Famous, but not in a good way
I had an advertising blast from the past today and discovered I’m famous, but not necessarily in a good way. In any industry other than advertising, you’d probably call it “infamous” or “infamy” but, being that the ad jungle is all about getting noticed at any cost, I’m sticking with my original assessment of famous-ness.
Several years ago—it’s been five or six—I was called in to work on a general market (English language) campaign, on the side, for what would later become my current employer, Dieste Harmel & Partners.
The campaign was for a new beer that one of Dieste’s clients, Anheuser-Busch, was launching. It was a new concept: flavoring beer with outside ingredients, and the launch was intended to compete with the hundreds of “flavored malt beverages” that were flooding the market at the time.
The beer was to be called “Tequiza,” and the product was going to combine the flavors of beer, tequila and lime. I’m sure some marketing wiz at A-B was in a bar one day, saw people chasing their tequila with beer, and had the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup-brainstorm moment of simply combining the two (“Your tequila is in my beer!” “Yeah, well your beer is in my tequila!”).
The campaign we developed played up the “liberating,” in vino veritas qualities of tequila, and the copy line, “Speak your mind, drink your beer” was born along with the tagline, “Beer Without Borders.”
The campaign was all about being bold, as in, “Did I just say that!? Fuck it. I’ve been drinking tequila—I’m excused,” and it received a ton of press when it broke, getting written up in AdWeek– by Barbara Lippert, no less– and in other publications of the sort that get read by exactly four people outside our industry.
We broke a slew of print with the campaign—subway posters, bathroom signage, outdoor, magazine—and some pretty good radio spots, one of which I still have on my reel:
(The radio is showing some age, being written during the early stages of the dot com bust, but I still like it too much to take it out of my book.)
It was a fantastically fun assignment to work on and it sold me on DHP being a shop that had the balls to do provocative, breakthrough work.
Today, the Art Director/Creative Director who brought me in on the project, Jesse Diaz (with whom I worked at the ill-fated shop, Berry*Brown Advertising), dropped by my office to show me an excerpt from a book written by someone named Koren Zailckas.
In the book, “Smashed,” she mentioned our campaign. Our campaign!
Jesse handed me the photocopied sheets (pages 191 and 192 from the book) and there, in New York Times Best Seller-set type, was this quote:
“What does sell [alcohol], especially to women, is sex as an idea. Even more than men, we buy the concept that sex is a tricky proceeding. We understand that interacting on the coed level is a struggle for dominance, one that involves a million fouls and false starts, where the playing field is never level, and where one player almost always has the advantage. That’s why Anheuser-Busch advertises Tequiza using the brazen taglines ‘Actually, size does matter’ and ‘They’re not real, so what?’”
Wow! Is that cool or what?
I guess I should have researched the book before I had that “I’m an Ad God” moment, though, because, roughly ten minutes later, I found this review on Amazon:
This isn’t just one girl’s story of sneaking drinks in junior high, creeping out for night-long keg parties in high school and binge-drinking weeknights and weekends through college—it’s also a valuable cautionary tale. At 24 (her present age), Zailckas gave up drinking after a decade of getting drunk, having blackouts and experiencing brushes with comas, date rape and suicide. […] Zailckas had alcohol poisoning at 16 after a night of downing shots at a party with friends, but having her stomach pumped in the emergency room and enduring a month of being grounded didn’t check her desire to drink. […] Alcohol defined Zailckas’s adolescence and college years to such an extent that, as she tells it, she lacks the tools to be an adult: she’s unsure how to maintain relationships and unclear about sex without an alcohol buzz.
Oooooooh kaaaaaaay.
So now my work is being held up as contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A young girl who, at the time the campaign ran, was eighteen. (And a young girl (now, a young woman) who has a blog.)
And not just eighteen; eighteen and lured into a hazy, beer-goggled world of binge drinking, drunken sex and alcohol-induced coma by– wait for it– advertising.
My advertising. My wonderful, breakthrough, attention-grabbing advertising.
Fan-tastic.
So now you see why I said infamy might be a better word.
I’m so proud.
Of course, I think it’s much, much more complicated than that– advertising is incapable of holding a gun to someone’s head and ordering them to chug a beer bong. There’s the whole matter of upbringing, intelligence and, of course, Free Will to contend with, none of which– certainly– is meant to disparage Ms. Zailckas. Rather, it is to say a reduction of such things down to an algebra of advertising equaling the x factor is overly simplistic.
And I’m not saying she blames me specifically– hell, I’ve only read two photocopied pages from her book and a couple thousand words of reviews. Within its pages she might fault Martians or an overactive thyroid gland or even David Hasselhoff.
What do I know?
Still, reading it was a cold-water chaser to my high-proof day in the ad jungle.
9 commentsEmail Article Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 04:58pm Mack Simpson
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