Hi.

Love this blog so being from Oz thought I'd comment. Fosters (the company) is a major brewer 'down under' though its name brand isn't widely promoted to the Australian market (wouldn't have said cheap and nasty tho). They produce 'VB' (Victorian Bitter) which is the largest selling brand in Australia with about a 1/3 of the market. The image of hypermasculine and rural are common parts of Australian national identity construction (even tho Oz is - and always has been- a highly urbanised country). Of course the ad is intended to be funny as well - a bit of a send up.

I often wonder about these cross cultural promotions - in OZ we have boutique pubs called 'Irish pubs' which makes me wonder what pubs in Ireland are actually like. 'New Age' shops market 'native American' spirituality but not Indigenous Australia - so perhaps 'Australian Aboriginal' culture is marketed in 'New Age' shops in USA.

Cheers

Shane

I've wondered why Fosters insists on these ridiculous "Be Premium Like a Man" commercials. I've only seen them as the ads that appear during the online episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on the Comedy Central site, so I don't know if they're as ubiquitous as they seem to me. I hate them so much I've started watching these shows on Hulu, who don't seem to run as much hateful advertising.

I get why beer companies so often make vaguely misogynist ads; no one wants to be the next Zima, with a reputation for being a ladies' drink, I suppose because women are not considered an important beer-drinking demographic. But these Fosters ads are basically saying that no woman should ever drink Fosters.

In the ads (I can't find them on Youtube), a group of men in suits seem to be doing cultured things, like going to art galleries, but then they throw darts at the paintings or humiliate one another for saying unmanly things. They're not funny, as far as I can tell, and their idea of what it means to "Be Premium Like a Man" consists of being vindictive, selfish, destructive, and stupid, no matter where you are. Does this appeal to men? In none of the ads are they competing for female attention or any other traditional marker of masculine success; they're just being mean to women and each other. And they've stopped marketing bullheaded destructiveness as an Australian trait; these are just American guys being mean and petty, and the voiceover is an American man.

Who is the demographic they're trying to reach, and why be so blatant in their insults? Any man who actually likes art, or doesn't consider himself a vindictive asshole would be put off, I'd think, even above making sure no woman ever buys Fosters again.

The study of beer marketing could be an academic discipline all its own. I'm going to go out on a limb and say there are few products which marketers project more unrelated ideas and values on than beer.

As I understand it, beer isn't exported-imported nearly as often as we think it is. Often a beer company in one country has a licensing agreement with a brewer in another country and they make it according to the recipe and slap the label on. Not to say that there aren't differences between beers, but the differences between mass-market beers aren't very large.

And yet, projected on to this rather homogenized project can be one or more of the following: masculinity, sexiness, sexism, nationalism, freedom and liberty (thinking Sam Adams here), coolness, fun, rebellion, athleticism(!)... I could go on.

Marketing often involves nonsensical associations but beer marketing is in a class of its own.

Back in the college days I lived one summer in a sub let apartment complex with a big group of Irish exchange students.

They all claimed that Guiness was not really what they all drank in Ireland. They said it was available, but all the young kids drank Amstel Light.

It was very depressing to me.

I've been fascinated by the spots they do for Budweiser American Ale on This American Life. A woman from NPR reads a statement about how it's brewed with cascade hops with water from a particular source---an actual recipe! for beer! It's really jarring to hear beer described by how it's made and what it tastes like, since it's usually not at all about the beer, but about what image it gives you. (I know it's weird for Budweiser, of all people, to be attempting to poach microbrew drinkers this way, but maybe it's a sign that some not-insignificant percentage of beer drinkers are buying for taste, rather than trying to make themselves look more like hypermasculine assholes.)

(For those who haven't seen it, this Chris Farley and Adam Sandler fake commercial for beer is hilarious.)

Shane,

Thanks so much for the context! I should have asked our Australian readers what they thought in the post. :)

Shane's dead right on this...once I got over the AustRahlian accent on the video it's not actually that far from the old beer ads we used to get here.
Also Shane's comment reminded me of all the tourist shops around here that sell 'fair dinkum' Aboriginal Australian items...all made in china ofcourse! Probably even the same factory selling those New Age Native American trinkets.

As far as beer ads the most recent one I remember seeing is this one for Pure Blonde: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml3ybCxxMRk

Reminds me of a night years ago when I out drinking with some folks I met in a hostel, one of whom was an Aussie and informed me that "Fosters is Australian for piss."

Another opinon from a genuine Aussie, lol.

The reason your student couldn't find "Fosters" beer anywhere is most likely because the individual brands manufactured by Fosters (eg. VB, Carlton Draught) are promoted at a much higher level than the brewery itself. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we actually have a beer called "Fosters" in Australia?

And yes, VB is absolute piss, yet it does have the highest sales - because it is about the cheapest beer you can buy here. Marketing in Australia is definitely aimed at working class - the tagline for as long as I can remember has been "A hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer, and the best cold beer is Vic." Accompanied (of course) by footage of big sweaty men doing hard manly work out in the Aussie sun.

Cheers;
Kas.

Fosters was all over Sydney in 2000. I guess they wanted to trick all the foreigners who came here for the Olympics into thinking it was the normal state of affairs. But otherwise, you would have to search really hard to buy it. Not that anyone would.

On a different note, would it have been that hard to get an actually Australian to do the voiceover? Guys with accents that strong really do exist. I know the whole thing is a pisstake but still... it's almost always Americans doing a bad accent in any American show.

And I'm suprised you didn't comment on the awful didgeridoo sample they used for background music.

I also just returned from a three week vacation in Australia, two weeks on the west coast (I covered a lot of area) and one week on the east coast. I thought when I got to Australia I would have a cold Fosters but after three weeks and many visits to bars and stores, I only found a couple of bottles. When I asked where the Fosters beer was, the response was, we don't drink it, it is poor quality beer and it is mostly an export product. I NEVER once saw an ad anywhere in the country for it but plenty of other beer ads. It is a myth that Fosters is a domestic beer that is truly consumed by many in Australia at least where I traveled. I will have to go to my local pub to have one I guess, but why now after I discovered other great beers in Australia!