Beverage of choice

And since the word does appear in the title, I suppose we need a post on beer (hate the stuff myself, by the way).

Any beer commercial is marketed at morons, in my opinion. It's almost always "look, here's a big pair of tits--now drink this!"

...Not that I mind seeng a big pair of tits, I'm just saying.

- from a forum for beer drinkers

Well, there you have it.

Anyway, so I was hunting for a snap of the ad that I had mentioned in the previous post - the one with the UMich girl and OSU guy playing tonsil football - and I came across this witticism. Also a bunch of other ads. Considering I wasn't sure what brand of beer it was, my searches were pretty specific, and I found a bunch of unrelated, albeit interesting, stuff.

One thing that was completely obvious was that beer manufacturers believe very strongly that a fantastic pair of cans are essential in order to sell their cans. Beer drinkers are supposedly a very macho lot, and wear their male-ness on their sleeves (in the form of tattoos involving grisly murder weapons, usually). Such men are clearly cavemen who respond to very basic stimuli. The obvious one being sex. So show them tits and sell them beer.

I will briefly point out that not only is this completely anti-feminist, it doesn't help the image of the men of this world. We DO have brains you know. And we use them - not all our decisions are made 2 feet below.

That said, the interesting thing I noted was that Budweiser had actually run a series of controversial ads aimed specifically at gay men. The first ad showed two men holding hands, with a punchline - "Be Yourself". Naturally, this led to howls of protests from conservative groups in America. Typical, isn't it. Anyway, Budweiser continued running these ads for a while, but only in gay publications. Later, it ran ads with mildly suggestive gay themes in these publications.

Clearly, this showed that the company realised an important truth - a significant proportion of its customers didn't like big (or any kind of) tits, and they had to reach out to these people.

The story didn't end there, though. There's a bunch of e-mails doing the rounds from people on both sides of the divide, trying to rally support to their cause. Again, there is no shortage of people with no work in their lives. I feel sad for such people. They seriously need to see some tits - or whatever.