Monday’s ad is for Heineken. It’s not particularly old, but I chose it because today in 1867 the cornerstone was laid for the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam. The campaign’s theme, done by the ad agency JWT, was “Made to Entertain.” As much as I don’t care for the taste of Heineken, they are masters of marketing.
The first is a stack of pizza boxes, made to resemble a Heineken keg.
The second is a stack of compact discs.
Today’s work of art was painted in 2007 by LC Neill, a North Carolina artist. She does a small painting every day, and this is one of them. It’s formal title is Two Will Do, though it’s also known as Heineken Beer Caps. It’s a 5″x 5″ oil painting.
Here’s what Lori Neill says about the painting:
This was an extremely challenging piece for me as I found the lettering to be a lot of work. You would be surprised how much you learn about a bottle cap after drawing it and painting it with this level of detail.
I loved the contrast of the deep green with the bright red graphic star, and ultimately wanted the finished painting to have a creative feel to it. One beer cap is lying face down and the other is standing inside the first one. They are sitting on a highly reflective surface. I hope you enjoy it!
There’s a short biography at her website, where you can also see a number of her other paintings. You can also see many more of her “daily paintings” at Still Rivers Studios and at Daily Painters.
Today work of art is a return to the old masters, a place we haven’t been for some time now. The artist is Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn better known simply as Rembrandt, one of history’s most famous artists. Today’s painting is officially known as “Portrait of the Artist with his Wife Saskia” though more commonly as “The Prodigal Son” or “The Prodigal Son in the Tavern.” It was painted in 1635 and currently resides in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) in Dresden, Germany. I was fortunate enough to see the original when I was there visiting the Radeberger brewery a few years ago.
In the painting, Rembrandt painted himself hoisting a flute of beer high in the air, with his wife, Saskia, seated on his lap. Set in a tavern, she is dressed as a courtesan while Rembrandt is dressed richly, indulging in his whim and squandering his resources. The painting depicts the Biblical scene from Luke, as explained on Olga’s Gallery:
Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). A man divided his estate between his two sons. The younger went off, squandered his portion in riotous living and was finally, in poverty, reduced to tending a farmer’s pigs. He returned home penitently and was joyfully received by his father who said “My boy, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” (Luke 15:31). This parable, which teaches the virtues of repentance and forgiveness, is most often represented in art.
You can read more about Rembrandt’s life in the biography at the Rembrandt Painting website, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Web Museum. You can also see more of his work at Complete Catalogue of Rembrandt van Rijn’s Paintings and A Web Catalogue of Rembrandt Paintings.
Vincent Van Gogh is justly famous for his later works, where he used bold swaths of color to create amazing paintings that (though not in his lifetime) shattered the art world. Paintings like Starry Night, Sunflowers and Wheat Field with Crows. Most of his most well-known works stem from the last few years of his life, which ended in July of 1890.
But before that, his work was darker, less colorful and he created three paintings with a mug or bottle of beer, between 1881-85, before he moved to Paris the following year and all hell broke loose, color-wise. The painting I like best of these is Beer Tankards, which was done between September and October of 1885 when Van Gogh was in Nuenen (in the northern part of The Netherlands). It’s currently one of the works at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Beer Tankards was done a few months after his father passed away in March and these works were dark, such as The Potato Eaters, one of his first major works. Though it’s nearly monochromatic, I like the composition of it, the way he’s seemingly haphazardly strewn the three tankards on what presumably a wooden table. Their positioning is, of course, quite deliberate.
The first time Van Gogh used a beer mug with four years earlier, in 1881’s Still Life with Beer Mug and Fruit. During this time the artist depicted “only the meager and homely possessions of the very poor: their basic foodstuffs, their rough earthenware crockery and thick bottles of beer set out clumsily on plain tables against dark backgrounds.” That’s Naomi E. Maurer’s description in her book, The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom.
He revisited the same thing three years later, in 1884 (a year before Beer Tankards) when he painted Still Life with Pottery, Beer Glass and Bottle. This one’s probably the least known, and for me it’s easy to see why. It seems too crowded and composition suffers as a result. Also, it’s very rough, not just impressionistic but less polished or finished.
In the last year of his life, Van Gogh returned once more to painting drinking, though as Rick Lyke points out, he was copying “a woodblock print by Honore Daumier titled “Physiology of the Drinker, The Four Ages.” The painting depicts a youth and three men gathered around a table, tankards in hand, with a pitcher at the ready for refills.” The painting is at the Art Institute of Chicago.
For more about Vincent Van Gogh, Wikipedia is a good place to start, though there’s even more at the Vincent Van Gogh Gallery. There are also tons of links at the ArtCyclopedia.
Yesterday’s World Cup match between the Netherlands and the Ivory Coast must have been quite a spectacle. As widely reported, over a thousand Dutch ticket holders arrived wearing orange lederhosen bearing the name of a Dutch brewery. Read that sentence again. Notice anything strange about it? Because it’s exactly the way this story has been reported by all but one or two news organizations. What’s missing is the name of the brewery, which was Bavaria NV. As revealed by IPKat, “For the record, most media – presumably because they benefit handsomely from Budweiser’s vast advertising budget – coyly refuse to tell us the identity of this Dutch upstart.”
So anyway, over a thousand Dutch fans show up wearing orange lederhosen with the beer brand name Bavaria on them. Dutch soccer fans traditionally don all things orange before games of their beloved “Oranje,” which is the nickname of the Netherlands national team and the distinctive color of their uniforms. So there’s nothing necessarily odd in that, and this is, after all, the biggest soccer tournament on the planet. But officials at the stadium in Stuttgart ordered them to remove their lederhosen or they would not be allowed to enter the stadium to see the game, despite having paid for their tickets. The majority simply removed them and went into the match and watched it in their underwear.
You can buy your own pair of orange lederhosen at the Bavaria online shop. They only cost about eight bucks, plus shipping. Or you can buy a twelve-pack and get a free pair. “The idea is supposed to be a gentle mockery of the Germans’ penchant for real lederhosen during the World Cup period. The lederhosen also feature a tail and a lion motif — the national symbol of Holland. So far over 250,000 pairs of lederhosen have flown off the shelves and they have become a cult item among Dutch soccer fans.”
Given that the lederhosen have long been available from the brewery and they are perfect for the rabid soccer fan, I don’t really see the problem. Go to any football game in the U.S. and you’ll see countless fans wearing their team’s colors in all manner of available merchandising paraphenalia. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine in a succesful marketing promotion many people wearing the same item to a game. In a stadium the size of Stuttgart’s (seating is 52,000) is a thousand people wearing the same team promotional item really that hard to believe?
Even if it is to hard for you to believe, so what if the brewery gave away the lederhosen or made it very easy to obtain them? Companies have been doing that since Adam Smith first used his invisible hand to avoid a “hand ball” foul. If more of them actually wore them to a game than anticipated, they should be pleased as punch, and FIFA and sponsor Anheuser-Busch should shut the hell up about it. That’s just the market for you.
But that’s not what they did, of course. Instead, they took a different tack.
“Anheuser Busch’s Budweiser is the official beer for the tournament and world soccer’s governing body fiercely protects its sponsors from brands which are not FIFA partners. Markus Siegler, FIFA’s director of communications, said at its daily media briefing yesterday that the governing body was alert to the kind of ‘ambush’ marketing Bavaria had attempted.
From the Yahoo UK article:
“Of course, FIFA has no right to tell an individual fan what to wear at a match, but if thousands of people all turn up wearing the same thing to market a product and to be seen on TV screens then of course we would stop it.
“I don’t know exactly about what happened in Stuttgart, but it seems like an organised attempt to conduct a mass ambush publicity campaign was taking place.”
Peer Swinkels of the Dutch brewery told Reuters by telephone it was “absolutely ridiculous” and “far too extreme” to order the fans to take off their lederhosen and said the brewery had complained to FIFA.
“I understand that FIFA has sponsors but you cannot tell people to strip off their lederhosen and force them to watch a game in their underpants. That is going too far.”
Also from IPKat:
Said FIFA: “Anyone can wear whatever they want, but if a company tries to carry out ambush marketing, FIFA must prevent that happening. In common with the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and UEFA, we do not tell individual supporters what to wear, but … FIFA has already won a court case against a beer manufacturer who tried this sort of thing”.
What this means is “Anyone can wear whatever they want, if FIFA says so”.
American beer Budweiser and Germany’s Bitburger are thus the only beers that can be sold, or even worn by spectators, in the 12 World Cup stadiums. The IPKat wonders what FIFA would have done, had the offending garments been t-shirts worn by thousands of young ladies.
PR Professional John Cass had this to say about how the incident will likely effect Anhesuer-Busch:
I think FIFA just created a public relations disaster for Anheuser-Busch by requiring 1,000 Dutch football supporters to remove their trousers when entering an international football match.
FIFA thought that the bright orange trousers represented a “marketing ambush” tactic. FIFA officials blocked entry to the stadium of any Dutch fans wearing the trousers, rather than miss the game 1,000 fans took off their trousers and watched the match in their underwear.
I think the FIFA officials have lost sight of the boundaries between business and common decency. As for Anheuser-Busch, I would not want to be the PR Manager today. This sort of protection of Anheuser-Busch’s sponsorship by FIFA surely cannot be endorsed by the company, otherwise Anheuser-Busch will be remembered this World Cup as company that took 1,000 Dutchmen’s pants away from them.
FIFA might be right that the Dutch company’s marketing tactic ambushed the World Cup stadium. But in the end what matters most in marketing terms is how a company’s brand it perceived through its marketing efforts. I’ve been searching through the web this evening, and it’s not looking good for Anheuser-Busch. Most comments are from Europe, and the majority of the posts are either incredulous or negative about the incident, for Anheuser-Busch:
I say “tough luck corporate sponsors”, money shouldn’t be able to buy the right to subject people to this kind of indignity. At the very least these people should have been offered alternative netherwear. In fact I think they should sue the sponsor who insisted on this and campaign to boycott their wares. So watch out Budweiser, I’m off Bud now (Nouslife Blog).
Where’s all this World Cup goodwill?
… and I always thought it wasn’t the winning that was important, but the taking part (No Offence Intended).
The PR disaster that is Budweiser’s sponsorship of the World Cup gets worse (CMM News).
The Netherlands beat Ivory Coast 2-1. I think I’ll be rooting for them in their next match, which of course I’ll be watching wearing nothing but my underwear with a nice cold Bavaria Beer by my side.