Big Game! Big Time Beer Commercials!
Unless you traditionally live under a rock, you know that a significant American football game was held on Sunday evening. This game draws over 100 million American viewers each year, and so each commercial slot fetches a pretty penny, and advertisers try to make the biggest splash possible with their tv spots. This year, Budweiser brought ads for their namesake brands, plus a third for Stella Artois, while Michelob Ultra brought a pair of entries to the game. Let's check out their ads!
We lead off with Michelob Ultra, who tries to swing for the fences by bringing the oh-so-dreamy Chris Pratt into its commercials. "The Perfect Fit" shows Chris trying his darnedest to nail his new Ultra role, but it ends up not being what it seems. Chris Pratt brings every ounce of his charming self to the commercial, but I really felt like the ending didn't have enough "oomph" to it.
Let's face it: you already either love or hate the Medieval-style "Dilly Dilly" commercials that Bud Light has been doing all football season. In "The Battle of Beer Run", the concept gets even more ridiculous with the arrival of the Bud Knight...see, 'cause it rhymes with Bud Light! Get it? Anyway, the whole attempt to cash in on the Game of Thrones-driven popularity of the Medieval Era made this an obvious theme that Budweiser attempted to humorize with the "Dilly Dilly" line. I generally enjoyed the first couple of the series, but now I'm pretty well over the whole thing. I didn't care for the craft beer dig in the original commercial, where a commoner was sent to the Pit of Despair for gifting a homebrew to the King instead of Bud Light. This isn't Bud's first Big Game dig at craft, as I remember an ad a few years back where Budweiser decided to crap on the craft beer industry, specifically mocking "pumpkin peach ale(s)" while their newest High End acquisition at the time, Elysian, HAD JUST RELEASED A PUMPKIN PEACH BEER! Here's this year's first Bud ad. Let's move on.
After the "Dilly Dilly" inanity, Budweiser hits a home run, in my view, by tugging at the heartstrings. The US has had its fair share of natural disasters in the last year, ranging from devastating hurricanes and flooding to wildfires. In "United We Stand", Budweiser shows us how their breweries do their part to help out in times of crisis by converting their canning lines from beer to water for distribution in disaster-struck areas. This is easily my favorite ad of the group.
ABI continues to pull at the heartstrings with their Stella Artois ad "Taps", which features Matt Damon and highlights and encourages the partnership between Stella and Damon's Water.org charity, which is providing more easily accessible water to developing parts of the world.
Chris Pratt and Michelob Ultra provide the latter bookend in the game's series of beer commercials with "I Like Beer", which teams up Pratt with a number of professional athletes and places in him in multiple athletic situations like lifting weights and running a race. It serves to let Pratt play up his more awkwardly humorous side that I and many others came to enjoy on his time on the tv comedy Parks and Rec, on which he starred before he became a movie megastar and joined the Pantheon of Awesome Chrises (Pratt, Pine, Hemsworth, Evans). For me, this is a far better effort than Michelob's first offering.
What about you, dear audience? Which of these ads did you enjoy? Feel free to leave a comment!
