That Downtown Partner DDB’s spot for Bud Light clinched the Super Bowl of advertising comes as no surprise to St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch.
The Toronto-based shop’s ‘Good Dog’ got top marks in USA Today’s ad meter poll, which permits viewers to rank ads during the big NFL showdown.
‘We had researched it over six nights and interviewed over 600 consumers in L.A. and Atlanta,’ says Joel Schumacker, VP, creative development for Anheuser-Busch. ‘We found that, one, it was very entertaining and, two, it [was in line with] our ‘Great Lengths’ strategy, and it also has a little twist.’
It fulfills Bud Light’s overall objective to represent itself as ‘young, fun and social’ to the 21-plus target, he adds. (The customer is younger than Bud Light’s in Canada, where the bulls-eye is around 25, and likely less appreciative of toilet humour.)
‘Good Dog’ also unveiled the new tagline ‘Fresh, smooth, real. Bud Light, it’s all here,’ which replaces ‘For the taste that won’t fill you up and never lets you down, make it a Bud Light.’
‘No one remembered the old tag, because we have two-and-a-half seconds to deliver and it’s just too much copy,’ explains Schumacker, who believes the new version will perform better, in part because the attributes ‘fresh and smooth’ were so popular in testing.
‘The consumer thinks, ‘I have fresh, smooth beer that has real beer taste, and I’m with my friends. I need nothing else.’ And that’s exactly how it translates to our customer.’
Downtown Partners adheres to ‘Great Lengths’ by portraying how the product is so enjoyable, you’ll do almost anything to get a bottle.
In this case, ‘almost anything’ means training your pup to chomp crotches. The ad shows a confrontation between a prep boy and his purebred Border collie Piper, and a guy’s guy and his mutt Fergus.
Piper fetches a Bud Light from the cooler. His master then makes the mistake of asking, ‘What can your dog do?’ It turns out Fergus can deliver a Bud Light too; he lunges at prep boy’s privates, forcing him to relinquish the beer. See it at www.strategymag.com/screeningroom.
Client: Anheuser-Busch
Brand: Bud Light
Agency Producer: Bob Kirk
Creative Director: Dan Pawych
Copywriter: Darren Clarke
Art Director: Daniel Vendramin
Account: Tim Binkley/Jeff McCrory/Chris Lee
Production Company: Radke Films
Director: Jeff Gorman
Producers: Lilly Labonge & Sarah Duncan
Post-Production: AXYZ
Editor: David Hicks – School Editing
Sound Production: Pirate Radio & TV
