It’s coming up on the tenth anniversary of this campaign. Mother of God, how times flies!

The Wassup! Campaign for Budweiser kicked ass even beyond my wildest dreams. And my wildest dreams were pretty wild.

I remember meeting Cliff “Where’s the Beef?” Freeman at an industry “top ten best ads of all time” party in New York in 2003. We both had ads in the top 10. Both were famous catch-phrase based ads. He said something that resonated with me. He explained “I didn’t want to be ‘the guy did that one thing’ ”. I can relate. Wassup! is a bit of a bête noire as they say in Belgium. But a great one!

At the time some ad people doubted my claim that I had a vision for this. and that vision was pretty much what happened: America screaming “Wasssuuup!”. I never understood that. Why is that so inconceivable? Is it that unimaginable that someone might actually know what they’re doing in advertising.? If only I had, oh I don’t know, some proof that I did. Well it turns out that I do actually.

Recently I unearthed this document. My partner Chuck Taylor (real name) and I put it together late in 1999. We were a bit bothered and worried that although the Budweiser client had nominally bought the Wassup! idea, there was comparatively less action on our idea than other ideas bought at the same time. We were still waiting for the money to be released.

I feared they’d had second thoughts. And I feared that those second thoughts were based on the racial makeup of the proposed cast. I was wrong about that.

So I suggested we create something that implied that the train was rolling. And present them with the idea again. Real professional like!

So we created this presentation. Note the date. A month and a half before the first spot aired. I was close to despair!

And here was my impassioned plea to resell the idea. I meant every word. And it pretty much came to pass. Phew!

And here was Charles Stone’s treatment. The “RAY” he refers to was the role he ultimately ended up playing so wonderfully himself. At this point I figured acting and directing might be too much pressure for him. I was wrong. He was perfect. He was a star.

I was so desperate to get the campaign done that I erroneously assumed that there was no way Budweiser would run ads featuring an all African-American cast. Their previous campaign featured cute and funny frogs and lizards. Call me crazy! So here I dangled the possibility of a multi-ethnic cast. Because I knew we would have to do at least some casting anyway. Turned out it was very hard to say ‘wassup!” correctly. We ended up with the original cast of Charles’ friends. Plus two new friends of his. Chemistry!

And this was the first script that I wrote to sell the idea. Has there ever been a less interesting sounding commercial script? I recall being really bored just typing it out.

You can see the short film the campaign was based on here.

And this is the finished product. If you compare the two you’ll see how faithful we were to the spirit of the original short. We Just sped it up and added beer really.

Is Budweiser about to get emotional? *********sniff!*********

In a recent Ad Age article it is reported that Budweiser is considering a return to what is termed “emotional” advertising. Usually in the context of beer and esp. Budweiser, “emotional” means doing something reminiscent of the classic 1980s beer ads where beer was portrayed as a reward for a hard day’s work. Steel mill workers wiping their sweaty brows and having that first sip of beer. And that is completely valid. In our culture beer is the agreed upon means of letting off a little steam and relaxing.

But a lot has changed since the 1980s. Blue collar workers and blue collar jobs no longer dominate the culture. “After a hard day’s code-writin’, nothin’ beats a Bud” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. And “emotional” beer advertising is a lot harder to sell and execute do than comedic beer advertising. A belly laugh is a lot easier to gauge than a lump in the throat.

The problem with purely comedic beer ads is they can lack texture. You see them, you laugh, it’s over. Nothing sticks with you.The problem with purely emotional beer ads is that they can be too gooey for guys. “Come on dude, it’s only beer!”.

Part of the problem lies in the beer purchase decision process itself. It’s a lot more tricky than it might seem. The beer you drink says something about you. You drink Pabst Blue Ribbon? Then you live in Williamsburgh Brooklyn you’re 25 and wear Threadless t-shirts and ironically intended trucker hats. And it’s 2004…winking smiley face. You drink Budweiser? Then you…live in Ohio, you’re an average American. You probably like stuff…that’s cool. etc. I remember a great Bud print ad that read “What drinking one says about you is that you don’t care what drinking one says about you”. Which neatly sums up Bud’s place in the culture. It’s THE BEER in the USA. Like Guinness is in Ireland. It’s hard to both special and THE BEER in your culture. Budweiser is “special” in other countries where American beer is seen as exotic and cool much as Guinness is outside of Ireland.

One thing that I always found very telling and maddening about Budweiser in America was this. Young Bud drinkers would sometimes switch to Heineken when in a public social situation like a night club, ie when their image mattered. The glowing green bottle was considered smoover despite the fact that its contents had taken six months to get into your hand and so frankly couldn’t taste as good as Budweiser. But that just reinforces my point that with beer, it’s all in your head.

It’s easy to play laptop quarterback and tell Budweiser what they should and shouldn’t be doing. When I worked on the Budweiser business there was no shortage of people coming up to me and telling me what we should and shouldn’t do. Everyone is very familiar with both beer and tv commercials. But that doesn’t equate to experience of actually brewing and marketing beer in this country at this time. It’s a very big ship that moves very slowly.

Budweiser’s big problem hasn’t been brand image. Its problem is that for 25 years there has been a generational shift in taste preference away from light lager (Budweiser) to ever lighter and lighter lagers (Bud Light, Mich Ultra). So while on the one hand it (A-B) was losing share on Budweiser it was picking it up on Bud Light and Mich Ultra.

So will a more “emotional” approach work for Bud? Yeah, sure it could. At its core, a beer brand is your friend. Ideally your best friend. When you think about it, young beer drinkers ONLY associate their beer brand with fun and good times. Nobody ever cried tears of pain while drinking beer. That’s what whiskey is for!

So anything that works to “make friends” for the brand is a good thing. It’s all in the execution. And that’s why Budweiser, frankly, needs The Escape Pod. It’s not simply a matter of understanding the beer category or the Bud brand, it’s a matter of putting something on the TV that works like magic. And that’s the really tricky part.

Emotional beer advertising. Easy to parody, hard to create.

The end of an era. Bob Lachky leaves Anheuser-Busch.

You know all those Budweiser and Bud Light ads you’ve loved over the years?  Well the man largely responsible for overseeing the creation of all of them – Bob Lachky – has left the brewery.

It is no exaggeration to say that I, and many other ad folks, owe our careers to Bob’s good judgment and steady nerves over the years.  If Bob liked your ad it very probably got done the way you wanted it to get done.   There were no nervous, interfering clients on Budweiser shoots.  They trusted us to get it done.  It wasn’t unusual to have no client at all present on a shoot.  I actually didn’t like that because I would end up trying to play client and annoy everyone in the process.

Ad geeks might be surprised to know that Bob started out as an account guy on Bud Light at DDB.   And was later hired by August Busch III to supervise the various A-B ad agencies output.  Bob’s somewhat senatorial demeanor could be misleading to the uninitiated.  He had surprisingly great creative and executional instincts.  I hesitate to tell the following story because it makes me look slightly bad, but here goes.

At the pre-production meeting the day before we shot the original Wassup! Ads, Bob asked me why the tagline at the end of the scripts read “This Bud’s for you”, their tagline at the time.  I uncertainly replied: because…it’s…your…tagline…Bob.

The short film we based the ads on was called “TRUE”.  And that word fluttered briefly on the screen at the end.  Bob, correctly, felt the ads in our campaign should end with that title too.  So we did that.  And I’m glad we did. It just felt right. I didn’t think it made that much difference at the time but it did as the campaign took off and ultimately became known as the TRUE campaign.

I’m not sure what Bob’s plans are.  I think he should write a book. I told him that the last time we met.  Write a book Bob!  There.  That should do it.

And so l hoist a beer-clean pilsner glass of Bud (poured down the middle to release the carbonation, natch) in his honor.   Here’s to you Mr. Great Beer Commercial Getter on the Air Guy.

Good luck Bob, and swing by The  Escape Pod next time you’re in Chicago.

Too hot for TV! Vol. 5

This is the fifth, and perhaps final in our series of unaired commercials. They kind of go downhill a bit after this one. winking smiley face.

You can see the others here, here, here, and here.

This one was weird.

Shortly after the first Wassup! spots started airing it became apparent that there was an appetite for online parodies. So we figured who better than us to do a parody of our own thing. After talking things over with the director Charles Stone, we settled on a few that we knew would be hard for the general public to pull off, ie they involved real production expertise. The obvious and smart thing was to go “What’s 180 degrees away from young African-Americans yelling into phones?”.

I remember we rejected the idea of country club white guys doing it as being unnecessarily racially divisive. Goodby Silverstein apparently didn’t think so. They jumped on the bandwagon with exactly this idea a year later. And won a gold Clio with it. I will forever hate them with the intensity of a thousand suns for doing that. I’m kidding Jeff! Seriously, I’m kidding.

But one idea that we all liked was the idea of having Old Ladies watching a game show having a Bud. The elderly ladies in the spot were blissfully unaware of the Wassup! phenomenon. Which made it even funnier. They had absolutely no idea what they were doing. I vividly recall nearly dying laughing when we shot the scene in the garden as the elderly actress screamed urban slang into her phone. “Wassup money grips???” etc. It was the first time we did something that mirrored or echoed the original wassup template. It would not be the last. That kind of became our job. Doing new variations on that one thing. Over and over. we got real good at it too!

The reason it didn’t air was that there was just something off-putting about grandmas drinking beer in the middle of the day in an ad for budweiser. it just felt wrong to the clients. and that was cool.

but the funny part was that the very next month…this wassup parody swept the internet! the exact same idea. it was like clockwork. and it was kind of eerie. but the good part though was that the spot we produced — much better execution IMHO — was eligible to be included in our Grand Prix-winning entry to the Cannes advertising festival. and it was a big hit en France. so in a sense it did actually air. but only in the palais at Cannes. and it did its damage there. so thank you old ladies. Merci!

FUN FACT: The New Jersey house where we shot our spot was the same house used to shoot Hesh’s home scenes in The Sopranos.

I am an experienced expert. Do not try this at home!

That’s me (Vinny Warren) rubbing the head of a mountain lion. It was early morning and i was on a Budweiser shoot in California and slightly hung over. Still a bit giggly from the previous night, i noticed that the animal wrangler on the shoot (the spot featured a dog) had brought along three mountain lions which he’d chained up in the back yard of the rather luxurious house we were shooting at in the mountains outside LA. To my still slightly inebriated eyes, they looked very cute and placid.

I assumed, incorrectly, that these mountain lions were the nice, cuddly and domesticated variety of mountain lion. You know, THE TYPE THAT DOESN’T EXIST! So i foolishly got on the ground next to them and cuddled with them, putting my arms around their necks and generally treating them like huge puddy tats! Only then did i suddenly notice how HUGE their paws and jaws were. And i became a bit concerned. So i asked the animal wrangler why he’d brought them. his response soon sobered me up. “Oh, i just bought them and i thought bringing them here would help them get used to being around people!”. In other words, I was the first human these man-eating felines had  contact with.  Ever!  The blood drained from my face as I slooooowly got up and walked out of paw’s reach.

I should note that this is only one of a series of photos i had taken that day. this was the smallest of the three mountain lions i cavorted with that day.   i will try and find the others.

Too hot for TV! Volume 2

This was yet another Whassup! exploration. This time we turned our sights on Hollywood culture. I think we did this one for the Oscars. And it would have been perfect. We ended up running something else on the Oscars. This one stung because it would have been perfect. It would still be perfect. We nailed Hollywood. Once again,  this spot was helmed by esteemed sopranos, sex and the city and Rome helmer:  Allen Coulter. Mike Colletta edited.

FUN FACT: Look for the guy with the white hair and toothy grin at the end. He was actually one of the producers of “The Player”, where he made a brief cameo role as a movie producer in his own movie. Here he once again played himself. He did it as a favor to the director.  

Jeff Goodby. A man of impeccably good judgement.

Adweek, celebrating its 30th birthday, asked some ad icons to select their favorite work from the past three decades. And i just read that Jeff Goodby of Goodby Silverstein fame selected our Budweiser work as his favorite campaign of the 1990s. Which is interesting because the campaign just about made it into the 90s. The first spot aired on Christmas day 1999 in an NBA game. So thank you Jeff. And might we reciprocate by saying how much we admired your work over the years on the brand. Frank and Louie will live forever.

in his article, Jeff repeats a myth about the campaign that i’ve seen in print several times  and  isn’t actually true – that the campaign only really took off when one of the spots aired on the Superbowl in February 2000. We did air a spot on the big game but it was by no means the hit of the game. It was actually ranked 22nd in the USA TODAY ad popularity poll.  Not a disaster.  but  by Budweiser Superbowl standards it was an abject failure.  But ultimately it didn’t matter. the genie was out of the bottle at that point.

A blast from the past

I created this ad for Budweiser back in 2000.  It debuted on the Superbowl and actually was the very first spot in the very first commercial break of the game itself.

It’s a parody of every dog food ad you’ve ever seen where the happy owner romps with his pet in a meadow, while the owner’s voiceover talks about his love for his pooch.

I hadn’t seen it years and was kind of surprised to see someone had put it on youtube.  we had great fun making it.  it still makes me laugh.  hope you like it.

The enduring appeal of sticking out one’s tongue and shouting “Wassup!”

It’s back.  I guess enough time has passed for the culture to have gotten over its Wassup! overdose in 2000.

The latest viral video charts show Wassup2008 at number one and the original Budweiser Wassup ad climbing up the charts at number 11.  Oh dear!

I can remember emerging slightly shell-shocked from the editing suite after we filmed the first Wassup! spots.  I’d listened to the phrase constantly for a week and was understandably heartily sick of hearing it.  So when people would come up to me and tell me, months later, how sick they were of hearing the phrase, i would nod politely and, in my head, go “Tell me about it pal!”.  I was arguably the first Wassup! burnout.

Like anything that is conspicuously successful, the whole Wassup! pop cultural phenomenon was written about and analyzed endlessly by the media at the time.  I recall being surprised about how blase i had become about being interviewed about the same thing over and over and over.  Lots of writers pointed out how the spots were great representations of male bonding etc…etc.

But for me the thing that made the whole thing work was much more basic.  And it was this.  When you screamed Wassuuuuuuup! a little bit of nervous energy left your upper body.  And you actually felt slightly better for saying it.  In much the same way that saying “IS NICE!!!” Borat-style is slightly cathartic.  It’s the same principle, physiologically speaking.

Go on, try saying both catchphrases.  You’ll feel better!

Mr. Feldwick’s theory about not making sense actually does makes sense. Scientifically speaking.

As we posted previously, we agree with Paul Feldwick’s theory about advertising that “doesn’t make sense” being more effective. Then we remembered something from last year we read in Adweek.

Some egghead boffin types hooked up volunteers’ brains to neurological analyzing machines. And played them commercials to see which types of ads tickled the brainbox most effectively

“We were trying to identify patterns that could be used,” said Bill Cook, svp, research and standards, ARF. “We saw powerful pieces of evidence for the impact of advertising.”

One such pattern was that a campaign like Bud’s iconic “Wassup” registered more powerfully with consumers than Miller Lite low-carb ads that essentially just said, “We’re better than the other guys.” Why? Because Bud told a story about friends connected by a special greeting.