Rolling Rock's Gone Ape

When Bud and MGD are bigger sellers and can afford the high price of TV spots, what is a small higher-quality brewery to do? With excessive competition in the funny, original beer ads category, Rolling Rock's answer was to cause controversy.

Last week, Rolling Rock posted this funny, bikini-clad advert for Rolling Rock on the web. To get consumers looking for the ape spot, the brewing company also started to run an ad on TV that pretended the ape spot had created controversy.

My personal qualm: The web ad isn't nearly provocative enough to be pulled from television. I feel like people who go to the web looking for this ad will feel gypped, by its friendly and not even mildly offensive nature.

For Real

I fell like this video by Okkervil River doesn’t match the song. Watching it several times, I took a moment to appreciate each part separately.



This video is trying to take two artistic mediums and throw them in a blender; instead of Margaritas they got and chunky clumps of paint trying desperately to attach to its favorite cord.

Refusing to give up on the video itself, I tuned out the song and played this video to several tracks in my music library. If you ignore the lipsynch and the band gratuitously appearing in the wilderness, the best match visual/audio match I could find was with “Free Until They Cut Me Down” by Iron and Wine.

Still not entirely satisfied I closed my eyes, listened to the song and visualized each idea. I can see where the creative content for this video may have stemmed from, but I fell like it would have been far more effective using black and white with a gritty texture, combining static landscapes with intimate close-Ups. Frantically lost with nowhere to turn, haunted by deamons while looking for some one to free you from the monster you hide inside. Heavy stuff. I like the song but I think they should give this video another go.

Test it out with your music library and tell me what you think...