Here we have the latest ad campaign for the venerable Mille High Life brand. Don't adjust your device; it's mostly black-and-white. But do pay attention, because if you don't, you could miss the dramatic irony.

The idea: You prefer a cheesy rowboat instead of a yacht; you choose smelly rented bowling shoes instead of designer footwear; you live in a humble apartment instead of a penthouse. But since you have plenty of equally un-affluent friends to hang out with, you aren't an ordinary guy trapped in an ordinary existence, doing ordinary things, and drinking ordinary beer. You are actually... rich! 

Scale-wise, down is the new up. Get it?

In service of irony

All this aims to make use of irony, the inverted dramatic technique of displaying one reality, while describing its opposite. The audience is required not just to listen or watch; it must listen and watch. And then appreciate that what's seen and what's heard are intentionally opposite. The viewer is supposed to take all this in, process it, and understand the point. 

Sound like more effort than most people devote to advertising? It is.

When it comes to beer advertising, the audience pays scant attention in the first place. On TV, YouTube, or wherever, ads appear as a mildly annoying interruption to entertainment. Further conspiring against the appreciation of subtle, intellectually involved techniques, ads often appear without sound, as when they're viewed in a crowded bar or some other noisy setting. Few viewers hang on each commercial message. Fewer still invest the mental energy dramatic irony requires. This sort of subtlety in advertising is like an extra sesame seed on a Big Mac. Nobody's gonna notice.

And therein lies just the start of Miller High Life's difficulties.

An element of surprise can be important in advertising. In this case, the surprise is muted at best. The ads show ordinary folks engaged in profoundly unsurprising activities. (Oddly, sister-brand Miller Lite's "celebration of ordinary" ad, reviewed earlier, goes the same route.) In order to deliver on the irony, the only surprising aspect of the sale gets relegated to the audio when, or more accurately, if the viewer listens carefully. 

Setting aside surprise, the ad's irony also conspires against clarity, a must-have element for effective advertising. Employing one message in the video and its opposite in the audio is the antithesis of clear messaging. Sadly, many an ad-agency creative director will choose technique over clarity every time on their personal advertising-preference list. But clients should know better.

It gets still worse.

There is little effort here to register the beer's name, another essential of effective beer advertising. The only name-registration occurs at the very end. And there it's combined with a "Champagne of Beers" reference, but in a way that belittles this historic brand treasure. In the same way as the ad's protagonist proclaims he's rich when he in fact has none of the trappings associated with affluence, so, too, the beer professes to be the "champagne of beers" when--for the irony to work--it must lack such distinctiveness. To "get" the irony, you also have to "get" that Miller High Life is, at best, "the champagne of ordinary."

A flawed ad idea that ends by making a joke of the brand's distinctiveness is an embarrassment. And it won't sell beer.

That the Miller marketing brain trust spent a good deal of the brewery's money producing the ad is its final irony, albeit unintended.

"Where it's from and why it's special" is a time-proven winning strategy for beer brands. Distinctiveness via place + product.

This simple formula's been key to any number of beer-brand successes through the years. From "real gusto" for the beer that made Milwaukee famous, to Leinenkugel's Chippewa Falls locale with its "water from the Big Eddy Spring," a brewery's home linked to its product distinctiveness has powered some amazing brands. And it's still going on. Many of today's most successful craft beers--including the largest of them, Boston's Samuel Adams--follow this path to stunning success.

Lost it

What about BigBeer? Unfortunately, their multiple mega-breweries-- scattered across the country to reduce shipping costs--conspire against employing the "place" half of the winning formula. When you're from everywhere, you're from nowhere. Anheuser-Busch hardly mentions St. Louis, and Miller's old Milwaukee home is, if anything, even more assiduously ignored. On the product side, BigBeer's attempts at selling distinctiveness have been hit-and-miss (hit: Bud's brewed the hard way; miss: Lite's frothy yellowness).

Alone among the largest brands, Coors Light was the exception. The "cold taste of the Rockies" was a real, if slightly hedged, point of geographic and product distinctiveness. The brand employed this strategic communications asset to good effect for many years, passing Miller Lite and Budweiser in the process. (Full disclosure: The author played a role in the creation of this strategy.) But if its latest national ad is any indication, the Silver Bullet has definitely lost its way. 

This isn't advertising; it's little more than a 30-second music video.

There's nothing here to make you want a beer, much less a Coors Light. Maybe a Coke ("The drop that refreshes" being borderline plagiarism). Truly, any beer could run this ad just by substituting its label. And when any beer can run your ad, you've utterly failed as an advertiser. String together enough of these failures--and MillerCoors has seen way more than its share for some time--and heads should roll.

Found it

In the odd yin and yang of beer advertising, debuting at nearly the same moment comes a new campaign from Corona Light... "The light cerveza."

Here is advertising working hard to register distinctiveness by way of a clever product-claim structure. More and less: More taste. More of what matters. Less ordinary. 99 calories. And then: "Less light beer."

Odd as that last bit of wording is, in the context of this advertising, it works. Corona Light actually is less like other light beers. Who else has the lime shown so provocatively here, and the beachy Miami vibe? And what other light beer has Corona Light's place of origin? "Mexico" right on the label, and the repeated use of "cerveza," drive the point. Distinctiveness by way of place + product.

If history's any guide, one of these brands is going places. 

While the other is running music videos.