SABMiller, Twist One Off
Increasingly finding comfort with same-sex and sexiness in the same ad, this is the most progressive print effort from Miller to date.
The ads were developed after talking to gay focus groups. "We showed them models first, and they liked the young, attractive, multi-cultural trendy people with a 'going out' look and feel," says Mike Giger. "We're seeing more and more couples in ads today but we came out with something that's got a lot more sexuality than everybody else but we're still tasteful." Focus groups reported that there's "no need to tip-toe around the sexuality."
Miller and Anheuser-Busch have the distinction of being among the few companies that advertises in gay media and also have a mainstream media commercial with a gay theme.
Beer companies are well represented in The Commercial Closet, largely due to an effort in the mid-1990s to pull away from the industry's longterm sexist advertising themes that objectified women. Such commercials were summed up by the Swedish Bikini Team ads from Stroh Brewing Co. for Old Milwaukee. Looking for new material to mine, brewers began extensively playing with gay and transgender themes in their advertising. However, because beer drinkers are stereotypically macho, the tone of many of the ads were more negative.
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nice colors and CUTE guys pitching a product, which I find personally rather crass but that has great financial value. Given the community's standing difficulty with chemical abuse and unacceptable use patterns of intoxicants, generally I personally believe that these sorts of ads are in some fashion no more appropriate than ads on an indian reservation for which brands of spray paint taste the best. Failure to warn any given target audience of the INHERENT dangers of a product is a common and purposeful oversight which many manufacturers engage in but when those dangers grind up guyzwholikeguyz it seems to hit home a little closer to my house.