What Old Milwaukee Can Teach You about Video Marketing (Because it Can’t Teach You Much About Beer)
During the most recent Super Bowl, Will Ferrell served as the unexpected spokesman for Old Milwaukee in an advertisement that only ran in North Platte, Nebraska. North Platte, in case you were wondering, is not a choice media market. A subsequent ad ran in the relatively cosmopolitan market of Davenport Iowa.
Here is the ad.
Ferrell and Pabst Brewing Company, the manufacturer of Old Milwaukee, weren’t content to bewilder TV viewers in America’s heartland and so they began to release commercials in Sweden. In one of these spots, Ferrell speaks in garrulous, declarative – and authentic – Swedish. While jetting around one of Stockholm’s harbors with a woman who looks shockingly like ABBA’s Agnetha Fältskog, the actor shouts “This is my boat. This is my woman. And this is my beer. Old Milwaukee. It’s all right.”
This ad was actually shown to Swedish TV audiences.
Shown in teeny markets in the flyover states, the initial Old Milwaukee commercials barely registered on television. And the Swedish commercials seemed less interested in courting Swedish consumers (who don’t seem like the ideal targets for an insipid American lager served up in aluminum cans), than in mocking their environment and in reveling in Scandinavian strangeness.
But the ads have had a long and successful run on YouTube. The original ad has been viewed nearly 400,000 times and one of the actor’s Swedish commercials, which was posted just 3 weeks ago, has been viewed more than 700,000 times.
What accounts for the success of these videos? Why do people enjoy watching a laconic Ferrell wading through a field of swaying grasses to endorse an unremarkable brew?
The obvious answer is “because they are funny.” That answer wouldn’t be wrong. But it also wouldn’t be a helpful one because “funny” is such an imprecise word. If the Old Milwaukee commercials are going to teach us anything about online video marketing, we need to figure out precisely why they are funny.
While it’s generally best to remember Steve Lohr’s observation in The New York Times that “There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing,” we think we can come to a better understanding of what type of humor works in online video marketing.
Online Video: The Preserve of the Strange and Surreal
Ferrell’s Old Milwaukee ads delight in skewering conventions with palpable and pointed oddness. The viewer must ask “why is Will Ferrell, a recognizable actor and comedian, shilling for Old Milwaukee and why is he wandering through a yellow field with a vacant, apathetic expression?” These ads upset our collective understanding of what an advertisement should contain and, by subverting the aesthetics of conventional online video marketing, appear distinct and different from it. In the hands of Old Milwaukee’s marketers, “off-ness” somehow makes the brand more relatable.
This humor – surreal humor (humor “based on violations of causal reasoning with events and behaviors that are logically incongruent”) – is popular on the Internet and has now become increasingly prevalent on television and in other entertainment mediums. Spend some time watching The Cartoon Network’s evening programming and you’ll see other exhibitions of this sort of humor. For some reason, it found particularly fertile soil in the internet’s deep chasms and unsounded abysses.
There is a knowing, smirking tone in these ads. In the same way they subvert our expectations of what an ad should look like, these videos seem to interrogate and mock a host of other assumptions and treasured conventions. The first of the ads – the ones aired in North Platte and Davenport – have that air of unsubtle schmaltz you occasionally see in a Budweiser commercial. Ferrell and Old Milwaukee are clearly using the conventions of the American beer commercial (a recognizable and standardized breed of ad) in ways that even the most ironically-detached hipster can enjoy: “Look, those aren’t just amber waves of grain. Those are interrogative, deconstructive, critical amber waves of grain!”
In the Swedish ad shown above, Ferrell and Old Milwaukee actually do something else: they explode the misogynistic world of the “American Beer Commercial.” When Ferrell, mustachioed and sporting an improbably puffy sweater, shouts “This is my boat. This is my woman. And this is my beer. Old Milwaukee. It’s all right,” he is simply putting into words the caveman chest-thumping we’ve seen in a million beer ads on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s not materialism, sexism, and neanderthalism – but “ironic materialism,” “ironic sexism,” and “ironic neanderthalism.”
Gratuitous irony plays well to certain viewers. By deconstructing certain choice qualities of conventional advertising, these videos make Pabst seem in on a joke being played on their stolid, vacuous industry competitors.
Collapsing the Distance in Online Video Marketing
The Old Milwaukee ads works as online video marketing because they do what surreal humor has always sought to do: they subvert expectations and make the viewer think about conventions. By doing both of these things, they make Old Milwaukee seem like a more relatable brand and they differentiate the company from its competitors. And that is precisely what good online video marketing is supposed to do.