So there I was on Super Bowl Sunday, watching a dreadful game while sipping on my lone Miller High Life of the night, when Budweiser and that dilly-dilly king of theirs started wheeling around a giant barrel of corn syrup searching for the beer company to whom it belonged.  It was a big barrel.  Didn’t belong to Bud Light of course, because all of their ingredients are printed on their label.   They went on to check with the Miller Lite castle who had already received their shipment of corn syrup and then continued on to visit the Coors Light castle who were happy to have located it.

My mind immediately went back to the set up.  Now I enjoy me some great advertising so I might pay a bit more attention to this stuff than most, but a few weeks earlier while watching the playoffs I put some thought into this commercial and this commercial which both informed me as a consumer that Bud Light would be putting ingredients labels on their packaging.  At the end of each commercial we can see the label on their box and it shows 4 simple ingredients.

I got to thinking about it in the moment when they told me about their new label.  “Who gives a rip?  Am I supposed to buy Bud Light because of a label?  Why do I even need an ingredients label if it’s only 4 simple ingredients?”  As I saw the commercial a few more times that weekend my mind meditated on it a bit more.  I thought to myself,  “I remember a few years ago when I looked for an ingredients label and was surprised there wasn’t one (seriously I did that).  Could there be a bunch of corn syrup type junk in my beer?”

**Side note – live sports is your only opportunity to advertise to this guy via TV.  If you need me, I’ll be on the internet.**

Super Bowl Sunday it all came full circle, on the biggest stage, in front of the most consumers, on a day when they’re all drinking beer.  Bud Light had set me (us) up perfectly.  They had given me information I didn’t know I needed, given me time to think about it, positioned themselves as the best option in light of this new information, and then proceeded to show how their competitors did not meet the new standard they set.  I mean, that barrel of corn syrup was huge!  What are Coors Light and Miller Lite gonna do now!?  Change their label and cut out corn syrup?  They have to, right!?  Think about what that will cost them!  This is a product that has such little differentiation and they finally gave me a reason to buy 1 over the other 2.  Meanwhile Coors and Miller are probably still filming ads about color changing cans and slow motion bottles sliding on bar tops.  Genius.  Chess vs. checkers.  Nice job Bud Light.

So where does that leave the rest of us who ain’t buying Super Bowl commercials?  What I loved most about this was how deliberate and planned it was.  Rather than thinking about each individual 30 second TV spot they took a step back and looked big picture and executed on a well thought out plan.  There are a number of ways that we can mimic this sequence digitally that won’t involve dropping 5-10 mil on a Super Bowl ad.  For example on Facebook, we could show a 2-minute video to a lookalike audience of known customers showcasing a problem like “my widget doesn’t shine anymore” and then separate out an audience who watched 75% of that 2-minute video as possibly being in-market for some “widget shining spray foam.”  Once we’ve reduced the advertising pool to only those with dusty widgets and repeated their problem back to them we could now start showing that 75% audience videos about “Acme Widget Spray Foam.”  We could tell them things like how much cheaper it is to clean rather than buying a new widget.  How we can ship it right to your door on auto-delivery.  Testimonial videos with dirty widget transformations.  The possibilities are endless.

Meanwhile Miller and Coors Widget Spray Foam Company Inc. are showing pictures of their product in slow motion sliding across a counter top to an ice cold, unresponsive audience.