Vier Out Of Ten

It's always a crying shame to see brands resorting to borrowed interest in order to sell themselves. This latest example is a classic case of "let's see how many iconic and culturally significant things we can associate ourselves with in order to seem edgy and cool".  

Set to a hip soundtrack we see some laboured and charmless vignettes of New York, the miniskirt, punks and the Rio carnival.  The last few seconds of the commercial informs us that it's actually an ad for Becks Vier, "the beer that said no to compromise".  You what?

By basking in the glow of all these great revolutionary and ground-breaking things, I think Becks are trying to tell us that Vier is also revolutionary and ground-breaking.  Which is bollocks.

Now I imagine the brief said something like "communicate that Vier is a 4% standard lager that tastes like a premium lager". But this is also bollocks.  I've tried Becks Vier and in no way does it come close to matching the quality of its strong continental lager distant cousins.

Maybe we've got an old-fashioned view of what makes a great ad, but over here in our backyard we're big believers that in any commercial the product should be the hero.  In this ad, the beer comes across as an almost apologetic afterthought.  It ends up being the least interesting thing in the ad when it should really be the most interesting. 

What a pity that Becks wasn't the client that said no to "the beer that said no to compromise".