Go to the Heineken "Open your world" website, select "content" and you'll find an array of the brand's current ads. It's pretty easy to see two very different advertising-information approaches.

Entertainment-as-content

On the one hand, there are the mini-movies in which the beer is quite literally a prop. Its name is never even spoken. Virtually all "the content" is entertainment.

Content-as-content

On the other hand, there are the decidedly minimalistic Neil Patrick Harris ads pitching Heineken Light. The brand is the co-star of the ad. Its distinctiveness is the content! "Heineken" is the first word spoken at the very beginning of the ad. The key focus is on conveying information: the beer's best-tasting-light-beer assertion and a money-back offer to support it.

Image versus product

Two wildly different advertising directions. "High-cinema/zero-product-claim" versus "low-cinema/high-product-claim." Right-brain versus left-brain. Beer-as-prop versus beer-as-star. Why the split personality?

Illustrated here is the decades-old great debate in beer advertising: image-versus-product. The Heineken mini-movies are pure image ads absent any informational content. The hope is any good feelings generated by the entertainment somehow wash over the brand. 

Clients who choose this course buy into a "trust us" promise from the ad-agency folks, the same people whose careers gain most from creating "beautiful film" and calling it advertising. And in virtually every case, the resulting "ad" could be run by any brand in the category, simply by substituting packages and logos. In other words, their mini-movies, however entertaining, are totally ineffective advertising.

Effective advertising always communicates a brand's distinctiveness. That means conveying some differentiating fact that separates the brand from its competition. To be sure, this can be done in an entertaining fashion, but it will never be exclusively entertainment.

Best-tasting light beer + money-back guarantee + an entertaining presenter = effective advertising.

Now that's content.

So, is Heineken learning? Or just conflicted?

Here we have a bunch of new Miller Lite ads with two things in common. First, they're solid entertainment. (We'll get to "second" in a bit.)

Oddball characters and otherwise interesting types visit their neighborhood bodega/convenience store. We get to see their personalities. We get to know the store's owner who interacts with each customer, offering advice or a bit of clever banter. There are some smiles. We are entertained.

That's the second thing the ads have in common. In all of them, the beer being advertised could be any brand. The characters never even ask for the brand by name. It's never spoken. And no one utters a single word about what's special or distinctive about Miller Lite. A good example: The store-owner convinces a woman to, in her words, "Bring beer to a chardonnay party." Implicitly, "any beer."

Absent anything to establish Lite beer as distinctive, how did these entertaining little dramas get approved by the people who are supposed to be selling Miller Lite? The answer in a word: insecurity. 

When MillerCoors hired the Los Angeles ad agency responsible for this campaign, they made a big deal about how cool and hip it was. One brewery honcho even bowed to its Los Angeles home as the center of all hipness. Now, fast-forward to the same agency proposing these very hip films-as-ads. How can the people who anointed the agency go against their judgment? 

And in the unlikely event some junior brewery guy had the temerity to ask, "Shouldn't we say something about what makes Miller Lite special?" the agency folks probably all rolled their eyes. Message to the clients: You hired us for hipness, and this is what it looks like. It's a Catch-22 of coolness ensnaring insecure clients.

But make no mistake, someone definitely stands to gain here. It's the agency! Their people will bask in the glow of the adulation of their peers and the advertising press who'll hail this effort as creative and artistic. Indeed, Adweek practically delivers a mini movie review:

"These eight spots have a relaxed, indie-film feel, inspired by the convenience-store settings in movies by Jim Jarmusch and the team of Wayne Wang and Paul Auster."

Trade-press accolades like that are cocaine to many ad-agency types who value their own industry reputations way above their client's business fortunes. For them, entertainment kudos like "indie-film feel" and the like are not means to an end, they are the end.

A much more useful assessment of this campaign comes from the director who made the spots, also quoted in the Adweek article. He describes the effort thusly, comparing it to pure entertainment: "It's like Sesame Street—the people in your neighborhood—except with a light beer."

(Emphasis is ours; spelling of "light" is Adweek's.)