Nurse the Hate: Hate Miller Fortune

As a 25-54 year old male, the American business community has decided that the following products need to be marketed to me as I watch sports on Sunday: Cars, tires, razors, erection medicine, and of course, beer.  If you follow the logic, it appears that Corporate America believes men do nothing but drive drunk with erections.  This, upon reflection, may be true.  Even a simple scan of the Police Blotter in your hometown newspaper does offer some evidence backing up this marketing plan.  This must be the reason for the unveiling of the Big Brewing beers “Miller Fortune” and its counterpart Budweiser “Black Crown”. 

These beers are essentially malt liquor rebranded as a classy beverage.  With alcohol contents prominently displayed on the label at 6.9% on Fortune and and 6.0% for Black Crown, these beers all but scream “Drink me and get fucked up cheap!”.  Yet we are all supposed to pretend that these beers are Sophisticated Beverages for Men of Taste and Character.  The current Miller Fortune TV creative has a young black male walking out of a gritty yet trendy club that seems very New York.  An outrageously seductive mixed race woman, all alone as these women typically are in real life, walks by and gives him the up/down/up.  TV tough guy actor Mark Strong walks in the frame and asks if the guy wants eight hours sleep, or if he wants to “make it a night most men only dream of” while handing him a Fortune.  Translation:  If you drink this and get really fucked up, you’ll be banging the hot chick in the bar.  Reality?  If you drink that, you’ll be the annoying guy that rids the bar of all women like a canister of tear gas and later will go home alone after a 3am stop at White Castle.  You will make creepy text messages to all kinds of women that will immediately cut off all social media ties to you.  You will then potentially piss yourself in bed while sleeping through your alarm and be late for work.   The beer’s tag line?  Fortune Comes To Those Who Seek It.  Hell yeah!  Bad fortune!

Compare that with Budweiser Black Crown.  “The Loud. The Savvy.  The Famous.  It took all of us to taste and choose the new Budweiser Black Crown.”   This is the voiceover while models and glamorous folks dressed in black party down in what appears to be an incredibly ornate Medieval Great Hall, everyone being unique and wonderful simultaneously.  This is unlike any party I have ever been to in my life.  Most parties I have been to have been in a kitchen centered around a sad loaf of pumpernickel bread hollowed out with some kind of mayo based dip inside, has terrible music, and is filled with people who's biggest adventure was taking their six year old to Disney last summer.  This might mean that I have been going to the wrong parties because I haven’t been hanging out with that “select crowd” that was somehow chosen to both taste and decide on a major global corporation’s decision to sell malt liquor to a new demographic.  I clearly need to drink Black Crown and become accepted into that inner circle.

Of the marketing, I think I prefer the Miller Fortune.  These guys are approaching it like drug pushers from old TV shows like Dragnet.  The language they use is great.  “Spirited Nights.  This is the stuff that keeps us up at night.”  This means “This shit will fuck you up and you won’t want to go home.  Let’s party motherfucker!”  The website also notes “That Hole In The Wall You Just Passed Could Be A Gold Mine”.  This is supposed to tell you “Go get drunk in that shithole bar and maybe this brew will give you the courage to take that tatted up foul smelling barmaid back to your squalid apartment so you can rut like dogs.”.  They also note “You could choose a regular beer, but then you will get a regular night.”  This is cleverly telling you, “Why get as drunk as you do when you knock back eight Miller Lites when you can knock back eight of these bad boys?  You’ll wake up like an AWOL sailor with a tattoo of a barbershop pole around your penis and a case of the crabs you won’t shake for a month!  Now that’s a night you’ll remember!”.

With March Madness quickly approaching, I can’t wait to absorb these messages more completely.  There will be no place to avoid it.  These commercials will be wedged into every ad break.  There is really only one way for me to proceed with my life.  I need to buy a sleeker fitted black suit and drive around until I find that really trendy shithole bar where other sleek Fortune Seekers like myself are out having the best nights of their lives thanks to malt liquor 12 ounces at a time.  I have always said that the problem with light beer has always been that the alcohol content needed to be doubled so guys in shithole bars could get twice as drunk.  At last, that future has arrived…