A little over two months back, MillerCoors announced they were about to reveal turnaround strategies for their "value brands"-- the 30% of the brewery's volume accounted for by cheap beer. We were quick to send some helpful advice their way:

Find the provocative, appealing product distinctiveness your low-priced brand can offer. Focus your strategy--advertising, packaging, promotion, social media--on that difference.

​And begin winning... again.

So did product distinctiveness find a place in the new High Life ad?

See what you think, before we give you our take...

We're pleased to say that the 15-second effort really does focus on the beer inside the classic clear bottle with "Estd 1903" molded into the glass. A win for product distinctiveness!

Before the resurrected "If you've got the time, we've got the beer" jingle and "Welcome to the high life," the only statement in the ad is devoted to the distinctiveness of the beer itself: "Known for its perfect storm of tiny bubbles, it has long been called the champagne of beers."

So maybe we've been asleep for a few decades, but this is the first we've heard of High Life's "tiny bubbles." Or the logic link suggesting they're akin to champagne bubbles. Is that even true?

Who cares?

Product distinctiveness is where you find it, or cleverly create it.

8-wheel logic to the rescue

Back in the 1920s, long before television even existed, when every major beer brand was pushing "purity" as a selling premise, advertising history was made. Product distinctiveness was the key.

On the strength of advertising copywriter Claude Hopkins' observation of its brewery operations, Schlitz chose to differentiate its beer with the claim "Bottles washed with live steam." While other brands used similar bottle-cleaning processes, the clever live-steam expression got people's attention and made sense. Schlitz went from #5 to a tie for #1 on the claim.

A wise advertising pro once described this kind of selling as employing "8-wheel logic." He said he remembered his very young son pestering him with a series of arbitrary questions, the way kids sometimes do, finally wondering how huge railroad cars managed to stay on the tracks. The dad--mildly annoyed and occupied with some vexing business problem at the time--quickly shot back, "Because they have eight wheels." That was enough for the boy.

So, is a "perfect storm of tiny bubbles" enough to suggest Miller High Life is distinctive versus other beers? Is it enough to make plausible the "Champagne of Beers" claim? Is it enough to cause this brand... to begin winning again?

​The Miller people sure think so... and we're inclined to agree.

In an interesting post-election interview on the "Morning Joe" MSNBC television program, Michael Moore was complimented as one of a very few political pundits to call the election for Donald Trump. And he did it five months in advance.

​No Trump supporter, Moore suggested he became even more certain of his prediction when, a few weeks ahead of election day, political guests on the same television program mocked a Trump campaign news item. It was a press release saying the top election-related expense item of the Trump campaign for that month was ball caps.

​(Click here for the full interview; ball cap bit at 3:51.)

​While the pundits around the "Morning Joe" desk all giggled back then, Moore said he thought: "There it is. That's the bubble."

He went on, "They don't understand." Donning his own trademark cap, he added, "This is where I'm from. We wear ball caps because, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, 'the country I come from is called the Midwest.'"

If the smartest of political pundits can fail so miserably to understand the heart of the country in a presidential election year, odds are beer marketers are no different.

Think beer marketers understand the heart of the country?

The failed Bud Light campaign suggests otherwise.

Were the issues offered in that advertising--like pay equity for women or trans-gender rights--of primary concern to the majority of middle American beer drinkers? Or were they more likely to be embraced and pushed by a much smaller group, not unlike those political pundits? And did the ad makers really think highly of those beer drinkers, or rather look down on them as rubes?

Was Amy Schumer--whose online videos and stage appearances are exclusively off-color and extremely explicit attempts at comedy--the sort of spokesperson who'd appeal to the ball-cap wearing young male beer drinkers in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Wisconsin? The guys who drink a ton of Bud Light. Or was she more likely to repulse them?

Did the people who created and approved this failed campaign live in a bubble of their own? Were they "coastal people" who not only don't understand the middle of the country, they don't care that they don't understand? Did they see the beer's target market as it is, or believe they just knew best where America was heading? Did they force-fit their personal prejudices in their ads?

Lest we be seen as picking on Bud Light, here's our recent take on some Coors Light "branded content" that's just as culturally tone-deaf.

A feel for the center of the country

There was a time when all the major breweries employed ad agencies with midwestern homes. St. Louis and Chicago, primarily. Midwestern people brewed the beer; midwestern advertising people sold it. Beer marketers believed the ad agencies on either coast were a bit too insular, too insensitive to the rest of the country.

These days by comparison, BigBeer's advertising is created mostly by east and west coast ad agencies. By men and women who claim to have a feel for popular culture, but it seems, have little regard for midwestern values, interests, ethics and belief systems. And why bother with the midwest anyway since, as one self-important BigBeer marketer announced awhile back: Los Angeles is "... at the intersection of all great things: creativity, design, technology, entertainment, music..." 

But when was the last time you saw a ball cap in a beer ad?

These days, it's very hip for ad agencies to spout off about their "insights."

​Okay, here's an insight for those self-important LA ad guys...

If some of your brand's most loyal drinkers wear necklaces made of empty cans, and hats made of empty cases, you might want to find ways to embrace them, rather than ignore and ridicule them and their interests.

​Truth is, they're way more important than you are.