there are three kinds of domestic beer commercial themes:
strippers
football
horses (and for a time in the mid 90’s, frogs)
strippers and football make sense to me, because the type of people who drink cheap American beer also tend to watch football and think that strippers are hot. But what’s with the horse commericials? What do horses have to do with beer, and how are they supposed to convince people to buy and drink their beer?
That commercial of horses playing football from a couple years ago was pretty cool…
The horses are the Budweiser Clydesdales. They’ve been a symbol of the beer since the end of prohibition. Budweiser used teams of clydesdale horses pulling a gussied up beer wagon as a way of promoting the brand. It worked well – the horses were very impressive and memorable. Because of that, they remained a symbol, appearing in parades and such, and in advertising.
They aren’t supposed to convince people to drink beer. No commercial expects to do that. The point of all advertising is to make you remember the brand. Obviously, you remember the horses, so it’s working.
The only horse & beer commercial that I can think of are the Budweiser Clydesdales. Those are their mascots, and it goes back to the days of horse-drawn beer wagons delivering kegs of beer from the breweries. Are there other beer commercials that use horses?
A quasi-hijack - the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen also has huge draft horses as their mascots, they dress them up in hats for parades and such. You can go pet them at the brewery. They are exceedingly large. (You also get free beer served by Danish hotties! Er, the male kind, when I was there.) No idea if they make commercials with them or not.
Shouldn’t there be another category for something like Generic Goofy Antics? There are a lot of those. Like putting the shock collar on the room mate, guys focused on the beer walking into the window & falling down, cutting through the wall to take beer from the back of the neighbor’s fridge, and many more that aren’t leaping to mind right now.
The story goes that they hitched up the Clydesdales to the wagon to deliver the first case/keg/whatever of post-Prohibition Bud to the White House, thus becoming an enduring symbol of American headache-in-a-bottle…errr, I mean, “beer.”
In addition to the “masculine” angle, horses are a powerful class symbol. Horse-related leisure is very much associated with the upper classes, and such adds appeal to that, IMHO.
Belgian beer company that makes Palm (um. . . Alken Maes, maybe?) also has big horsies with a big cab that they use promotionally in places like Antwerp. Nice horsies.
Just adding to the data collection.
No, it isn’t working. I remember the horses, but I don’t remember which brand was using them in the commercials. Was it Bud? Miller? Coors? Domestic beer is all the same to me…I think Casey1505 summed it up pretty well.
Yeah, don’t forget the friendly black bear that Labatts uses to shill beer, at least here in the USA. And the generally ridiculous Fosters commercials.
An aside about strippers and beer: In the current Coors commercial they show a young, dusky maiden carrying a tray of beer in one of the first “shots”. This appears to me to be a young lady named Rachel Sterling, who used to work as a “juggy” on The Man Show. Since she’s no longer got that gig (I think the show was cancelled), she’s now working as a pornstar under the name “Angel Veil”. Which is a little bit more than just stripping. Just google the name, you know you want to, you perverts.