CHICAGO Ogilvy & Mather dominated Miller Brewing Co.’s annual wholesalers convention with new advertising for Miller Lite and Miller Genuine Draft, including a spot with actress Pamela Anderson engaged in a pillow fight.
Not shown to the wholesalers during Miller’s advertising session this week in Las Vegas was work from MGD’s other agency, J. Walter Thompson. “JWT’s work was not ready yet,” a Miller representative said, adding that JWT continues as an MGD shop.
Miller’s marketing team assured JWT executives that the brewer has not shifted the MGD account to Ogilvy, New York and Chicago, sources said. It does, however, mark the first time since JWT picked up the account in 1999 that new work from the agency was not shown to the distributors during the marketing session.
Miller split the $50 million MGD account between the two shops in September 2002 after a shootout. At that time Miller said it was not satisfied with the Chicago agency’s previous executions, which included the “Never miss a genuine opportunity” campaign that contained sexual overtures.
Ogilvy’s work, however, has also generated controversy and the ire of consumer advocate groups as “showing that all men want nasty, slutty girls,” said Christine O’Donnell, founder and president of Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth.
At question is the Milwaukee brewer’s catfight spot from Ogilvy in which two voluptuous women engage in an outrageous wrestling match over whether Miller Lite tastes great or is less filling. The ad ends with two guys talking about how that would make a great commercial as their girlfriends stare aghast at the idea. The spot is part of Miller’s “storytelling” campaign.
Work shown to distributors on the brand extends the catfight theme. In one spot, the two women take their battle into a hotel room, where Pamela Anderson emerges and the three engage in a drawn out pillow fight.
In another spot, the girls fight is stopped as the guy telling the story says, “What about this.” The next shot shows him duking it out with one of the girls. He smiles as she bashes his head close to her breasts. The same storyteller in a different ad says, “I’ve been nasty” as he gets spanked in a pool by a female.
“It’s insulting at this time of war to show such tasteless ads,” O’Donnell said. She did, however, acknowledge that the ads have earned Miller a lot of media time.
MGD’s new work from Ogilvy continues the “cold-filtering” brand campaign introduced last year, but has actor Keifer Sutherland as the voiceover saying, “Keep what’s good.” The spots convey the “purity” of MGD by showing how men stick to the pure things in life, such as a good girlfriend or a woman’s smile during an otherwise bad day.
Work from Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore., for Miller High Life consistently connects with its audience with the use of subtle humor, said Tom Pirko, president of Bevmark, a beverage consultancy in Santa Barbara, Calif. “The High Life work clearly stands out from their other advertising,” Pirko said.
A Hispanic spot from LatinWorks Advertising, Austin, Texas, was also shown with a take on the catfight theme for Miller Lite during a soccer match.
More Catfights on Tap From Miller
