Macro Pride: On Budweiser

By Neem Regardie

For the 2015 Superbowl, Budweiser released 2 interrelated commercials to reassert its proud history and tradition as a self-proclaimed macro-brew.  “Macro We Stand,” one ad boasts, “Proudly Macro!” declares the other, in two fairly transparent ploys to stem the loss of market share Anheuser-Busch has been hemorraghing now for several years due to the explosion of so-called “Craft” or “Micro” Breweries all over the country, from sea to shining sea.  The first of these “anti-micro” ads is actually titled “USA Freedom 2015,” which sounds so blatantly self-parodic one wonders if it wasn’t suggested to them by the creators of South Park.  

The other ad’s title is subtler, though not by much.  Its more austerely masculine appellation is “Brewed the Hard Way.”  

News to you perhaps that commercials even get titled at all, but what could be more overdue, more about-time than the titling of advertisements?  It reminds us of the long slow patient courtship of the Arts by our Marketing Industry.  How better to culminate the union of their incestuous muses than to lend out titles to those 30-second visual poems produced by Madison Avenue, just as another kind of creator might title their novel, their play, their national anthem or epic.

True, one might protest, not many commercials deserve titles, true, but these, these are Superbowl Commercials!  These aren’t ordinary commercials.  These represent the commercial-as-event.  Such a protester would have a point.  Superbowl ads could easily be said to occupy their own mythic zipcode in the American imagination.  They are a separate category unto themselves, and they do more than just cement the idea of the Superbowl as the single most important cultural day of the year.  They also cement “Super Bowl Monday” just as much.  Invariably, they conjure up related myths of the “return to work” after our athletically secular sabbath, of the dreaded “Monday slog,” and of the sanctuary of the office water cooler where one can steal little moments of pleasure back from a dismal workday, by rehashing, debating, ranking, and rating our favorite ads. What does it matter then that we’re doing the company’s work for them, anytime we rehash an ad, paraphrase it to the coworker who went to take a piss, or post its youtube link on our facebook (or Blogger) page?  What does it matter that Super Bowl Sunday has the highest reported incidences of domestic violence, more so than any other night in the year?  Such concerns are washed away by the tides of democratic debate over which ad was the most risqué, which animal ad the most touching, which dancing digital baby the most realistic.

Through their polish and their artistry, these ads don’t just sell us a product, they also provide us with a service.  They help us avoid the single most terrifying, most shameful occurrence to the contemporary American: dead time.  In Superbowls past, it used to be that such dead time was devoted to dissection of the game itself, to catching up over food, or yes, simply to taking the requisite hourly piss.  For we drank plenty of Budweiser in those days too.  But we weren’t paying the ads enough attention.  Their artistry went underappreciated.  So the mythmakers hit on an interesting strategem.  Give us a rooting interest not just in the game, but in the ads themselves.  Quiz us the next day on our favorites.  Follow who wins.  Mix in another dash of rooting interest for the companies behind them.  Just as Hollywood has gotten us to root for our favorite blockbusters by ingeniously announcing their gross ticket revenues every weekend (furthering the idea of Art-as-Sport, as a weekly race five or six participants run against each other, with an awards ceremony at the end), so too Madison Avenue makes sure you know the exact price to the penny of a 30-second Superbowl spot.  They tell us.  Then we tell each other.  An ad rolls by.  “Did you know it costs a cool 4.5 million to run one of these now?”  Whistling sounds.  “That’s $150 grand a second.  A second!”  More whistling sounds.  Just in case we forget the amount, Joe Buck reminds us, two or three times, it seems, per hour.  In order to reconnect us with our origins, he then informs us of the price of an ad way back in Superbowl I, which from the seriousness in his voice, must have taken place in 1776, in Concord, Massachusetts.  The Patriots won that one too.  Oh and by the way, it only cost $42,000 back in those days.  What a testimony to the growth of our economy!  What a testimony to our industrial giants of steel, and corn products, and crisp refreshing beer! Back and forth, we pass that rate around - $150,000 dollars a second – as though unaware we’re only counting someone else’s money.  It seems almost as though we’re celebrating some sort of vicarious economy that will be raining – or should I say, trickling – its wealth down on us very soon too.  Of course, the Superbowl isn’t only about the Goliaths: our titans of industry, all the American dynasties of award-winning cars, our two or three similarly shaded macro-beers.  The Superbowl has room for David stories in it too.  What about our small businesses?  Our venture capitalists?  Our risk takers?  Isn’t it just as quintessentially American how a handful of companies blow their entire advertisting wad for the year on a single ad spot.  Here the advertising budget becomes the gambling chip placed down on the longest of longshot bets.  That too is American.  Better be catchy!  A company called Loctite tried this last year.  Loctite sells glue.  I know because CBS did a special segement celebrating their intrepidness.  Somebody named Gigi Stone Woods reported on it.  “Loctite,” writes Gigi, “is one of a dozen companies buying a Super Bowl commercial for the first time. That’s the most newcomers in more than a decade. With an estimated 184 million people expected to watch the big game, these companies think it’s worth making a high-stakes bet.”  So what you’re saying Gigi, is that any newcomer can buy a Superbowl ad?  Any citizen at all?  How democratic that any old schmo can buy an ad!  You could say anything you wanted.  And all 180 million viewers would have to listen to you.  All you need’s the cash. 

So you can see the tall task the producers of the Budweiser mythology have in store for themselves.  They need us to root for Goliath over David.  They need us to root for monopoly over small business.  From one vantage point, no request could be more UN-American.  We’re the country of the little guy, the underdog, the rebel, the random Rockwellian schmo who steps up at the town meeting to speak his mind.  From another vantage point, nothing could be easier to ask of us than to root for a dynasty.  We love them in business as much as we do in sports.  We love guaranteed wins.  We say we love close games, but really we love blowouts.  We love the feeling of manifest destiny we glimpse in Jordan’s Bulls, Jeter’s Yankees, Brady’s Patriots.   As the comedian named Joe Lewis once said, “Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for US Steel.”  We seem to have missed his point.

AD ANALYSIS:

            The second ad, “Brewed the Hard Way,” taps into this ethos of American dominance as the justifiable crushing of the little guy.  Here’s some of the ways I think it does this:

·         COLOR & SOUND: Notice the aggressiveness in the choice of music. There’s even an aggressiveness to the editing.  It’s very jumpy, and feels both hurried and determined at the same time.

·         MATERIALS – WOOD, PLASTIC, STEEL: There’s an interesting, though not entirely successful attempt, to naturalize this very artificial product.  Imagery of wood being chopped, by hand, and manually shoveled into a furnace.  In one shot, the steel vat where the beer is being brewed is made to look like a steel furnace, an associative link to U.S. Steel, American industry.  By this logic, the beer begins as fire (0:12 + 0:38).  The brewmaster is a kind of alchemist who creates the impossible: Liquid Gold.  Or “Golden Suds.”  He does this through a labor-intensive process – the “hard way” – with lots of twisting of pressure locks and other traditional manual labor.  It’s worth doing it the hard way.  What you get for your hardwork is a smooth, clear, yet crisp beer that will never ever challenge your taste buds.  This is where the ice comes in.  Every beer ad plays on this dichotomy of fire and ice imagery.  Pagan magic: also keep the beer as close to frozen as possible so you can’t taste anything.

·         HIPSTERS: This ad obviously hinges on a stereotype of “hipsterism” as weak masculinity.  Weak here = a slow, thoughtful, analytic appreciation of sensual qualities.  They “dissect” the beer rather than drink it rapidly.  Their tailored beards and form-fitting clothes are supposed to betray an underlying femininity.  They’re portrayed as too controlled by their senses in general, but also controlled by the wrong senses with this hyper-refined appreciation of the olfactory qualities of the beer.  If they have to be so damn sensory, it would be nobler for them to focus their eyes on the “golden suds” of a tasteless Budweiser.  Their gustatory leanings also betray a total lack of patriotism (0:27).   Notice how the chalkboard menu behind them lists dainty, European fare such as brussel sprouts, steak tartar, chicken liver mousse.  Worst of all: it lists a wine selection!  The anti-beer.  Their un-American weakness is further revealed in their body language.  Watch how they cup the curved sample glasses in both hands, as though the beer itself were delicate, breakable, or the cups were just too heavy for them to lift one-handed.  Compare that with all the dynamism with which Buds are distributed.  Indestructible bottles of Bud are slammed on bartops.  Cans are chucked across yards by men, who throw like real men, to other men, who catch like real men (0:41).  Cases are lugged hurriedly around to slake the immediate thirst of real Americans.  Meanwhile, in some brewpub, these 3 hipsters are sharing a “flight” of different beers.  Sharing = communism.  And opting for the flight of beers = a lack of decisiveness, as well as a lack of brand loyalty, a hedonistic promiscuity of taste.  Compare that to Bud’s primary slogan: “This Bud’s For You.”  This suggests ownership, as well as a tailoring to the customer, in return for brand loyalty.  One unintended sign of this transaction is the facelessness of the Bud drinkers (0:28).  Notice how the camera keeps whisking past their faces in constant commotion, whereas the camerawork for the Hipsters is static.  We get closeups on them or their faces that are there to expose their inability to blend in, play along, get with the team.

·         SUDS: One last amusing image that runs through all these commercials: the presence of spilled suds.  Crack a can and suds pour out.  Pound a beer down on the bar and you get suds all over your hands, all over the bar.  They must spill about a case of beer per commercial.  Why?  What mythology does this second-order signifier of suds tap into?  For me, it suggests three classic American ideologies.  (1) Conspicuous Consumption:  The way beer is spilled acts as a celebration of waste.  (2) The Right to a Cheap Lifestyle:  Don’t worry, this stuff is so cheap, just buy more!  (3) Instant Gratification: notice how people are always hurrying in these commercials.  Hurrying to drink down a beer.  Hurrying to bring more beer.  There’s a guy at one point just running alongside a car for no reason, while carrying a case of beer.