Commercially Viable - Miller Lite

I like drinking Miller Lite. Then again, I like drinking shitty, domestic swill. I don’t have any particular affinity for Miller Lite. I don’t care about its vortex bottleneck, its wide-mouth can, or whatever half-assed gimmick they came up with this month to sell more beer. Miller Lite, to me, could just as easily be Bud Light, or Budweiser, or Coors Light, or any other low-rent light beer. They’re all pretty much the same: cold, cheap, and watered down.

That’s what makes Miller Lite’s perpetual “manliness” ad campaign so frustrating. There have been about a thousand of these ads thus far, and the premise is always the same. A man is confronted with a choice between Miller Lite and another, unnamed light beer. The man says he doesn’t care which beer he drinks. The bartender, always gorgeous, chastises him for his indecisiveness, and then we get the big comedic reveal, where the man is shown to be “unmanly” because he was crying on a rollercoaster or texting or, as in the above ad, wearing skinny jeans. Usually, the man is sheepishly shown drinking a Miller Lite at the end of the ad while his dipshit friends and more inexplicably hot women giggle at him.

Let’s watch the ad. The Art Garfunkel/Seth Rogen/John C. Reilly hybrid-looking guy orders a “light beer”. I’m pretty sure there’s never been anyone in the history of drinking who has placed an order for an unspecified light beer. Even though they all taste the same, a person would at least blurt out a brand name. This would be akin to walking into a Subway and asking for a “sandwich”.

She, of course, is ready for this, and holds up two beers (Miller Lite and generic “Light Beer”), asking him if he’d prefer “more taste or less taste”. Why wouldn’t she just give him the beer with more taste? Who says Miller Lite actually does have more taste? And what kind of bartender asks that fucking question?

When posted with the eternal more taste/less taste query, shithead here actually says “I don’t care”. I know we’ve established that his order of any light beer and her response with “More taste or less taste?” are both completely implausible and never would happen. But if this sequence of events were to actually unfold, wouldn’t you just ask for the beer with more taste? I know the idea of Miller Lite actually having more taste is completely unproven and unscientific, but if some knockout bartender is asking you which beer you want and implying that one is better than the other, and you don’t really care which one you drink anyway, wouldn’t you just ask for the Miller?

These problems annoy me far more than the lame punch line, which has doofus dressed in skinny jeans. He’s unmanly, you see, and that’s why he didn’t order the Miller Lite! He’s not worthy of it! Of course, because being shamed by one beautiful woman isn’t enough, there’s another ten sitting adjacent to him (somehow completely alone in a crowded bar) to really twist the knife in. The opposite of hilarity (depression?) ensues.

We go through the whole “Miller Lite! Yeah!” portion, and then we get perhaps my least favorite joke in the history of commercials. Having finally learned the lesson of never being not manly, our hero approaches his friends with a bucket of Miller Lite. He then asks them, “The score still 21-32?” A friend responds, “Yeah, just like your jean size”.

Ahem.

- No one with even a passing knowledge of or interest in sports would ever read off the score backwards like that. Other than children under the age of six or an adult who has legitimately never watched a sporting event in his or her life, people do not do that.
- The assholes who wrote this commercial knew this, and certainly could have come up with another joke to fit the scene that actually made sense, but chose the lazy route anyway.
- These same assholes got paid to write this.
- The joke fucking sucks.

This commercial in particular is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, but all of the recent Miller Lite ads take the same approach, and they’re all terrible. If someone is drinking a Miller Lite, that person wouldn’t care if it was a Bud Light or a Coors Light. One doesn’t have more taste than the other, we don’t give a shit about bottle grooves or color-changing labels, and a man is not an effeminate loser, no matter what he drinks (except maybe Tab). These commercials are like the perfect storm of misguided broseph humor and genuine incompetence.