Here's what Miller Lite's top marketing guys are telling the press about their just-named new ad agency:

- "This is a marriage for the ages."

- "... at the intersection of all great things: creativity, design, technology, entertainment, music..." (the Los Angeles location of the new agency)

- "... it's all happening in L.A. right now."

- "It's about the best agency... the best agency for the job. (This ad agency) really understand(s) our brand and our consumer."

Agog with his new ad guys, the MillerCoors marketing honcho also rhapsodized about the new agency's work on the legendary Apple account. (He may not have known the computer company had fired the agency just a few months ago.)

How does the ad agency take all this lavish praise?

When client marketing guys gush so publicly, how do you suppose it will affect the new agency? Will they be more likely to listen to the client's ideas and suggestions on strategy? Will they invest the time and energy to understand the client's problems?  Will they embrace the vast amount of brand knowledge residing in the client's people? In the end, will they even accept that the client knows what's best for the brand?

Not likely.

See, too many ad guys possess a keen predator's instinct. When they get a whiff of the scent of a gullible, desperate client and hear him fawning over them, they become emboldened. At the extreme, they can set out to have their judgment supplant their client's; in effect, to be both seller and buyer of their own ideas. 

They'll conjure up advertising that sets aside the stuffy and confining "category knowledge" as to what works and what doesn't. They'll fixate on their creative solution without bothering to immerse themselves in the client's data. They'll ignore the perspectives of client people in the trenches, such as beer distributors, whose decades of lived experience could offer insight on the underlying story of the brand. Ultimately, they'll often aim to create advertising that gets their ad agency noticed and talked about, whether or not it sells any beer

And when the end-product of all this-- the ad geniuses' idea of "great advertising"-- rubs some of the client folks the wrong way, or seems off-base, or is just plain wrong for the brand, who'll have the guts to say "Stop the presses"? Not the infatuated brand guy so in love with the new agency he committed to a "marriage of the ages." Nor his starry-eyed boss who hailed the agency's being "at the intersection of all great things."

In all of this, the sense of déjà vu for Miller Lite is almost spooky.

Been down this road before

Back in the 90s, Lite faced exactly this situation. The brand was declining. The client team was frightened and desperate. An agency-change took place. The Miller brain trust chose the reputed most creative and hottest shop in the business. (Back then, the advertising "heat" was in Minneapolis before it moved to the coast.) Not surprisingly, the new agency proclaimed the idea they came up with for Lite to be "great creative." So great in fact, it was the only idea they showed their new beer client.

What choice did the Miller guys have? Unsure of their instincts and under terrific pressure, even if their gut told them the idea was just plain awful, refusing to buy it could mean letting great advertising slip from their grasp. Heck, the agency might even resign and tell the world Miller couldn't spot great advertising when it was right in front of them! Besides, as the agency pointed out, the very fact that the idea made the marketing guys nervous proved it was great. Talk about instincts for knowing when you hold the high hand!

And so, one of the least effective and most bizarre campaigns in the history of advertising got green-lighted. 

There were 80 of these commercials, a reported quarter-billion dollars spent on them. But after nothing in the way of a positive sales response, pretty much everyone agreed: all Miller Lite ended up with was... dick. 

Now all these years later, Miller Lite is declining again, the clients are desperate again, and they're singing the praises of their brand new agency... again.

But history doesn't repeat (re-dick?) itself.

Does it?

In the 1990s, St. Louis ad agency, D'Arcy advertising (DMB&B), was entering its 79th year as advertising counsel for Anheuser-Busch. It was, at the time, one of the longest-running client-agency partnerships. The agency's "When you say Bud, you've said it all" jingle was credited with bringing Budweiser from regional success to national dominance. Together, the two companies had prospered for more than a generation.

But in 1994, the ad-agency holding company that owned the D'Arcy agency decided to accept a modest media-buying assignment from Miller Brewing. The publisher of Advertising Age noted at the time:

No less strange is a decision made by ad agency D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles to accept business from Miller Brewing Co. while continuing to handle archrival Anheuser-Busch's Budweiser and Michelob brands of beer.

D'Arcy didn't check with A-B to see whether the new Miller job, for D'Arcy's TeleVest unit to buy national advertising, represented a conflict in the mind of its St. Louis client.

I knew the guy running D'Arcy at the time in St. Louis. We had been colleagues at Foote, Cone & Belding. A highly principled man, he was neither consulted about, nor given advance warning of the decision to accept Miller business. He was simply told after-the-fact to "pass it by the A-B folks." His loyalty to Budweiser-- and probably his excellent instincts for how such a meeting with August Busch might go-- prompted him to refuse that order. He resigned.

When Anheuser-Busch finally learned of the agency's decision, August's retribution was swift and final. There were no give-and-take meetings with the agency. The ax fell. D'Arcy would not see its 80th year as an A-B agency. All its assignments-- reportedly $125 million in billings-- were shifted to DDB Needham in Chicago.

Have times changed?

Twenty years have passed. Much has changed in the beer and ad-agency businesses in the intervening two decades. August Busch no longer runs his namesake brewery. It's now part of a much larger international company run by a man who grew up in Brazil. He's a financial guy, not a beer guy.

Perhaps the beer business really has changed that much.

Perhaps not.