Yes, below is a beer commercial. I know, I know…But, you see, I often find beer commercials very telling about where we’re at, they’re like a snapshot of the Zeitgeist (in part because beer companies are so loaded they can hire the best agencies to produce the most astute, pin-pointy ads). But does this one tell us where we’re at?
Actually, what is it trying to say? Set to Neil Diamond’s Hello Again, it’s about reclaiming the original bloke, freeing him from handcream and stupid handshakes and silly cocktails. The subtext is that men have been prisoners to this for the past decade or two, living a lie, trying to be something they’re not, and now it’s time to get back to “real”.
It’s quite an old discussion point.
There was a bourbon commercial about 8 years ago called The Bloke’s Dilemma that frothed about the same thing. It followed a terribly confused guy trying to balance between being a good old fashioned dude (opeing doors for chicks) and being the metrosexual that chicks expect him to be (going Dutch on a date). He can’t get it right (and the women around him bludgeon him for his conflicted efforts)…so he has a bourbon instead. At the time I thought it was very astute. They nabbed the issue right as it was arising for the first time, before the magazine stories about the Return of the Bloke, and The New Bloke.
So, are blokes still confused? Or is it just Generation X blokes, the ones who run the creative agencies that make these ads?