All right, Wieden + Kennedy. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: create a commercial for Heineken Premium Light beer. And do it without ripping off about fifteen other commercials.
No, without ripping off fifteen other commercials! Without!
First of all, there is no excuse for this ad to be a minute long. It's the same goddamn thing over and over again, for sixty seconds. What a waste.
Second of all, does the structure of this commercial seem, oh, I don't know, slightly familiar?
Well, well. It's not just the "circle of giving," either, it's the particular gambit of having the ad start and end in the same place - which is to say, paradoxically. That's a pretty specific choice you have to make - or, in this case, steal.
The idea of "passing the love" is also "borrowed" from about seven quintillion Coke ads. Like this one. Or this one. Or, basically, every single ad in the Coke oeuvre ever. And as ridiculous as that concept is when applied to caffeinated soda, seeing it used for an alcoholic beverage just makes me wince. I'm glad that cigarettes aren't allowed to advertise on TV anymore, but sometimes you have to wonder at the justification for letting beer companies pitch their product in all kinds of life-bettering ways when other harmful consumer products have been banned from the airwaves.
At any rate, I think Wieden + Kennedy can do better than this. Here are some suggestions I have in keeping with their general theme:
* A friendly, beer-drinking clown helps stop the Heinekenburglar from stealing all the beer in GreenBottleLand.
* Two actors portraying Heineken Light and a domestic light beer stand in front of a white background and discuss their differences.
* Lipizzaner stallions tote a Heineken wagon through a snowy landscape.
* A woman runs into a room full of drones watching a dystopian Bud Light ad and throws a Heineken bottle through the screen.
Any one of those should work pretty well.
1 comment:
A couple other commercial ideas for Heineken:
* Heineken Light fans debate which of the key benefits of the beer - "Tastes Great" or "Less Filling" - is the more important factor.
* Against a picturesque backdrop of the American West, a lone cowboy nicknamed The Heineken Man works a herd cattle across a stretch of mountainous scrub. He's his own man, and he enjoys his Heineken -- he opens his beer caps with the antlers of a disgruntled Longhorn.
* A car drives by a busy freeway, and an empty bottle of Heineken is tossed out the car window -- landing at the foot of an old Native American dressed in a traditional headdress. The camera zooms in on the Indian's face as a solitary tear works its way down his wrinkled cheek.
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