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Will craft brewers ever make ads as good as their beer?

11/11/2015

 
The only reason to spend money on advertising is to let people know that you have something to offer that's different from, and at least implicitly, better than everything else out there. Why else would you expect people to choose your brand?

Oddly, many craft beer brands are doing just the opposite: Spending their money on advertising that pretty much says: "We're like every other craft beer."

​How ironic that what's made craft brewing such a success, namely the unique properties of the beers, hasn't yet found its way into advertising.
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"We're like every other craft beer" is NOT a winning strategy.
A simple test...

Before you watch these three craft-beer ads, turn off the sound on your device. As if you were viewing them in a noisy bar. Then start all three videos simultaneously, or as close as you can.

​Okay, go...
So what'd you notice? Ingredients? Pretty shots of beer? Some regular-looking folks doing something or other in a brewery?

Yup. Yup. And yup.

Nothing wrong with any of that... unless you're competing with so many other beers featuring the very same things.

No distinctiveness = no sale

As we've pointed out many times, establishing a brand's provocative distinctiveness is key to successful advertising. 

A critical marketing choice facing any advertiser is selecting the single feature of their brand that's most compelling and most distinctive. Sometimes it's a surprising, but seemingly minor fact that does the trick. But it's human nature to want to provide more information, not less.

That's probably why so many craft brewers abandon focus, and instead tell all they can about themselves in thirty seconds.

Craft brewers' two rookie mistakes

First, "Tellin' ain't sellin," as a smart advertiser once put it.

It's an advertising paradox: Load more into an ad, and less comes through. The strong temptation--especially so for 
entrepreneurs--to include all the details of their brand ends in a rookie mistake: a cluttered message that doesn't persuade. People viewing ads rarely remember more than one point, and if no single message comes through, no persuasion will occur.

For the three craft beer brands above, ask yourself: What was their one focused message? (Extra points for remembering which ad belonged to which brand.)

Second--and making matters even worse--when multiple competitors take the same unfocused, tell-all approach in the same product category, their ads only sell the generic, in this case, craft beer. It's like Budweiser advertising "Drink beer" to the benefit of Miller, Coors, Heineken, and every other brand. Few advertisers, least of all craft brewers, can afford to waste their ad dollars like that.

Making good ads can be easier than making good beer
PictureTwo requirements for a great (craft) beer ad
We've presented our two-item checklist here before. It's the standard we'll use to evaluate the new ads coming from the biggest of BigBeer's brands. But it's also a good measure for craft brewers and their nascent advertising efforts. And it's way simpler than any brewing recipe. There are just two requirements (neither of which, incidentally, were met by any of the ads in this article). 

Why create some of the best beer in the country, and then relegate its promotion to unremarkable, generic advertising?

Sooner or later, one sharp craft brewer's going to create the first great beer ad.


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Two common beer-advertising mistakes

11/2/2015

 
Picture"Yes" x 2 = A great beer ad
In our last article, we laid out the case for a simple, 2-item checklist for great beer ads. While we plan to apply these criteria to the new ads coming from Bud Light, Coors Light, and Heineken, there's no need to wait. Until the new ones arrive, we can evaluate beer ads running right now.

​Call it a teachable moment.

Take the latest Heineken ad. Is it "the best beer ad ever," as one media outlet gushed?
And what about this one from Miller Lite's current campaign?
Sadly, "great" does not apply to either ad. (Okay, one of them might be a great ad for the 007 movie "Spectre.")

Mistake #1: Irrelevant and not-all-that-unexpected ideas


The creative notion, such as it is, in both ads is the same: Star-power as idea. But in neither case is the chosen star--James Bond or the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback--in any way particularly relevant to the beer brand. And the only unexpected part of the advertising concerns the star and his performance; in no way is it related to the beer. Truth is, in both ads, the beer is just a prop. Any beer would do. 
Mistake #2: Nothing provocative about the beer itself

Without going back to view the two videos again, ask yourself: What fact about Heineken or Miller Lite was featured in the ads? The answer: There isn't one.

​The only reason to run advertising at all is to cause folks to choose your brand over others. Can't the executives at MillerCoors and Heineken find anything provocative to say about their beer? Or maybe they just think television ads are too limited to get across a fact-based message about the beer.

If so, how to explain these fact-based product messages in the most confining advertising medium of them all, outdoor billboards?
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Using provocative facts to sell beer... How refreshing!
Who's responsible?

The ad-agency people who create television ads are famous--"notorious" might be a better word--for choosing entertainment value over selling-message content. Just look where their industry's awards go. But ad-aency people don't approve and pay for ads; their clients do. So, for every ineffective beer ad, there is a top beer-marketing executive who blessed it. 

Last week, Anheuser-Busch's ceo, Carlos Brito, publicly addressed the brewer's marketing. In a moment of complete candor, he admitted Bud Light's declining fortunes were "our fault." And he promised the brand's new ads would be "revolutionary."

He's absolutely correct on his first point. On "revolutionary"... well, we'll just have to wait and see. After all, Brito once said Bud Light's unremarkable and failed "Up for Whatever" campaign had "lots of mileage."

​Fortunately, we have a checklist ready to spot ads with serious mileage.

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    The Author

    Dan Fox is a real beer guy.

    For more than half his 30-year career at ad agency, Foote, Cone & Belding, he ran the Coors Brewing account. Leading a group of dozens of advertising professionals, Dan also personally wrote the Pete Coors "Somewhere near Golden, Colorado" commercials, designed the Coors NASCAR graphics, authored sales-convention speeches, and most important of all, formulated marketing strategy for virtually every Coors brand, including Coors Light, Keystone, Killian's Irish Red and more. His proudest achievement? "Our team had every Coors brand growing at once."

    Over his advertising career, Dan was personally involved in the analysis, planning and creation of thousands of ads for a variety of products and services. By way of this blog, he freely shares his expertise about what works, and what doesn't, when it comes to selling beer.

    If you're in the beer-marketing business--or just interested in the subject--you may want to read what "HeyBeerDan" has to say.

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