Disclosure : I used to work on the Coors Light account. So, whilst I’ve tried, I can’t promise that this post is entirely objective.
I find myself liking, in a bordering on admiring kind of way, the new Coors Light ad with the frozen-panted Jean Claude Van Damme.
The writing, the performance and the message are as tight as JCVD’s pants.
The humour is understated and knowing.
There’s no getting away from it. It’s good.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdHocrK59bo]
At the time of writing it has had a decent 255,736 views on YouTube and the comments are mostly positive.
It’s good.
The YouTube video includes a pop-up link to the Coors Light UK – Closest To Cold Facebook page.
This has a somewhat less decent 1,679 likes at the time of writing.
Only 1,679 likes in spite of the incentives to Like of more JCVD content (how could you resist?) and the chance to win 2011 festival tickets.
And thereby hangs the tale.
The new ad is good, bordering on very good.
But I don’t believe that the UK has ever got its head round light beer in general and Coors Light in particular.
And I’m not sure that, outside of small pockets of male evangelists and small pockets of females, it ever will.
There is a huge disconnect between advertising that is easy to like or admire and a brand that struggles to be relevant.
And the trouble is that it’s hard to pinpoint what could be done better.
The association between a light beer that comes from Colorado with ice cold refreshment is intuitively credible.
They’ve somehow managed to get away with the line “The World’s Most Refreshing Beer”. Hats off again.
And the new ad is good.
If it were me, which it isn’t, I’d be seriously considering a radical shake-up of the brand’s targeting.
Coors Light is inherently female-friendly and it is a massive brand for women in Ireland.
But that approach brings its own challenges. How to market a beer to women when women recoil from beer marketing that is overtly targeted at them?
Not my problem any more, but I wish any client that bought the latest ad the best of luck.
(Views on this blog are my own and not those of my employer etc. etc.)
(Enjoyed tagging this post with “tight pants”.)
Yes, good ad – but JCvD just not a warm or popular or cool enough personality to swing it for me.
As for Coors – doesn’t have a strong image over here. Doesn’t have the Latin associations that some other brands benefit from. Does have dodgy political associations. There’s already a lot of cheap tasteless weak lager on offer which competes on prices. Other have failed in the light beer sector already – Guinness springs to mind.
As for Tesco – I wasn’t wildly keen on them to begin with, but trying to collapse a railway tunnel on my train turned me off them fairly strongly. Don’t have Morrisons near me – but there’s a Lidl not too far away with all sorts of odd stuff.