Cycling Back Down

The latest ad campaign from Miller Lite revisits old territory:

The portrayal of women in beer advertising seems to go in cycles.  As Bob McCannon of the New Mexico Media Literacy Project has observed, Anheuser-Busch went through an extended period whereby women in their ads were objects of scorn, if not outright hostility and violence (McCannon, 2003). The most egregious example of this may have been the Michelob Ultra Amber ad in 2006 that featured a brutal tackle:

McCannon notes that such campaigns are designed to tickle the egos of young males.   At times, they also appear to be designed to appeal to the resentments and frustrations of one of the prime target markets for beer – the young male with disinhibited, antisocial traits (Mazas, Finn, & Steinmetz, 2000; Moeller & Dougherty, 2001).   A scan of publicly available industry market research materials allows us occasionally to peer behind the curtain and see the machinations of industry psychographic research.  One notable example is the Simmons Market Research study that linked “traditional” beer drinkers to the ideas “Feel very alone in the world,” “Little I can do to change my life,” and “Women are more suited to running homes.”   (Is it traditional to feel very alone in the world?)

Other ads are a little more subtle, merely treating women as brainless bimbos (from Bacardi, so as not to neglect the distillers):

or vicious shrews:

or indecisive annoyances:

The Miller Lite “Buster” commercial fits the my-beer-is-more-valuable-than-my-partner mold, in the tradition of the Bud Light “Taxi” ad from 2000:

The apparent advertising pattern with regard to women seems to be a kind of crop rotation, whereby the big brewers plow the fields of misogyny, take some heat for it, and then solemnly “declare a moratorium on female objectification,” as did August Busch IV in 1991 (Teinowitz, 1991), letting the fields lie fallow.

But they always seem to cycle back.

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