Guys mistake rain for beer in a clever new spot for Miller Lite titled “Downpour” “(:30). Created by Young & Rubicam (Y&R), Chicago, and directed by Baker Smith of harvest, Santa Monica, “Downpour” opens on a group of average Joes playing baseball in a park when it suddenly starts to rain. “Beer is falling from the sky!” one of the players proclaims.
Cut to jubilant men running wild both on and off the baseball field–while one guy happily slurps “beer” out of a birdbath, another lines his driveway with dozens of containers to catch the falling brew.
Toward the end of the spot, one of the celebrants bursts into a bar to announce to everyone that it’s raining beer. But after taking note of the tall glasses of Miller Lite being enjoyed by the bar’s patrons, he realizes that it isn’t raining beer, after all: He and the rest of the guys depicted are just so used to drinking watered-down beer that they mistook rain for beer.
So where did the idea for “Downpour” come from? “It came from it being rainy and miserable in Chicago,” Y&R art director Sonya Grewal said laughing. She’s not kidding.
“I have to give Sonya full credit,” Y&R copywriter Ken Erke chimed in. “We were staring out the window, and she said, ‘What if it was raining beer?’ “
That simple thought inspired a killer concept that ties in well with Miller Lite’s overall marketing message. “We’re all about taste. We taste better than Bud Light. That’s been proven in taste tests, and one of the reasons we taste better is we’re not watered-down,” Y&R director of broadcast production Matt Bijarchi related.
THE MAGIC TOUCH
Smith was hired to direct “Downpour” because, according to Y&R producer David Fisher, he possesses both the humorous and filmic touches that the spot required. For his part, Smith said that the project presented a challenge in that he had to convince viewers–at least initially–that it really was raining beer. So the performance given by the baseball player that we first see–the aforementioned guy who declares “Beer is falling from the sky!”–had to be utterly believable.
With so much riding on that particular scene, Smith called on an actor named Brian Stepanek whom he has worked with in the past. “I’m a huge fan of Brian’s work. He is an actor who can do anything, and I think, most importantly, he understands commercial timing,” Smith shared. “He had a wonderful way of taking all this emotion and condensing it down into the one-point-eight seconds that we needed.”
With their star performer cast, Smith and DP Emmanuel Lubezki shot “Downpour” over the course of three days on location and on the Universal Studios backlot in Universal City, Calif.
To create the illusion that it was raining, Smith and his crew constructed massive towers from which the rain fell. On one of the shoot days, the sky was overcast, which worked in their favor–at first. When an actual thunderstorm hit, production had to be halted. “We had to stop production and wait for the rainstorm to stop so that we could turn our rain on and start shooting,” Smith recalled laughing.
Despite that delay, Smith said that there was time and room for improvisation during the shoot. For example, the scene in which a guy drinks from a birdbath wasn’t in the original plan: That was picked up along the way. “That’s what happens when you work with an agency like Y&R and a client who are willing to go with you on things,” Smith remarked.
In turn, Bijarchi praised Smith’s penchant for collaboration–as well as that of Y&R’s creative team. “Collaboration is a word that’s thrown around a lot in theory but seldom used in practice,” Bijarchi said. “[Ken and Sonya] are nice, talented people who want to do great work, and Baker is the same type of person. So they all made the best solutions. There were no lines drawn in the sand.”
After a successful shoot, Eric Zumbrunnen, who was with Spot Welders, Venice, Calif., at the time (and is now at Final Cut, Los Angeles), cut “Downpour.” “He worked fast,” Fisher marveled. “He was able to quickly knock out the bad performances, and it was easy to trust him.”
Once “Downpour” was cut, Y&R sent it to Human, New York, where a track was composed to accompany the spot. According to Erke, the agency requested music with a magical quality that would underscore the boyish wonder the men exude in the spot.
All of the elements come together to create a humorous ad that, according to Smith, “taps into everyone’s inner Homer Simpson.”
