A brief look at the history of Beer Advertising part 1

Blatz. 

This must be a prohibition ad or is it suggesting you share a bottle of beer with the younguns?  Father comes home from work and finds mom and the kids already blatzed. 

Later on they sponsored TV programs like the Amos n' Andy show, and in this one, which claims that Blatz in a bottle tastes like a draft beer.  What they mean at the end of the ad about "beer at local prices" I do not know. 

And in the 1940s and 1950s in magazine ads, celebrity endorsements were big.  For example this one featuring Liberace was a pianist and entertainer who was originally from West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee. 

He was in his heyday in the 1950s and one of the biggest names in show business. Others featured in the ads were Fred MacMurray,  Dan Duryea, Groucho Marx, Bill Veeck, George Sanders, Uta Hagen, etc.  While some of them like Liberace were "from Milwaukee" and could say "I'm from Milwaukee and I oughta know..."   other well know persons could say "I've lived in Milwaukee and I oughta know..." and others like Groucho who neither could say truthfully that he'd lived or was from Milwaukee could nevertheless say "I've been to Milwaukee and I oughta know..."  By that criterion I guess I could endorse Blatz myself.  

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hamm's

Hamm's seems to have taken a kind of outdoorsy wilderness theme to its advertising featuring a cartoon bear and Indian drums, which always makes me think of how refreshing bears are...

 

 Anyway, for a very long time Hamm's used the Bear and animated cartoon ads for its advertising.  As with many bears there was a sports tie-in. 

Hamm's was a beer company based in St. Paul, and with breweries in St. Paul and San Francisco.  It is now owned by SAB Miller and is still produced.  It is considered a "bottom shelf" brand in the SAB Miller portfolio today. 








--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anheuser-Busch is a huge brand and I probably could go on forever with their advertising.  This was an ad run in the mid 1950s.   The slogan then was "Where there's life there's Bud".  There you are having a beachfront cookout with a beautiful woman with a conch shell.   Someone is playing a jazz flute and I just hope you remembered you brought your beer can opener because they didn't have pop tops back then. 

Back in the 1970s it was all about male bonding and beer, as these two guys playing basketball demonstrate.

This one from the 1960s features the old "When you say Bud" jingle and Ken Burns style pictures of people drinking it.  It features Bud-man, some kind of caped character who serves bud I guess. Naturally only nice looking people drink beer.    

Ed McMahon, best known as Johnny Carson's co-host was also a spokesperson for Budweiser for many years.  Here he says "Budweiser is the best reason in the world to drink beer."

Then there were the wazzah commercials which just features a bunch of couch potatoes sitting around watching the game and drinking beer and acting like a bunch of idiots like beer drinkers are wont to do.  It hardly says anything except that, except that the beer the idiots are drinking is bud.  

Bud light of course was aiming at a different demographic, ladies and transvestites who were watching their weight.