Home time for boring beer ads
A perfect, elegantly shaped pot belly needs years of tender loving care, loads of affection and not a few litres of beer. Over the course of time, an imposing rounded midriff takes shape, filling your shirt with gently expansive persistence. Unimprovable elegance – this was presumably uppermost in the minds of the marketing experts at Biermarke Bergedorfer from Hamburg when they developed their “Lovingly brewed” advertising campaign. But in the past there have also been numerous other advertising campaigns for beer that stick in the memory. Or who’s forgotten the wonderfully enchanting French voice cajoling “Arald my dear, couldn’t you send me something of your very own? Perhaps the little silver car and a bottle of the beer ….” Legendary, simple, and nonetheless creative.
Beer ads have to be simple – with around 3,000 advertising messages a day vying for our attention, it’s no wonder that only the simple ones stick in our memories. Beer ads play a major and extremely important role here, since in many countries beer is one of the most popular beverages. Which is why there are so many different varieties of it, for every taste, every occasion and every type of drinker.
“Beck’s Beer quenches a man’s thirst”
What did beer ads use to look like?
Beer advertising used to be a bit more unpretentiously conventional. Posters reading “Time for a nice cool beer” or “Beer is a wonderful thirst-quencher” were common in the first half of the 19th century. In contrast to present-day beer ads, most advertising used to be related to specific events, where a new type of beer would be premiered, for example. Brand advertising pure and simple, as we know it today, did not emerge until the second half of the 19th century. To be more precise, brand advertising in the true sense of the term didn’t really come along until bottled beer and the concomitant labelling appeared on the market.
The most whimsical advertising campaigns today
The creative ads for the Bergedorfer Bier beer brand, with their “Lovingly brewed” theme, constitute one of the most unusual advertising campaigns yet seen. Out-of-the-ordinary and reality-driven, which is why this advertising campaign was recently even awarded the Silver Lion in Cannes. But Carlsberg too, for example, takes its place in the long list of unusually distinctive beer ads. With its Astra beer, it has recently been flooding the ad market, and goes to the limit with its beer ads – the watchword here is “be provocative”.
“I drink my beer deep-chilled. I’m super-hot anyway!” – Astra beer
But besides this multiplicity of attractive mass advertising, there’s a trend that’s refreshingly different, and is in my opinion a sight for sore eyes. The CraftBeer scene places far more emphasis on traditionally brewed beer from small firms with charm and that certain something, instead of expensive advertising campaigns. Clean-chic instead of obscene mass advertising!
So all that remains for me to add is: consign boring beer ads to a well-deserved oblivion and let’s see what’s in store for us 😉
