5 Super Bowl Ads That Tell the Future of Drinking
As an alcohol insider, these five ads told me a lot about future drinking trends.
As an alcohol insider, these five ads told me a lot about future drinking trends.
The Super Bowl isn’t just the biggest event in football, it’s the biggest event in advertising as well. With streaming services, social media, and skippable ads on YouTube, the Super Bowl is one of the few places advertisers can be confident that people will actually see your commercial and NBC charged accordingly. When you are paying $7 million for 30 seconds worth of airtime, it better be an excellent investment. So what did the ads for alcohol tell us about where the biggest name in beer, Anheuser-Busch, is putting their money? From what I saw last night, the future of domestic beer looks pretty watered down and weak.
Anheuser-Busch is the parent company for Budweiser, as well as Michelob, Busch, and also having purchased a handful of the largest craft breweries in recent years. They have also had the exclusive rights to beer advertising during the Super Bowl since 1989, as this article from VinePair explained. All the alcohol ads that played during the game were from this same beer company, but few of them looked anything like the beers typically seen during the big game.
Budweiser: A Clydesdale’s Journey
The only Budweiser ad featured a solitary, injured Clydesdale who recovers from his injury so that he doesn’t let down his best friend, who is a dog. As the horse runs triumphantly out of the barn, the tagline “In the home of the brave down never means out” runs across the screen. Also, as someone who grew up on a horse farm, I’m irrationally angry that someone left the stall door open and let an injured horse escape. This kind of lax care is probably how the horse got hurt in the first place.
While the marketing team probably intended it to be an uplifting message for all Americans during a troubling time, I saw this as an acknowledgement of the fact that beer, especially domestic beer, has been losing market share for years. The message was meant to be optimistic and defiant. But since this was the only ad for a beer that wasn’t light or a seltzer, and barely even featured the beer, it sure looks to me like Budweiser isn’t betting the farm on their flagship beer.
Bud Light NEXT: Zero in the Way of Possibility
Bud Light NEXT, a zero carb beer that looks a lot like a seltzer, is the subject of this commercial. The ad features ethnically diverse young people escaping from various boring social situations into more exciting and neon colored situations. In the last shot, a giant black woman plays guitar in the desert. The tiny young people watching her wave their phones in flashlight mode and cans of NEXT in the air.
I’ve often joked that domestic beer is basically beer flavored seltzer. To which the people at Bud Light apparently said, “Hold my beer” and then went and made a beer that was even closer to beer flavored seltzer. While I haven’t tried NEXT, it’s clear this is a beer meant to win over seltzer drinkers by being as close to seltzer as possible. Again, it isn’t looking good for the future of beer sales.
Michelob Ultra Organic Seltzer: Superior Bowl Caddy
Michelob Ultra’s Seltzer ad was hard for me to understand, probably because I don’t actually know anything about sports. A man walks up to a bar in a bowling alley and asks a guy in a baseball cap and a jersey, “What’s the play?’’ That man recommends Michelob Ultra Organic Seltzer because it’s organic. And has zero carbs and zero sugar. Also, it’s organic. The man seems skeptical but orders the seltzer anyway. I’m guessing that the first man is probably a famous sports guy. Probably a former quarterback because that’s what all the cameos I didn’t recognize were, but maybe golf since they are the ones who use caddies, right?
Seltzer’s have taken a large amount of domestic beer sales, so it’s no surprise that they are everywhere now and that many of the brands of domestic beer have seltzers that carry their name. Michelob Ultra seems to be committed to being the beer for health nuts, so I guess it makes sense that they are doubling down on the organic and “zero carb” designation. It seems odd that the man ordering the seltzer didn’t really seem to want one and was never seen drinking it. The ad felt like it was trying to convince your dad to order an organic seltzer instead of a beer.
Bud Light, meanwhile, had an ad featuring Guy Fieri sending minions to steal the new Hard Soda flavored seltzers because of how much flavor they have. But two different seltzer ads for two different products owned by the same company are another sign to me that seltzers are here to stay.
Also, I’d like to remind you that, while alcohol doesn’t have “carbs”, your body breaks it down into sugar and that’s why you get a beer belly. So if you want to avoid “carbs,” alcohol really isn’t your friend. But I don’t expect anyone to pay any more attention to this than they did my “all vodka is gluten-free” rant from 2016, so I guess just live your life.
Cutwater Spirits: Here’s to the Lazy Ones
Cutwater Spirits had what may have been the first Super Bowl ad for a spirits company, albeit for their canned cocktail product. The ad was black and white except for the cans, which were in color and featured people doing household chores in colorful and lazy ways. Clearing snow off the driveway with a blowtorch, walking the dog on a treadmill, and using a roomba to deliver a canned cocktail. There is, of course, a shot of a dorky-looking bartender with a hipster mustache, sweating to make a cocktail while the lazy ones walk by and open a can.
Cutwater Spirits was originally a part of Ballast Point Brewery before separating and being purchased by Anheuser-Busch. As a craft cocktail lover, the canned cocktail trend pains me. Mainly because most of them are the sort of cocktails you can make by adding one mixer to one spirit, like vodka mules or gin and tonics. Do people really not know how to make these at home?
But I can’t argue with the numbers. The ready to drink market is growing fast. Plus, I’m a great example of why these drinks probably exist. I know plenty about how to make cocktails, but I rarely want to even make a Manhattan for myself, let alone a Mai Tai. It feels too much like cooking for one to make a cocktail for yourself. If Anheuser-Busch invested their super bowl ad budget into this, then it’s no fad. Canned cocktails will soon become an even larger part of alcohol sales.
Liquid Death: Big Game Commercial with Kids Hydrating at a Party
This isn’t an alcohol ad, but it tells you a lot about the future of drinking. Liquid Death’s ad for their canned water featured kids chugging the water from the 16 ounce cans while dancing, yelling, writing on each other with markers, and generally looking totally out of control. It ends with a heavily pregnant woman smiling approvingly while also drinking a can of Liquid Death and text saying “Relax, it’s only water.”
Liquid Death is a brand of sparkling water I’ve seen all over in the past few years. Not in grocery stores or gas stations, but in places where alcohol is sold, like bars and liquor stores. The can has a flaming skull on the front and at a glance, you would think it’s a beer can or maybe an energy drink. And that’s the point. This is a brand that was created to give you the same social experience as drinking a beer but without the beer. Instead of using alcohol to feel cool, Liquid Death let’s you use irony and smugness. It sounds kind of crazy but it works. There are many people who are willing, eager even, to pay good money to crack open a cool looking can full of water instead of holding a boring plastic cup full of the same thing.
The Real Future of Drinking is Drinking Less
This is going to be a growing part of the future of drinking. There will be fewer people who drink and those who do drink will do less of it. The youngest legal drinkers are drinking less than any generation before them and choosing lower alcohol drinks when they do. Older generations are also cutting how much they drink.
States have legalized cannabis in some form for a large majority of all Americans. More and more people are choosing cannabis for their chemically enhanced relaxation. How long will it be before we see a cannabis ad during the Super Bowl? Cannabis and other forces are going to continue to reduce the amount of alcohol that Americans consume. This is the actual future of drinking that I see in these ads.
Thank you for taking the time to read. If you want to read more by me and other great writers on Medium, you can become a member here. I will get a portion of your fee at no extra cost to you.