Miller High Life's dramatic irony: Probably not the best beer-advertising gambit

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.

Just a punch line?

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.

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