Miller has had a rough time lately, advertisement-wise and presumably also marketing and sales-wise. The glorious triumph of their 70s success with Lite beer and "Miller Time" had faded; their demographic skewed further and further upwards as fewer and fewer potential beer consumers remembered who Dick Butkus was, or why it would be funny if someone poked his belly.
So Miller struck out upon uncharted territory a couple years ago with a series of ads featuring the artifice of ad writer "Dick." The early ads flashed a photo of "Dick" from, it would seem, "Dick"'s high school yearbook. He looks like a dweeb, "his" ads were incomprehensible gibberish, the campaign was an unqualified disaster. It's less amazing that someone would think of a zany, goofy, stupid ad campaign, than that the Miller company would guilelessly fall for it.
But Miller told Advertising Age last summer that the "Dick" campaign was meant to be a throw-away to cleanse the TV beer-ad viewing audience's palate. Since Miller was so firmly associated with those old campaigns, the execs swore (though not under oath), the company had to clear away those memories with a deliberately disturbing, distracting, awful series of commercials. Why shouldn't we believe corporate execs? Here's why:
The new Miller ads, filmed in grainy, glorious, nostalgic black-and-white, make an immediate appeal to the old Miller Time campaign. No doubt you've seen "It's Time To Drink Beer From Vats The Size Of Rhode Island," which Miller claims is meant as a dig against those pansy microbrews. The point is, that's always been Miller's demographic - blue-collar, poor, nasty, and brutish. What has become of The New Miller?
And it was for this reason that I haven't bothered to think or write about the new ads. They were such an obvious rehashing of the old ads, covered with such an obvious corporate lie, that nothing grabbed me.
But then I read a complaint about one of the new Miller ads - in which Latino kids stop in the middle of a graffiti job in an urban setting to engage in that ages-old tradition, Miller Time. It's "socially irresponsible trash," the offended party remarked. But this is what gave me my insight into the New Miller. Everything makes sense now.
It's truth in advertising.
I call the new Miller campaign Ugly People Doing Stupid Things, because that's what it is. One of the spots, shot in perversely close-up slo-mo, shows a deeply unattractive, emaciated young woman breaking into a grotesque smile, a hideous, grimacing grin, as her eyes droop shut against the brilliant sunlight. I have given another frequently shown ad the title "Pool-Playing Whores Dance Around the Perverted Old Men." If you've seen it, you know what I mean. The geezers peer lasciviously at scantily-clad sluts who bend over to make billiard shots. Anyone looking at these commercials would have to think, "Wow, that's easily the stupidest, most offensive thing I've ever seen on TV, leaving aside Pauley Shore."
So what's Miller's message? Try this on for size: "Advertising is bunk. We at Miller would never stoop to manipulate our loyal beer customers by means of a cheap come-on. Anybody can do that. Instead, we're going to make the world's first informational ads. Yes, we're going to buck tradition and actually state honestly the effects and qualities of our product."
Hence the Rhode Island vats ad: Miller doesn't care about their product's quality, only it's quantity, and they want beer customers who think the same way.
Hence Ugly People Doing Stupid Things: No less an authority than the Surgeon General would tell you that drinking lots of beer turns clear-thinking people into snarling, drooling beasts, just like the folks in the ads.
It's Miller Time. Time for the beer that tastes like a 5 million gallon aluminum can. Time for the beer that turns you into a drunken idiot. Hell, if you can't trust TV commercials, who can you trust?