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Heineken Amnesia

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I came across this on Ad Punch, a blog about advertising. The post is about a new ad campaign by Heineken in India with fake news stories pasted to Heineken bottles about the supposed lengths people would go to actually drink Heineken beer. It still amazes me how powerful advertising is when it creates the perception that something as awful tasting as Heineken is considered a premium beer. So the first ad in the series really cracked me up. Here it is below.
 

 

Because in my opinion you’d have to have amnesia to drink Heineken willingly. Perhaps after drinking one it might give you amnesia. I certainly can’t remember any good reasons why anyone with or without amnesia would have one. There are other ads as well, which you can see on Ad Punch, but this one had me in stitches.

Paging Doctor Obvious

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health
My friend, Stan, over at Beer Therapy already mentioned this New York Times article yesterday, but I wanted to add my two cents, though knowing me it will be more like three or four cents.

The Times’ piece is about a recent M.I.T. graduate student’s paper “Try It, You’ll Like It: The Influence of Expectation, Consumption and Revelation on Preferences for Beer,” which will be published in this month’s Psychological Sciences, a scientific journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Leonard Lee, who has now received his PhD and is teaching at Columbia, along with research assistants Shane Frederick and Dan Ariely, conducted experiments in which they sought to discover whether tasting beer blind or knowing something about the beer changes people’s perceptions of it.

From the Times article:

[The researchers] found that they could change beer drinkers’ taste preferences by telling them about a secret ingredient in a beer before they drank it.

In previous studies, psychologists had found that putting brand labels on containers of beer, soft drinks and other products tended to enhance people’s subjective ratings of quality. But the new experiment demonstrates that this preference involves more than simple brand loyalty. It changes the experience of taste itself.

“It’s a clean demonstration that what we think is going into our mouth actually changes what we taste, down to the level of the taste buds themselves,” said Michael Norton, an assistant professor of business administration in the marketing department of the Harvard Business School who did not take part in the research.

To which my initial reaction is simply, “duh!” Having been tasting beer both openly and blind for many years, it’s only too obvious that knowing what the beer is or even knowing something about it changes your reaction to it. Not to throw vinegar in this “research,” but did they expect a different result than what experience and indeed common sense would have predicted? I say vinegar, because that’s what the researchers used when giving subjects two beers, one normal and one laced with a small amount of balsamic vinegar. When tasters didn’t know which one had the vinegar, 60% chose the modified beer as their favorite. But when they were told in advance which one had vinegar in it, that number dropped almost in half, to around 33%.

Dr. Lee said that the study showed that the experience of taste involved not only the sensation of a blend of ingredients, but also the “top-down” influence of expectations. Previous research with brain imaging had shown that expectations could change the trace of activity of people’s brains when tasting drinks.

Having experienced this phenomenon first-hand both in myself and others, it just seems incredibly self-evident. I would have been truly shocked to learn the opposite was true, because who wouldn’t think that objectivity is compromised or at least altered by knowing something about what we’re tasting? Why do you think we evaluate beer by tasting it blind, for chrissakes? For competitions in which beer is critically judged, it is always, always, always done blind precisely in an effort to remove as much prejudice from the process as possible, so I don’t see what this study is telling us that we don’t already know. And not just kind of, sort of know, but for which we have centuries of experience so that we really know. This knowledge forms the basis for how we judge beer and indeed probably how everything involving the ephemeral qualities of taste is judged in an effort to be as objective as humanly possible.

So maybe I’m being my usual curmudgeonly self here, but despite Dr. Lee’s protestations to the contrary, it seems to me he did get M.I.T. to foot his bar bill. I don’t see how his findings tell us anything new. I know it made the papers because it’s unusual for beer to be the subject of “serious” research at any level. If this same study had been done using juice or water or almost anything non-alcoholic we would likely never have heard about it. There are fifteen articles in the same issue of the Psychological Sciences Journal, yet this is the only one meriting a mention in the New York Times. Why didn’t “Sex Differences in Intellectual Performance: Analysis of a Large Cohort of Competitive Chess Players” or “The Neglect of Musicians: Line Bisection Reveals an Opposite Bias” get any ink? They both sound interesting to me.

But, okay, I’ll climb down off of my tall equestrian mount. While I’m certainly glad to keep seeing more and more attention paid to beer by the media these days, I continue to be cynical and more than a little suspicious of the motives for its content. Maybe it’s me who needs the psychological evaluation? What do you think?

drink-no-evil

World Series Beer Collectibles

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This will give you some idea how much I don’t follow baseball. Until I read this press release from Anheuser-Busch, I had no idea who won this year’s world series. Apparently it was the St. Louis Cardinals and A-B is doing a commemorative can and magnum bottle.

From the press release:

The commemorative 46.5-ounce magnum bottle features the Cardinals 2006 World Series Champions logo on the front, with a summary of the World Series on the back label. The World Series magnum is sold individually in a red and blue box featuring the Cardinals and World Series Champions logos. The 16-ounce Budweiser aluminum bottle features the Cardinals 2006 World Series Champions logo and lists the years of each of the Cardinals 10 titles. The aluminum bottle is sold in 15-packs of specially labeled Budweiser cases featuring images of the Cardinals World Series bottles.

Both will be available in liquor, grocery and convenience stores in the greater St. Louis metro area — the magnum bottle as early as this weekend, and the aluminum bottle starting mid-next week. Both bottles will be reintroduced in March, when they will be more widely available as the city gears up for the 2007 Major League baseball season.

And an AP story added:

A 46.5-ounce magnum bottle will include the Cardinals 2006 World Series Champions logo on the front and a summary of the World Series on the back. Also available is a 16-ounce aluminum bottle featuring the championship logo and a list of the 10 championship years for the Cardinals. Among all baseball teams, only the New York Yankees have won more World Series titles.

The Cardinals won only 83 regular-season games but won the World Series in five games over Detroit. It was their first championship in 24 years.

Though Anheuser-Busch sold the Cardinals to the current ownership group more than a decade ago, the brewery and the team remain closely connected. The new ballpark that opened this year is named Busch Stadium thanks to a naming-rights agreement. The old advertising jingle “Here Comes the King” still stirs the crowd during rallies.

Unfortunately, just like their Millennium magnum and other collectible bottles, inside will still be just Budweiser and not a special brew made for the occasion.

We Report. You Decide.

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We report. You decide.

In the little town of Plaistow, New Hampshire, an elderly couple has been putting a nativity scene on their front lawn for over thirty years. The other night someone stole the plastic baby Jesus and replaced it with a can of Bud Select.

UPDATE 12.12: According to the Boson Globe, the plastic baby Jesus was returned this morning. No word on whether they took back the beer can.

Fifty-Year Old Coors Found in California Dessert

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This was an odd little story out of Tennessee about some hikers who found a case of Coors that’s fifty-years old in the California dessert near San Diego, at the scene of a famous train wreck known as the “Coors Wreck.” The television station’s website, WBIR Channel 10, includes a link to a video report. In the report they show them opening and pouring out the contents of the beer. It’s interesting to see how it looks after being exposed to harsh temperatures for a half century. One odd thing in the story, however, is the interviewee seems to imply that the find was not made all that recently so I’m not exactly sure what made it news now. Anyway, it’s still fun to see it opened.

A fifty-year old can of Coors.

Beer Goes Wireless

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Heineken and IBM, along with a few other companies, have partnered together to test wireless tracking of beer shipments. Dubbed “The Living Beer Lab,” the scheme will allow Heineken to know the exact location of any shipment of its beer, even in the middle of the ocean, using “triangulation techniques of both satellites and cellular base stations to locate exactly where the cargo is.”

The first test is currently underway, with ten containers of Heineken in the water and in transit from both the Netherlands and Great Britain en route to the United States.

According to ZDNet UK, “Integration has been completed with IBM WebSphere service oriented architecture (SOA) to maintain a paperless trail of the beer’s journey from customs in Europe through US customers and into the distribution centre on the other side of the Atlantic. The process will eliminate the need to fill in up to 30 documents on each journey, and could vastly decrease the amount of time the beer spends in transit.”

Here’s a more thorough explanation of how it all works, complete with impenetrable business jargon from The Retail Bulletin:

IBM’s Secure Trade Lane solution will provide real-time visibility and interoperability through an advanced wireless sensor platform and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), based on IBM’s WebSphere platform. The project’s SOA, called the Shipment Information Services, leverages the EPCglobal network and EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) standards, so rather than build and maintain a large central database with huge amounts of information, distributed data sources are linked, allowing data to be shared in real time between Heineken, Safmarine and customs authorities in the Netherlands, England and The United States.

In this project, Safmarine will ship ten containers of Heineken beer from locations in both Netherlands and England, through their Customs Authorities, to the Heineken distribution center in United States. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will coordinate the project and provide best practices documentation to share across the European Union.

“The Beer Living Lab is setting a roadmap for the next generation e-Customs solutions. We test innovative solutions, based on IBM’s Tamper Resistant Embedded Controller (TREC) and SOA developed by IBM that could revolutionize customs,” said Dr. Yao-Hua Tan, professor of Electronic Business, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “Companies using these solutions could benefit greatly due to less physical inspections by customs; thus these e-customs solutions greatly facilitate international trade.”

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, more than 30 different documents are associated with one single container crossing a border, which equals roughly five billion documents annually. The findings of the project will provide a viable alternative to manufacturers, shippers, retailers and customs administrations as they look to move to a paperless trade environment. Once accepted and implemented widely, paperless trade will support initiatives such as Green Lane, which will eliminate most inspections on arrival, thus significantly speeding up ocean fright shipments and improving the profit margins for shippers.

“Because efficient collaboration is a paramount requirement to making this work, IBM built the Shipment Information Services to address interoperability. If governments around the world are serious about electronic customs and paperless trade, they need to encourage each country to adopt open standards environments to enable collaboration and data sharing throughout the trade lane,” said Stefan Reidy, Manager, Secure Trade Lane, IBM. “The Beer Living Lab project is the first step in building the Intranet of Trade, which will help to substantially improve efficiency and security in the global supply chain.”

Now if only they’d stop using those green bottles that result in Heineken being such a skunked beer most of the time.

Giving the Bishop the Finger

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Did you know sex sells? Yeah, me neither. The late comedian and social critic Bill Hicks used to say that the advertisement that big business wants to run is simply a photograph of an attractive woman fully naked and the text “Drink Coke” (or any other company’s slogan). Unlike me, he made it sound funny, of course, but the point is that it’s not really a secret that sex is used to sell almost every imaginable kind of product or service. I had a whole semester on this subject in college, where we were even shown the word s-e-x spelled out in an older version of KFC’s Colonel Sanders logo, along with much else.

Among beer advertisements, especially those of the big breweries, sex is a frequent sales tool from the Coors Twins to St. Pauli Girl. A review of older beer ads will quickly reveal that this is not a new phenomenon, either. Many early breweries used attractive women in their advertising. I’m not necessarily opposed to seeing an attractive woman per se, but when it’s used merely to pander to base instincts and outmoded stereotypes then it’s bad for the beer industry, at least in my opinion. Most of the worst examples of this — Miller’s mud wrestling “cat fight” ad was a particularly bad one — essentially take the position that their target audience is all but exclusively male or certainly male enough that they can safely alienate half the total population. And not just any male, but a certain kind of unenlightened male, the ones for whom Jackass, Beavis and Butthead, Dumb and Dumber, and Beerfest are all high art. Does that make me elitist? Maybe, but I’d rather that than see beer’s image continue to be so unceasingly tarnished.

Not surprisingly, that is outmoded thinking, because the demographics of beer are changing and beer drinking among women is on the rise. Some recent studies show that of the total beer consumed in America, women drank 25% of it. And while it may be no surprise that the age group with the most women beer drinkers is 21-30, the number of women drinking beer who are over age 50 is growing significantly.

But I wouldn’t argue that sexual imagery should never be used in advertising (or art or anywhere else). I don’t think that’s the right solution and frankly I don’t think it possible. Despite fundamentalist attempts globally to suppress sexual awareness and expression, it is a potent part of human nature. Without the sexual urge, we might never procreate and continue as a species so it certainly fills a very vital role in the life cycle.

I would suggest, however, that common sense and a sense of perspective and context might be employed in how sexual images are used, not least of which because we’ll never evolve if advertising continues to keep us wallowing (and literally wrestling) in the mud of our basest primal instincts. The people whose products are being advertised in these ways should have a bit more respect for themselves and their product. Why the big beer companies want to associate themselves with mud wrestling, talking frogs, man law, flatulent horses, etc. is beyond me because it does nothing to elevate the image of their product. Interestingly, when Miller tried to change that carefully created image by using the tagline “Beer: Grown Up,” hardly anyone was buying it. USA Today polls showed a majority of people didn’t like the ads and didn’t think they were effective. Despite Terry Haley, the brand manager for Miller Genuine Draft, saying “[w]e believe in what we’re doing, [w]e’re tapping into a true social trend, and we’re going to stay the course,” Miller quickly dropped the ads, and switched ad agencies, who presumably will return to the puerile.

But the other side of this debate is one of easy offense and our willingness to censor should even only a sole complaint be lodged. Advertisers, advertising and the media generally beat a very hasty retreat when faced with criticism, which is a powerful wedge for organizations and individuals with agendas and an axe to grind. (The media, of course, is paid for by advertising — you may think that you are TV, the magazine and the newspaper’s customer but you are not. Their customer is the advertiser.) For years, organizations with a small, minority membership have caused havoc for the rest of us when they cried offense at one imagined slight after the other. The media landscape for a time was (and probably still is) rife with stories of letter writing campaigns from citizen’s groups in which television shows (and other media) were deemed by these yahoos to be too provocative, too sexy, used too much bad language, showed different morals then their own, and on and on. Basically, much like neo-prohibitionist groups, some people cannot rest until the world is remade in their own image, indeed they cannot tolerate any difference of opinion or alternative (to their own) lifestyle being on display, especially if their children might furtively glance longingly at such imagined hedonism. Worse still, entire entertainment programs have been altered, changed or canceled, books have been banned, and songs have been censored all on the basis of a few complaints or even a single complaint. That 299,999,999 people in the U.S. do not complain seems to carry no weight, or at least far less weight than the single whiner who does. This is literally the very opposite of a democracy, in which the desires of the many are circumvented and denied by a tiny handful of individuals, or in some cases a single person.

This is, of course, true of advertising as well. The hue and cry against much advertising is loud and shrill and seems never to cease. And while I may not disagree with all of it — I’m no fan of a lot of advertising — I find truly reprehensible the impulse to inflict one’s beliefs on the rest of society, as if any person could be certain of the one, true moral compass and way to live one’s life. That anyone pays attention to these nutjobs is a sad commentary indeed on the way our world is heading, but that’s a debate for another day and another forum.

What prompted all of what preceded, is an item reported yesterday by the BBC News in an article titled ‘Provocative’ beer ad criticized. According to the report, a complaint was filed with the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, an organization that is paid for by the advertising industry and which acts essentially as an ombudsman. That means that people offended by advertising may file complaints and have their cases adjudicated by the ASA. In this instance, a print ad for Bishop’s Finger, a popular beer brewed by the Shepherd Neame Brewery of Kent, England had a complaint filed against it. The ad that prompted the complaint has been removed from Bishop’s Finger’s website, but here is a similar one:

In the offending one, which apparently ran in the magazine Time Out, the woman was seated on a bale of hay and the text read, “I love a good session on the Bishops Finger.” And here are all seven print ads, after the offending one was quickly removed. The name “Bishop’s Finger” has it’s origin in the “ancient finger-shaped signposts that showed the Pilgrims the way to Canterbury Cathedral” that are unique to the Kent area of southeastern England.

It is overtly sexual? Sure. Is it offensive? Not to me, I find it mildly amusing. It does play on the origin of the beer’s name and hearkens back to Chaucer’s time. It uses a pretty obvious double entendre, of course, but it is in context. According to the BBC article, Bishop’s Finger is known for running humorous ads. At least it’s not a scantily clad bikini gal holding a beer for no discernible reason other than to titillate.

The ASA examined the ad for four breaches of the UK’s advertising guidelines and only found that they had violated one, and ruled as follows:

We considered that the text “I love a good session on the Bishops Finger” played on the connotations of drinking and sexual activity. We considered that the woman’s pose was suggestive and concluded that, in combination with the headline text, it was likely to be seen as linking alcohol with seduction and sexual activity.

On this point, the ad breached CAP Code clause 56.9 (Alcoholic drinks).

Here’s 56.9 in its entirety:

Marketing communications must neither link alcohol with seduction, sexual activity or sexual success nor imply that alcohol can enhance attractiveness, masculinity or femininity.

Based on their ruling, the the “Advertising Standards Agency told the beer maker in future to adopt an approach that did not link alcohol with sexual activity.” Okay, I’m sure they’ll get right on that. And given that alcohol and sexual activity are, in fact, linked insofar as sexual activity can be linked with practically anything, I’m not even sure how you could possibly enforce such a perniciously vague standard. Right or wrong, alcohol has been called a “social lubricant” for centuries. That’s one of its roles in society, to pretend otherwise seems dishonest.

But here’s the thing, and perhaps the point of all this — finally — only ONE person in all of England complained about this ad. Only One. Out of a population of more than 60 million people, only ONE person was offended enough to complain. That one person being offended by the ad prompted a full-scale investigation involving who knows how many people, a news article in the BBC, and a major brewer to withdraw an ad from the market. Does that seem reasonable? It sure doesn’t seem so to me. Like many issues of censorship, the person who lodged this complaint could have asked a few friends before starting this ball rolling. Perhaps some friend’s support or non-support might have changed or strengthened their resolve. But even if a 100 people had complained, a hundredfold increase, I would still be skeptical that justice had been served. Perspective has to play in role in looking at issues of censorship and people being offended. I’m sorry this person felt as badly as she (or possibly he, I suppose) claims to have, but that doesn’t mean the whole of England should have to sit up and take notice. Is there anything published in the world today that you couldn’t argue might be offensive to somebody? It’s one thing to be sensitive to the views of others, but quite another to insist the world be inoffensive to all. Every time we pander to such an extreme minority view, however well-intentioned, we fan the flames of intolerance and make it harder for all of us to co-exist. Why can’t we all just have a beer and get along?

Jesus Was a Homebrewer

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jesus-drinks-beer
Many people think that Jesus may have been a homebrewer. I have heard that when the Greeks first translated the bible from ancient Hebrew, that they lacked a word for beer and thus substituted the Greek word for wine in its place, perhaps thinking what difference would it make, an alcoholic drink is an alcoholic drink. I’m not sure this is directly on point, but the article Beer, Barley and [Hebrew symbols] in the Hebrew Bible certainly shows that this would have been quite possible and that there is some confusion about translations of this type for centuries.

So when Jesus turned the water into wine (in the Gospel of John 2:1-11), perhaps he was simply a homebrewer and making beer for the wedding party. It certainly seems more plausible to take vats of water and make beer out them than magically turn one liquid into a completely different one. It’s my understanding that the priests of the day would have been the ones who possessed the knowledge of how to make ancient beer so it follows that Jesus would have known this ancient art, as well. That’s probably why Jamie Floyd’s new Ninkasi Brewing in Eugene, Oregon has “Jesus Was a Homebrewer” printed on the back of his brewery t-shirts. And no less a beer luminary than Michael Jackson has also ruminated on this subject.

But while I’m very open to this possibility and believe it makes far more sense than the conventional story, I gather that many people of a more religious bearing than myself do not look upon this debate with anything but contempt. My understanding of fundamentalism is that many adherents refuse to entertain the idea that mistranslations may have occurred because they believe the translators themselves were divinely inspired and somehow led by the hand of god in their work. Whatever your own take on this theory, it follows that religion and beer are generally not fast friends, notwithstanding many christians do enjoy a pint from time to time. So I was mildly amused when I saw the new ad campaign for this year’s holiday season by the Churches Advertising Network (or CAN), an English group whose mission, in their own words, is to be “an independent, ecumenical group of Christian communicators which exists to provide high quality national Christian advertising campaigns, especially around major festivals, and to provide the means for local churches to share in and receive the benefit of such national campaigns.”

Apparently each year, CAN creates an ad campaign around Christmas to try to bring people back into the fold. “Previous CAN campaigns include a poster depicting Jesus as the revolutionary leader Che Guevara and one suggesting Mary was having a “bad hair day” when she discovered she was pregnant.”

This year’s campaign features a pint glass with the image of Jesus in the Brussels lace stuck to the side of the empty glass and a MySpace.com website for Jesus. CAN chairman Francis Goodwin said he hoped the poster and accompanying radio adverts would spark a debate about religion.

“The message is subtle but simple – where is God in all the boozing at Christmas?” said Goodwin.

“For many, Christmas is just drinking and partying and God is excluded, yet many young people are interested in finding deeper meaning and exploring faith.”

The poster is a nod to the occasional discoveries of holy images in everyday objects, from the face of Jesus in a frying pan, toast or fish finger, his mother Mary on a toasted cheese sandwich and even Mother Teresa in a sticky bun.

jesus-beer-poster

According to the group’s literature, here is their take on this image:

This year’s poster picks up on the current media preoccupation with finding images of Jesus in everything from egg yolks to currant buns. Next to an empty beer glass in which a face can be seen are the words “Where will you find him?” and pointing to the web address myspace.com/isthisjesus.

The poster aims to provoke thought and debate about where and how people find God. The myspace.com webspace will include a link to the rejesus website, which has creative features and reliable information on the Christian faith. Rejesus is supported by all the mainstream UK churches.

So why the image of an empty beer glass? Francis Goodwin, Chair of the Churches Advertising Network (CAN) says: “The message is subtle, but simple: where is God in all the boozing at Christmas? For many, Christmas is about drinking and partying, and God is excluded. Yet many young people are interested in finding deeper meaning and exploring faith. We hope the link to myspace.com will offer a fresh venue for them to discuss their feelings and debate the issues.”

Richard Johnston and Mark Gilmore, who produced the poster at Radioville, the ad agency for the campaign, say…

“We took the traditional silly-season news story in which people find images of Jesus in the side of trees, in a slice of toast or even within the bubbles of cheese on a pizza, and developed a number of new images showing Jesus’ face in unexpected places. Because of the season, CAN chose the beerglass route, where Jesus’ face is captured in the froth running down the side of an empty pint glass. The responses expected on myspace.com when the campaign launches should be quite illuminating.”

Yes, they should be quite “illuminating.” It will quite interesting to see what people say about this. I can’t imagine many American fanatics being very happy about this since so many neo-prohibitionists are also highly religious. One bit of unintentional humor is that when you visit the MySpace page, Jesus has “0” friends. Jesus has no friends? I’m sure that will change shortly, but for now I feel kinda bad for him. Perhaps I should buy him a beer.

Hell for Certain: A Beer … and a Town

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Bluegrass Brewing’s beer, Hell for Certain, has been out before but something caught my eye in a short article about it’s impending re-release (perhaps seasonally) in the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal. It seems the Belgian-style ale is named for an actual town in Leslie County, Kentucky whose name really is “Hell for Certain.” If you were born there, would you assume you were damned from the get go? Are there many churches there? How would you explain to people that you were born in hell? Ah, the possibilities are endless.
 

Terrorists Target Beer Cans

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If they get to our beer then the terrorists win. CBS News reported yesterday that an FBI informant, during a court interrogation in Britain, laid out a plan that had been tested by al Qaeda to poison beer cans and sell them at football (soccer) games. The witness explained how the plan would work. “You just put poison in a syringe, inject it in a beer can and put a sticker on it, which would stop it leaking, and hand them out.” Another reason to drink beer from glass?

Since most of the technical problems of beer in cans have been solved, they’ve slowly started gaining acceptance again, even among beer afficianados. Several craft brewers have been offering their beer in cans, and several more will probably be doing likewise in the coming year. Hopefully, this won’t put the kibosh on can’s comeback.