Miller Lite’s newest jab on the Michelob Ultra aims to position its competitor’s brand as a fitness drink. A new campaign from the Molson Coors-owned brewery includes ads that begin by showing people in athletic activities, such as biking up a mountain or sweating it out in an outdoor fitness class.
They then bathe in a beer labeled “extremely light beer”. A voiceover declares that “light beer shouldn’t taste like water – it should taste like beer”, while the scene switches to drinkers enjoying Miller Lites in a bar.
The ads, from DDB Chicago, don’t mention Michelob Ultra by name, but the implication is clear: Ultra has long blended beer and fitness imagery into its campaigns, going back to the days when its ads featured cyclist Lance Armstrong living the “Ultra Life”. .”
“We really lean into that challenging mindset. We’ve been doing swings for some time at Michelob Ultra,” said Elizabeth Hitch, senior director of marketing at Miller Lite. The campaign’s goal is to portray Miller Lite as “the light beer for people who really love the taste of beer,” she said.
These changes included digging into the Ultra’s low-calorie positioning with ads pointing out that the Lite has just one more calorie than the Ultra — 96 calories versus 95. During the 2021 Super Bowl, for example, Lite ran newspaper ads promoting a ridiculously long URL that said it took a calorie of energy to type.
The new campaign attempts to skewer Ultra’s very successful and enduring association with sports that lately includes ads starring high-profile athletes, including tennis great Serena Williams and NBA star Jimmy Butler.
Ultra, owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev, ended 2021 as the country’s third-largest beer, with shipments growing 9.5%, while Lite ranked fourth after growth of 3.2%, according to the report. Beer Marketer’s Insights.
Lite’s new campaign fuels Molson Coors’ strategy to keep its Miller brands focused exclusively on beer, as other beer big names sell line extensions that include products like hard seltzers, such as Bud Light and Michelob Ultra.
Molson Coors last year dramatized Miller’s-beer’s approach with a video for the Miller Genuine Draft that showed it “launching” a seltzer — tying competing brands to a rocket ship and tossing it into oblivion.
“There’s a crazy fragmentation that we’ve seen in light beer brands,” Hitch said. “Miller Lite will always stick to what we do best, which is beer.”
The new campaign includes a TV purchase during tonight’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship game on TBS, as well as investments in podcasts, radio, PR and influencers. “We’re really going really big with this camp to make sure a lot of people see it,” Hitch said.
There’s also a trick: Lite will promote limited-edition “beer drops” that the brand describes as a “liquid flavor enhancer that adds more beer flavor to other light beers.”
The campaign is timed with National Beer Day on April 7, which marks the passage of the Cullen-Harrison Act, which Congress passed in 1933, allowing so-called 3.2% beer sales during Prohibition (essentially ending Prohibition earlier for beer).
Translated matter from AdAge – EJ Schultz
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