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23-year-old Todd Nopp says he usually changes Photo: Marc Rosenblatt |
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Also see the sidebar to this story: Miller’s Man. Josh Feit interviews indie musician Alan Sutherland about his role in the Miller campaign |
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"It's a reality from Beer World. It's part of beer--you get beer breath. It's something Bud would never say." --Steve Sandoz, W&K creative director |
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Details magazine is planning a feature article on W&K's Miller Genuine Draft campaign for its August issue.
Boasting Fortune 500 clients like Nike, Microsoft and Coke, W&K posted earnings of $63 million off client billings of $525 million in 1996, according to Advertising Age. In its June 16 issue, Time identified Wieden & Kennedy as "the most widely recognized" of the "Off-Madison Avenue hot spots."
Nearly 50 percent of Spin magazine readers are under 21, according to Business Week. Spin is one of the publications running Wieden & Kennedy's full-page Miller Genuine Draft ads.
Nationally, microbrews make up 2.5 percent of the beer market. In Oregon, microbrew market share is between 9 and 10 percent.
The beer market is worth an estimated $50 billion in retail sales, according to Beer Marketer's Insights.
Negativland's Mark Hosler told Willamette Week, |
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Miller isn't the only large company that went looking for a new ad agency. Companies from Bayer aspirin to Domino's Pizza to Taco Bell Corp. to GTE Corp. all changed agencies
Average Americans devote roughly a year of their lives to watching television commercials, according to the Center for the Study of Commercialism.
Miller Genuine Draft, Miller's flagship brand, is seventh on the list of best-selling American beers. Bud is number one.
"Advertisers are correctly recognizing the cynicism of their audience and joining them in their cynicism. It's a nod and wink strategy." --Sut JhallyMiller Lite is the third-best-selling of its beers, while the once-popular Miller High Life has fallen off the map--the company doesn't even have a commercial campaign to promote High Life.
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It’s still your father’s beer, but these sure as hell aren’t your old man’s beer ads. From the heart of microbrew land, the boys at Weiden and Kennedy are using anti-advertising to pitch Miller Genuine Draft to a new generation of macro-brew drinkers. |
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By Josh Feit, jfeit@wweek.com |
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All over America, companies want people like 23-year-old Todd Nopp--badly. Not because the recent Reed College graduate has a 4.0 grade point average or a degree in chemical engineering--he doesn't. Rather, he and his peers, who can be found hanging out in Southeast Portland's Bar of the Gods, are one of the most sought-after consumer demographics on the planet. "It's something every marketer will tell you," says Jim Arndorfer, a researcher at Advertising Age magazine. "Younger consumers have been sucked away from mainstream products. And [mainstream brands] want them back." Good luck. Nopp is part of the most media-savvy and cynical generation in history, one that has been bombarded with advertising since it was in Muppets Hugaroo diapers. It's a generation that has seen Burger King and Mountain Dew logos seep into classrooms and onto public school buses. A generation that has seen Nike Swooshes find their way onto high-school basketball uniforms. Today's young adults are bombarded with some 3,600 commercial images each day, according to the now-defunct Washington, D.C.-based Center for the Study of Commercialism. That's more than twice the number their parents' generation saw. Nopp says he's so fed up with ads that he's taken to tearing the advertisements out of his roommate's magazines. "Every other page is an ad," he complains. In November, the job of grabbing this cynical generation's attention was given to Portland-based Wieden & Kennedy, a nationally recognized advertising agency with a successful history of casting a line into youth culture, reeling in attitudes and sensibilities, repackaging them as advertisements and casting the line back out as bait to hook the elusive twentysomething crowd. "[This generation] has been schmoozed and hyped to death their whole lives," says Steve Sandoz, Wieden & Kennedy's creative director. "But we're not your typical schmooze-you-hype-you agency. We want people to have an emotional connection to the ads." Wieden & Kennedy's latest challenge: selling Miller Genuine Draft, one of America's most mainstream beer brands, and one whose market share has settled to the bottom of the barrel. This is bad news in an industry where brands rarely, if ever, come back after losing favor with consumers. After 18 years of using the same ad agency--Bates USA of New York--Miller Brewing Co., a division of Philip Morris, showed up on Wieden & Kennedy's doorstep. The goal was to reach Miller's target market--21- to 24-year-olds. "We needed an agency that understood that target really well," Miller Genuine Draft senior product manager Bruce Winterton told Willamette Week. "Our market researchers went out and asked 20-year-olds what ads move them and speak to them," Winterton said, "and they always mention Nike and ESPN [W&K accounts]. Well, we said to ourselves, let's get that agency--let's go to where the source is." In the past six months, Wieden & Kennedy has created an ad campaign that has revived a dying brand. More importantly, the agency has made the most mainstream of commodities appeal to a generation that prefers "alternative" products. In the process, W&K has refined advertising for the '90s. The short version is that sales of Miller Genuine Draft have rocketed since W&K took over the account, climbing from $1.6 billion last year to an estimated $2 billion this year. "They have substantially improved the trend," says Benj Steinman, editor of Beer Marketer's Insights, an industry newsletter in New York. "They're up 10 percent in supermarket sales alone in just one year. That's substantial. That's a big turnaround." Steinman says there are three reasons for Miller Genuine Draft's recent success. First, the giant brewer has stopped focusing on its smaller brands, such as Red Dog. Second, the company slashed prices by 3 percent. Third, he says, there are "those new commercials." Winterton agrees with Steinman about the commercials. "In some of our bigger markets, like California, we haven't slashed prices," Winterton says, "and sales are up. In our core markets our sales are up less due to pricing than to advertising." Winterton should fly back to Portland and thank Jeff Kling. Kling, 30, had been writing scripts for radio in New York before he move to Portland last year to take a job as a copy writer for Wieden & Kennedy. Alternating between pensive and explosive, reserved and cocky, Kling talks loud and fast. Every other word is a curse, as in: "There's no fucking reason for Bud to be selling 38 fucking million barrels and for Miller to be selling 9 million. That's bullshit. Complete bullshit." |
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Wieden & Kennedy ad boys Jeff Williams, Jeff Kling and John Boiler (left to right) say they drink Miller Beer and like it. |
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In November, Kling and three other Wieden & Kennedy staffers were given the task of resuscitating Miller. "They came to us with a cry for help," says Kling's co-worker Jeff Williams. Wieden & Kennedy's research was, in many ways, typical for an ad agency. They became familiar with the product, looked at what the company had been doing with its previous advertising, visited Miller Brewing in Milwaukee and analyzed market-research data. Kling and his team also did some atypical market research. For starters, they subscribed to low-brow magazines designed to appeal to the testosterone humor of macho beer-swillers. They also test-marketed Miller at some impromptu focus groups. "I showed up at this party," Kling says, "with two cases of Miller beer, and this mountain biker guy, this fucking Oregon cliché beer-snob idiot, starts ridiculing me for bringing that kind of beer to the party." From his perch in the microbrew capital of the nation, Kling saw potential for a backlash. He says the defining moment of his team's research came when colleague John Boiler went to the Green Room, a blues bar on Northwest 23rd Avenue. "Boiler was looking at the list of beers there, and he's like, 'Do you have any just kind of normal beers?' And the waitress said, 'I know. You know, every once in a while you just want a normal, American beer.'" "People have been taking beer way too fucking seriously," Kling says. "Miller is just a big-ass American beer." Wieden & Kennedy's Miller Genuine Draft campaign debuted on TV during the NBA All-Star game in February, with a corresponding insert in Sports Illustrated. The campaign includes 12 TV commercials and two-page ads in Spin, Rolling Stone and other magazines. Miller spends $200 million a year on advertising, although W&K wouldn't reveal the dollar amount of this particular media campaign. The TV commercials are shot at a few different sets (a trailer park in California, a brewery in Milwaukee, a bowling alley and a pool party in LA). They have several things in common. They're in grainy black-and-white and occasionally slip out of focus. Some of the actors aren't conventionally attractive. The cast includes seniors, pierced grungesters and minorities. There's no dialogue--instead, there are random splices of curious music, over-the-top crooning, jagged guitar and catchy tape-loop pop ("Miller's Man," page 23). The camera finds people lounging around, flirting, jumping in a pool. It's playful and goofy. The ad copy plays the "anti-elitist" trump card. "It's Time to Drink Beer Imported All the Way from Milwaukee." "It's Time to Stop Reading the Label and Drink Some Beer." "It's Time for Beer to Quit Acting Like Wine." "It's Time to Shut Up and Drink Some Beer." "It's Time for Beer that Doesn't Belong on the Same Shelf as Bottled Water." "It's Time for a Good Old Macrobrew." The ad in widest circulation features a multicultural cast of hipsters clowning at a trailer park, pressing their lips against the camera lens and blowing. "It's Time for Better Beer Breath." W&K creative director Sandoz refers to the "Beer Breath" spot as a "realistic beer moment." "Beer breath," he says. "It's a reality from Beer World. It's part of beer--you get beer breath. It's something Bud would never say--they have these Disney-like ads with frogs while we're trying to do stuff that's relevant to real beer drinkers." "I think the simplicity of this piece is great," Sandoz wrote in a memo to Wieden & Kennedy partner Susan Hoffman. "They've made 'It's Miller Time' mean 'It's time for a no-bullshit beer.'" "These are the first ads in the beer category that are realistic about the way people drink beer," he told WW. "We were trying to get away from all this fake poseur stuff that's been beer advertising. You just have real people enjoying themselves." "The Wieden & Kennedy ads are definitely getting noticed," says Advertising Age's Arndorfer, "because they dirty up the picture of the well-lit, glamorous beer ads of the past. They're unusual for what you see on TV right now." Arndorfer says the W&K beer ads break out of the traditional mold in order to attract 21- to 35-year-old consumers, who "aren't carried away by traditional images anymore. These ads speak their language." Local ad man Pierre Ouellette, a partner at KVO Advertising, agrees. "The ads are funky and gritty, and they reach out across the gap to the common man by celebrating ordinary things," he says. "It's sort of like a populist revolution in advertising." The brilliance--and the absurdity--of the Miller Genuine Draft campaign may be the fact that the ads aspire to be something other than ads. "Our ads cease to be advertising," Kling says with a straight face. "It goes beyond the hackneyed realm of hyping product benefits. Advertising is supposed to be a pack of lies. We tell the truth." Sut Jhally, professor of communications at University of Massachusetts in Amherst and author of the 1992 book Codes of Advertising, is troubled by Miller's slick commercials. He says the Miller Genuine Draft commercials are part of a new form of advertising that emerged in the '90s--a form of advertising that W&K helped create with its Nike ads. Jhally calls the trend "anti-advertising advertising"--marketing that makes fun of advertising as a way to, well, sell products. "This is the new form that commercial culture is taking," Jhally says. "Advertisers are correctly recognizing the cynicism of their audience and joining them in their cynicism. It's a nod and a wink strategy that says, 'We're all hip.'" Traditionally, anti-ads are defiant or comically self-conscious about being an ad. Classic examples are Sprite's "Image is Nothing, Thirst is Everything" slogan or Nike's commercial where the infamous anti-establishment icon William Burroughs made fun of himself for doing an ad--while doing an ad. According to Leslie Savan, who for more than 10 years has written a regular advertising column for the Village Voice, W&K's Miller Genuine Draft commercials refine the anti-ad ad. "Rather than attacking advertising or making fun of it out loud," she says, "these ads thoroughly drench themselves in the trappings of anti-commercial culture. They are awash in it. There are average-looking people. Fat people. Old people. There are kids with pierced belly buttons. There's underground music. They're low-key." "Rather than telling the audience that the ad is an anti-ad," Savan says, "it shows you that it's an anti-ad." This, she says, is far more powerful--and insidious--because when people learn by being shown rather than told something, "it seeps in much deeper." Kling is well aware of Savan's criticism. He thinks she has it all wrong. "Rather than sell, sell, sell," he insists, W&K advertisements simply connect activities like running and partying to the client's product, creating an emotional bond for the consumer between activity and product. "If in the process we happen to demonstrate, as in Nike's case, that sports are cool," he says, "I won't apologize." Wieden & Kennedy's aggressive strategy to craft "anti-commercials" reached a level of absurdity earlier this spring when the agency contacted Mark Hosler. Hosler is the brains behind a San Francisco-based self-described "media guerrilla" music group called Negativland, known for mocking the commercialism that saturates American culture. Negativland's latest release is a singlecalled "Truth in Advertising." It features the voices of panicky callers on a consumer hotline asking questions about impulse buying. Asking Hosler to work on a TV commercial is like asking Andrea Dworkin to pose for Hustler, or Bill Sizemore to collect signatures for a property-tax increase. It violates the basic laws of the universe. Jeff Kling tried it anyway. "We love you guys," Kling told Hosler over the phone after barraging him with e-mails and faxes requesting his help on the Miller campaign. "I asked them," Hosler later told WW, "'Do you really listen to what we do? Can't you tell that we're in opposition to the world you're creating?'" "It was depressing," Hosler says. "What we do is about tearing that world down. [Wieden & Kennedy] are the blob that we are shooting arrows into. Here they were, trying to absorb us. I was depressed that they even thought to call me." In an attempt to convince W&K that it was absurd to pursue Negativland, Hosler says he told Kling about the group's upcoming record: a harsh sendup of Pepsi commercials. According to Hosler, Kling said, "Oh, Pepsi. That's BBDO [a New York ad agency], that's their account. They're evil. They're the bad guys." Hosler was stunned to discover that W&K had divided the ad world into "good guys" and "bad guys." "I said to them," Hosler recalls, "'You guys all do the same thing. I don't see a whole lot of difference.'" The folks at W&K, however, do see a difference. Kling points to an episode from the Miller campaign he thinks distinguishes W&K from other agencies. Last December, Kling was in Milwaukee, presenting the MGD ads to Miller. Representatives from Fallon McElligott, the Minneapolis ad agency heading a separate Miller Lite campaign, were there as well. "Presenting across from Fallon--that was the best illustration of how different we are," Kling told WW. "We looked like a bunch of guys who just walked in from high school--jeans, T-shirts, outdoor gear--and Fallon was over there in these Armani suits," his co-worker Williams adds. It's hardly surprising that advertisers who focus on twentysomethings would dress down. What's surprising, however, is their level of denial about what they're doing. Nothing bothers ad-copy writer Kling more than advertising itself. "There's a lot of marketing bullshit," he says abruptly, referring to Miller's 10-year campaign hyping "cold-filtered" beer, with scenes of snow and girls in bikinis. "A lot of stuff you can't trust. Miller's old ads wanted me to believe that their beer actually tasted colder than other beer. Oh yeah, I believe that. And I'm fucking stupid." The new Miller Genuine Draft ads, he says, are different. "To say, 'It's time for better beer breath,'" Kling says, "that's giving people a peek behind the curtain. Somebody else might have taken an approach with this beer, 'We should probably try to tell people that we really taste good and stuff.' Bullshit! You know, this is what we are. At the end of the fucking day if you drink a bunch of these things, you're gonna reek. And we're just breaking it down to that real-life level." Real-life or not, the commercials are certainly turning heads. Bar of the Gods regular Nopp admits that the Miller Genuine Draft ads have broken through his anti-commercial antennae. "It's sort of disgusting how much I enjoy looking at those ads," he says. "But at least there's something interesting to look at on TV." Nopp says he's drawn to the "cheap looking" film and the low-budget font. Shilla Kim, a 22-year-old recent college graduate and Bar of the Gods patron, says: "Those commercials dignify Miller with a true grit image." Kling's got their attention. And in the slick world of advertising, that's half the battle. |
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