If you watch sports on TV, beer advertising cannot be avoided. Mostly entertaining, some more than others. Once in a while, those of us in marketing question whether the ads are effective, as in do they help move product. Dos Equis and “The World’s Most Interesting Man” was a good example of success in this field.
Today we read about the other side, as Bud Light recorded its first full-year decline is sales. Consumerist picked up on it in August, and this week Ad Age got into the details…
Shortly after August Busch IV was named CEO of Anheuser-Busch, he accepted a company director’s recommendation for a consulting firm that would assist with managing the brewer’s burgeoning brand portfolio.
The firm, Cambridge Group, ended up going far beyond portfolio management. In fact, its exhaustive research resulted in the “Drinkability” campaign that — four years and millions in fees later — is considered a major factor in Bud Light posting the first full-year sales decline in its history.
The “Drinkability” debacle, however, resonates beyond A-B, as agencies increasingly chafe under the growing influence of consultants. Marketers are under pressure to justify their budgets, and CMOs, skating on ever-thinner ice, are trying to bring a more scientific approach to a discipline traditionally heavily reliant on gut calls. The degree to which these consultants’ recommendations and findings can translate directly into creative is becoming a familiar frustration for agencies.
Excellent report, with typically good comments.
Very few of today’s effort can rival the effectiveness of “Miller Time” or “This Bud’s For You.” And who doesn’t remember “Tastes Great, Less Filling?” I look forward to getting “drinkability” off the air…
PBS Newshour did a good piece on it, interviewing Chairman Genachowski…
According to ars technica, we’ve been down this road before, especially the wireless spectrum portion…
Between 2006 and early 2009, the agency actively vetted a proposal by M2Z Networks to provide a free, wireless broadband across the United States. The FCC would lease a national spectrum license to M2Z in the Advanced Wireless Services-3 (AWS-3) band area (2155-2175MHz), and the company would offer a free, advertising-funded, 512Kpbs broadband service that filtered out indecent content. Consumers would be able to access the band area via an attachment device on their computer. The firm would also offer a faster, unfiltered premium service and pay the government 5 percent each year from its gross revenues. Once granted this band, M2Z would commit to rolling out the smut-free network to 95 percent of the US population over the course of a decade.
M2Z launched a spirited campaign to generate public interest in its proposal, which came complete with a small battalion of endorsers. “I know many Utahns would welcome the opportunity to provide their children with the educational and economic opportunity which broadband access can provide without having to become software engineers in order to protect their children,” Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT) wrote to the FCC in 2007.
But while the idea received lots of shout-outs from family advocacy groups and members of Congress, the FCC rejected just granting the spectrum to a chosen entity. Then in 2008, agency chair and values voter Republican Kevin Martin came up with an alternative proposal to run an auction of that license zone—the winning bidder promising to abide by M2Z’s commitments and rules.
