinctive.”
This came out a month ago but somehow it escaped my notice then. MillerCoors unveiled their latest gimmick to sell more beer to wholesalers meeting in Las Vegas. According to Brand Week, it’s called the Miller Vortex and described as “a bottle with specially designed interior grooves that ‘create a vortex as you’re pouring the beer,’ according to a rep, who explained that the brand’s goal is to ‘create buzz and excitement and give consumers another reason to choose Miller.’ The Vortex bottle, which begins hitting shelves this month, will be supported by advertising from DraftFCB.”
As Peter Rowe succinctly put it in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Miller’s Vortex bottle is, at first glance, stupid. The neck swirls your beverage as it’s poured. This, if we remember our Beer Chem 101, stirs up the aromas and unleashes a larger head.
All of which can be done by, what, pouring beer from an un-Vortexed bottle and giving your pint glass a twirl?
Exactly. This is one of those things nobody needed being touted as the savior of mankind. You can see how it works in the short video below.
In related news, I also saw a television commercial yesterday for Miller Lite‘s aluminum pint bottle, which they debuted to several test markets in 2008. I guess it must have gone well.
And now yesterday, I saw a press release that Miller is bringing out “improved” packaging for their Miller High Life. Perhaps most humorously, the release is titled Common Sense Gets A New Look. The release begins with this gem. “Miller High Life, the brand synonymous with common sense, is bringing a new look to store shelves this month with the debut of new primary and secondary packaging across all bottle and can offerings.” Synonymous with common sense? What does that even mean? Marketing Daily has the story, too. Below is the new 12-pack.
And here it is side-by-side with the old package. Wow the difference is so amazing, the beer’s just going to fly out of the store.
So that’s three cosmetic changes all geared to sell more beer, which is not bad in and of itself: a new gimmick bottle, an aluminum bottle and new packaging all designed to turn around slowing sales. And this is why I think the big guys will continue to slip. They never once considered it was what was inside the bottle that might be the problem. Sure, packaging needs to be updated from time to time, but gimmicks are never a good idea, at least to my way of thinking. Maybe they’ll get an initial trial sales bump from the curious, but I can’t see that it will last. The vortex is completely ridiculous, even embarrassing. The aluminum bottle doesn’t seem any better than the can, but is more expensive to produce. New packaging will, of course, become old packaging in time.
The real reason that sales are falling is that people are turning to other products, notably craft beer. But Miller still sells an awful lot of low-calorie light beer — I don’t understand for the life of my why anyone buys light beer — and so there’s really no impetus to change it or abandon it. As a result, they’ll keep throwing whatever they can think of against the wall to see what might stick and thus drive sales. And apparently, anything they can think of is a very broad range indeed. Given what they’ve tried in the past and what they’re currently trying, I’d love to know what some of the ideas that didn’t get out of the meetings might be. That should be a pretty funny list.
Wednesday’s ad is from 1946 and is a beautiful painting of two people fishing. It’s for Miller High Life and is surprisingly uncluttered for the time period. It looks like the fisherman got his hook caught in the woman’s shorts, which is pretty funny in an odd way.
Several sources are pointing out a Reuters interview last week with Peter Swinburn, head of MolsonCoors. In that interview, Swinburn suggests that while he considers his company to be a “buyer,” he doesn’t discount the notion that MolsonCoors could be a takeover target. He further remarked that “SABMiller, Molson’s partner in the MillerCoors joint venture, would be a natural fit as a buyer.” While going on to say he doesn’t believe that will happen, this is, after all, how these types of things begin. A rumor that’s denied and discounted by all involved parties becoming a reality is nothing new, so you never know. Currently SABMiller is the 2nd largest global beer company and MolsonCoors in sixth. Though a merger wouldn’t eclipse A-B InBev at the top spot, it would move them closer together. Only time will tell.