Even in the day and age of the metrosexual, there are still plenty of guys out there who cling to a code of conduct that real men are supposed to abide by. It is these average Joes–more specifically, blue collar guys ages 25 to 40–that Mother, New York, set out to reach in a new television campaign for Milwaukee’s Best Light. And while all of the five spots directed by John O’Hagan of bicoastal RSA USA present funny situations that find men straying from what is widely considered to be manly behavior, the highlight is “Dog” (:15).
As the spot opens, three guys are standing in the driveway of a suburban home peering under the hood of a muscle car as one of them talks about the engine. Fascinating stuff, of course, but one of the guys gets distracted when the fluffy white dog from next-door approaches. Bending down, he starts engaging in cutesy puppy talk. “Come here. I’ll rub your little belly,” he coos.
Boom. In a split second, a giant can of Milwaukee’s Best Light beer falls from the sky and crushes the guy. Meanwhile, the dog, not close enough to meet the same fate, hightails it back home.
“Men should act like men, and light beer should taste like beer,” a voiceover intones, and the brand’s tagline “Brewed for a man’s taste” appears on screen.
THE LIGHT STUFF
According to Mother’s Linus Karlsson, who served as creative director on the Milwaukee’s Best Light campaign along with Paul Malmstrom, the agency has handled the brand, part of Miller Brewing Co.’s line of products, for about a year. Initially, Mother worked on developing promotions and radio spots for their client, then came the opportunity for Milwaukee’s Best Light to become the official sponsor of the World Series of Poker on ESPN and a need for television commercials.
Building off the tagline “Brewed for a man’s taste,” Mother’s creative team created various scenarios featuring a group of buddies who represent the Milwaukee’s Best Light drinker. According to Karlsson, that drinker is “a straightforward, funny guy who tells it like it is. What you see, is what you get.”
Like “Dog,” the campaign’s other spots all end with a beer can flattening the one guy who slips into unmanly territory. While “Insect” finds a man frantically swatting at a buzzing insect, “Pizza” has another using a napkin to soak the excess oil off his slice of pizza. In “Check In,” a guy engages in a syrupy sweet phone conversation with his girlfriend when he thinks he is out of earshot of his buddies, and in “Match,” a man shows up at a barbecue holding hands with his girlfriend–and they are wearing identical shirts.
The concept for “Dog,” by the way, was inspired in part by Mother copywriter Dave Clark. “People realized that I own two tiny Yorkies, and that’s pretty unmanly,” Clark said laughing.
With the scenarios locked down, the agency set out to find the right director. O’Hagan was chosen for a combination of reasons. “Obviously, we think he has a brilliant reel. He captures humor in a way that feels very real, and he’s fantastic with casting,” Mother art director Rob Baird commented. Plus, Baird added, “He really understands where this guy [who drinks Milwaukee’s Best Light] is coming from and the role of the beer in his life.”
With the exception of one professional actor, O’Hagan cast non-actors, average guys wrangled from hardware stores and bars.
“It’s not an easy way to cast,” O’Hagan acknowledged. “There are a lot of people who are uncomfortable on camera. So you have to do a lot of casting, and sometimes you just find amazing people out there who have never been in front of a camera before, but when you put them in front of a camera, they’re great.”
One of those finds was Travis Nicholson, a native of Tennessee who plays the main character in “Dog.” You can’t help but notice Nicholson’s Southern drawl in the spot. “I’ve had multiple people call me–both inside and outside the ad industry–who’ve seen the spot to comment on how great it is that there’s a guy in a commercial running on national TV with a real Southern accent. They like that we’re not making fun of a Southern accent. He’s just a real guy from the South,” Baird said, adding, “It’s not that we were trying to pick [guys] from a specific region, but we did want guys who felt real.”
As for the dog in the spot, a trained pooch named Bandit–not one of Clark’s Yorkies–took on that role. “The dog was great,” O’Hagan remarked. “We wanted to make it feel like it was this little toy dog that belonged to the grandmother next-door or something.”
“Dog” and the other spots were shot on location in the Los Angeles area over the course of three days. While Ellen Kuras was the DP on “Dog” and “Check In,” John Stainer was the DP on “Pizza,” “Insect” and “Match.”
BEER BASH
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges was deciding exactly how to crush a guy with a giant beer can. “That was a big discussion early on, and personally, I just always prefer to do as much in camera as I can and then resort to post in trying to enhance stuff later,” O’Hagan said.
Going with that approach, the director had about half-a-dozen eight-foot-tall Milwaukee’s Best Light beer cans fabricated from foam and fiberglass. At each location, one of the cans, weighted with sand bags to ensure a solid landing, was hoisted up into the air by a crane and subsequently dropped to the ground.
The artisans at The Mill, New York, later went in and “scrunched the guy down and erased him,” O’Hagan said.
Achieving the effect was remarkably uncomplicated, the director said, noting, “We originally thought we were going to have to do a can drop and then place the can on the spot and morph the two shots together so the can would be facing the camera perfectly. But we just got lucky. It pretty much faced the camera straight on [after every drop].”
Once all the footage was in the can–so to speak, Mike Douglas of Cut & Run edited the spots.
Short and to the point, “Dog” and the other commercials in the campaign are truly genius in their simplicity. “That was the rule across the campaign,” O’Hagan said. “We didn’t want to overcomplicate the spots. We wanted for them to just be really simple, recognizable moments.”