Was the Coors Light "Hits the Spot" ad good or... fast? EP12

Episode 12 Transcript

Welcome back to the Marketing Combat Podcast. My name is Chris Kubbernus and with me is always the amazing, handsome, funny, talented, funny, we need like a little like walkin', Christopher Walkin' thing in there, funny, Jason Donnelly. Here we are. Well, this is the Marketing Combat Podcast and today's episode is all about the new Coarse Light ad. It's not new though. We gotta scab. it's not new. It's back from like last year, but it's like.

popped up again for some reason in the news, in the marketing space news. I'm not sure why it's popped up again, but it's basically maybe because it's an interesting case. Let me give you guys some back story. Shoei Otani hit a massive home run, a missile out to the stands, the ball went foul, and he hit the Coors Lights ad, the LED sign, and it actually knocked out one of the black squares on the screen. And then...

pretty fast, a couple of weeks later, what Coors Light did is actually they turned it into like a marketing moment, they had some collectible merchandise, you know, basically like the block was missing, it showcased Botani, and then they also launched some cans, right, so they actually had limited edition cans where like basically in the can where the sign was hit is where this black block was out, so, and I can show you guys here on the platform, think that's, maybe that's gonna help you guys understand what we're talking about.

But essentially like this is the can, was commemorative, hits the spot. This was the nice tagline that they added in this, right? Coors Light hits the spot, which is perfect. It totally ties into it. So if you didn't see it, it's just come up again that it was pretty interesting. You can see here people are selling the limited edition cans for quite a bit of money, which is quite interesting as well. So this was a marketing home run, if you want.

Four Coors Light. I'm out of here. I'm gonna take, you done? Is that it? This is a marketing home run for Coors Light. And today on the Marketing Combat Podcast, we're gonna debate fast and good or just fast. Is this good advertising or is this fast advertising? Which I would say there's a lot of fast advertising these days. And is this any good? So Jason.

you're gonna take the position, or no, you let me know which position you wanna take. I'll tell ya. And on one side, I think it's horrible. I'm gonna go with like mostly horrible and just fast, but when you look at the numbers, it's hard to say that. They just kept selling more Coors Life because of this cool campaign. But I don't think it's a good campaign. I think it's a ton of wasted money. I think that they just put a black square on a bunch of cans. They had to change all of their signs, change their cans, change their marketing, and I don't...

see the massive interest in it other than super fast and quickly relevant at the time. At the end of the day, I don't think it's good. I think it's fast. Today I'm going to play devil's advocate. Why I think it's a great ad is because it is ins...

In some ways, I think a lot of brands try to insert themselves into conversations that they don't have any part of being a part of. I saw this with IKEA and the MedGala a few weeks ago. talked about this on, I've talked about this on social, if you're following me on social, but I basically thought that was horrible. Basically, you know, they're just memeing off of Doja Cat wearing some towels to the MedGala. And then IKEA is like, we also sell towels here. Here's one of our people walking down the street wearing towels. And it was just like, okay, great. Thanks IKEA.

Perfect, we knew you sold towels, it did nothing for us. In my opinion, I think that's crap advertising. Where I think this actually is fitting is because of it was Coors Light sign in the first place. It was an interesting moment in the culture, in baseball for those kind of fans. It's also Japan has a large...

beer following, I would say, or like a large love of beer and a large love of baseball. So from a marriage of all things together, I think it's a really good moment that they picked that they didn't just try to like insert themselves into something that's completely irrelevant. Like Coors Light is like, hey, you know, someone wore a dress that is also the same color as our can. So now our cans are all like, look like a dress and we'd made, it's like, that's garbage marketing in my opinion.

This is actually like, hey, this is something funny that happened to us in the zeitgeist and we're gonna make fun, we're gonna do some funny things with it. We're gonna have some commemorative cans. Does the design suck? Yes. Is it a nice can? No. Is it, you know, is it very niche? Yes. But I think as we progress into marketing, we're gonna find a lot more of these niche opportunities to just engage fans on a very small.

moment as hyper -personalization comes in, as speed to market comes in, they're able to produce these sort of things way, way quicker than they used to. And I think it's going to be more marketing like this, but I hope brands err on the side of what Cruel's Light has done, which is not just inserting themselves into a moment, but actually like, that was interesting. Let's be a part of that. Let's do something nice and put out something commemorative that appreciates the moment, supports fans, does something cool. And that's it. That's what I think. All right. What do all the listeners think?

Do you think that it was just a fast money grab or do you think that it was a cultural win and a smart good advertising for Coors Light? Tell us in the comments. Tell us what you think of the podcast. Give us some reviews. Think about us. Talk about us. Send us a message. Say hello. We miss you. Yeah. Catch up with us on social. Let us know what you think and we'll see you guys in the next one. Thanks for joining the Marketing Combat Podcast. I've been Chris Kubbernus. I'm Kim Kardashian. I'll see you next time.