In an age of weak beer and no hair, Molson Canadian 67 embraces the New Normal

Jerry, man...

Advertising whiz Jerry Della Femina, who not only lived but epitomized the high life depicted in the TV series “Mad Men,” once tried to sell light beer and couldn’t.

He writes in his entertaining 1971 bestseller, “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor,” how his brilliant campaign for Gablinger’s Diet Beer, a product of Rheingold Breweries, failed to persuade suds-lovers to switch brands in order to cut calories.

Forced to explain how his judgment could have been so wrong, the ad maven whines that he didn’t initially understand how beer-drinkers — being some sort of primitive blue-collared species — actually took pride in their distended guts, and considered the word “Diet” as anathema.

Others would simply say that both the product and its ad support missed the mark by miles.

Gablinger’s happened along, way back in 1967. A decade would pass before Miller Lite and Natural Light from Anheuser-Busch would emerge to create a sector category. Today three of the four leading beer brands are “light,” as are six of the top 10. That would make these diluted brews the new normal. And that, in turn, would force some brewing industry executive to spur the introduction of an Extreme Light as the new, um, light.

Beer at its most ephemeral

Hence, Molson Canadian 67: a beer so light, that, as the joke might go, you hardly need bother. As much as I’d like to think that the “67″ name is there to honor the year of both the birth of Gablinger`s and the Canadian centennial, it actually refers to the number of calories in a 12-ounce bottle. That compares with an even 100 calories in conventional light beer, or 150 or so in the full-strength variety. (Here’s a private message for Stephanie DeSutter of Molson, who spun the following prevarication to Marketing Magazine: “When people automatically think there’s anywhere from 200 to 250 calories per bottle of beer, there’s definitely a great opportunity for a brand like 67 to come in and make that calorie call-out.” Which people? Badly misinformed people who can’t read the nutritional information on their beer label? That’s the market you’re targeting?)

There have been other ultra-low calorie lagers before, and they’ve all been rejected by consumers. I used to buy something called Alta, a product of the Blitz-Weinhard brewery in Portland, that also hit the scales at 67 calories. It was quite tasteless indeed, but kept a fellow hydrated, and the price was right for school-kid budgets. I can’t imagine that the new Molson product will be any better, or any good at all, but the marketers seem determined to avoid Jerry Della Femina’s last-century missteps.

The National Post newspaper reports that Molson is using a blog-trolling service called Radian 6 to scope out comments about the new brew, and an article adds that the company will “respond to those consumers in what it calls ‘Direct to Drinker’ engagement.” I guess we’ll see exactly how that works, but if you’re planning on engaging this blogger, Ms. DeSutter, please leave the stepped-on suds in your office.

The original Mad Man?

Now, if Jerry Della Femina had personally showed up on your granddad’s doorstep, and instructed him to drink Gablinger’s, well, things might have played out differently. JDF is a biggish gentleman whose shaved-head-and-beard was a trademark in the days when he, along with Shel Silverstein, Yul Brenner and the fictive pair of Mr. Clean and Lex Luther, were the only lads sporting that particular look. Then Kojak and Michael Jordan joined the gang. Now, the denuded-skull-with-goatee is the other side of the new normal, accompanied by a weak beer in front of you, to complete the image.

Last week, Mr. and Mrs. J.T. Grossmith showed up in town, following a year-long road trip hither and tither, during which time we’ve failed to keep in touch using Skype.

J.T., the male component in the couple, has affected the Full, Complete Jerry Della Femina, but, to his credit, wouldn’t accept a Molson Canadian 67 when I offered to treat him at the neighborhood pub, and agreed to a glass of white wine. Something about a shaved head seems to accentuate a man’s eyes, and I was surprised to see that I’d never really paid any attention to J.T.’s peepers during the 30 years of our friendship. His are what I would call extraordinarily cop-like, which I may elaborate upon during a future occasion: say, if I ever get around to scribbling that police-procedural novel I think I may have in me.

Perhaps, if Ms. DeSutter and her team are open to a marketing opportunity involving strategic product placement, I may call the book “Badge 67,” and it may feature a bald, cruel-eyed detective who watches his waistline by drinking watery lager — and is miserable, as a consequence. I’m keeping most of the plot under my hat, but part of the dramatic tension will come as the detective searches high and low, both in lowdown dives and swell joints, looking for the miscreant who stole two-thirds of the flavor from his bottle of beer.

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• More about struggling beer brands, in Mitch’s April 2009 post about Rolling Rock.

Jay Leno and the Golden Age of Mediocrity

Excuse me, but didn't you used to be Jay Leno?

You’d probably question the motives of an architect who forever groused about the high cost of building materials, and be suspicious of a surgeon who constantly worries out loud about the expense of all those darned gauze pads. Therefore, you need to wonder why NBC, the television network, has taken to carping about the exorbitant investment incurred in order to broadcast quality television programs.

Let me disclose, before we go any further, that I own shares in the General Electric Company, which operates NBC — although this is nothing to brag about, believe me. As a stakeholder, whose stake is currently worth quite a few drachmas less than I originally paid, I naturally support management’s efforts to improve shareholder value, if that is the appropriate phrase to use when you actually mean, “Give me back my god-damned money, you imbeciles.”

The network’s programing gurus determined that the guru-like move was to stop trying to fill the 10 p.m. slot with shows that no one wants to watch, and, by the way, cost an arm and a leg to produce. They wondered: Why not just show a test-pattern? Why not sell the hour to the Hair Club for Men?

Then some better-grounded executive ejaculated, no, no, we can’t do that, but why not move Jay Leno’s Tonight Show up to 10, and put that Conan guy in Leno’s old spot? Brilliant, the management team exclaimed.

Bud Collier: Never ashamed to pay you to watch his TV program

Apprised of these developments, and determined to keep an eye on my investment, I tuned to the Leno program during its first week in the new time, and found it encouraging in its flagrant mediocrity. It was so dreary, I deduced, that it’s going to drive viewers to other, more compelling, entertainment options: nightly re-runs of Beat the Clock shown on the Bud Collier Channel, or viewing pornography on the Internet, or staring at a dripping faucet, or perhaps reading a library book of modern poetry published in the original Italian. Well, forget the last one.

Faced with this outcome, GE would be bound to sell NBC to Rupert Murdoch, or some other pigeon, and perhaps several of the many billions that will change hands may trickle down in the form of a shareholder dividend. (Yes, I know: highly unlikely that GE’s Jeffrey Immelt would let loose of any portion of the mazuma, but a fellow can dream, right?)

Moving Leno to ten-oh is one of those classically dumb corporate decisions that will rank up there with Ford’s exploding Pinto and Schlitz’s additive-enhanced beer. I can’t remember how your charming host used to come across when he was regularly seen around midnight — but, to paraphrase the old Mickey Gilley song, he don’t get any prettier when you’re fully aware that closing time has been extended by an hour-and-a-half.

In truth, it’s just plain unsettling to watch Leno anxiously pitching his repertoire of lame topical jokes, effusively greeting the predictable queue of has-been actors promoting their tired old projects, and basking in the over-rehearsed adoration of his studio audience of casually-turned-out mongoloids. There are some zany stunts larded in, as well, but it’s best to pretend these didn’t occur.

To say something positive, however, the spectacle shows every sign of having been put together on the cheap — which, after all, was the founding premise.

Having grown up watching a fair bit of Canadian television, I’m familiar with the visual symptoms of this rigid adherence to budget, as well as the underlying logic, which is: (1) “Why use two cameras, if you can get away with one?”; and (2) “Where does it say you need three musicians for a trio? Fire that sax player.”

If you’re accustomed to the usual showbiz aggrandisement, this will seem unorthodox. We’re used to generations of promoters inflating the value of their attractions in order to impress the yokels, from Sam Phillips introducing Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny and Carl Lee as his Million Dollar Quartet, or George Hamid calling his Atlantic City amusement joint the Million Dollar Pier. But even adjusting for decades of hyper-inflation, NBC’s Leno hour seems like The Seven Hundred Dollar Talk Show, and that would probably include the budget for the store-brand cookies and fruit punch served nightly in the Green Room.

Since NBC seems determined to emulate a Canadian standard of mediocrity in its daily schedule, the broadcasting colossus may want to import another tactic from their media colleagues north of the border. Canadians, much like citizens of other nations, haven’t been spending as much time as previously watching the listless nonsense on commercial television. This resulted in lower ad revenues — an obvious problem for Canada’s TV networks — so the station owners did what they’ve always done, and went to the national capital and demanded that suckers’ money be used to support their failing for-profit ventures. The federal broadcasting regulator obligingly sent a platoon of mid-level bureaucrats outdoors to help load bags of funds into the trunks of waiting limousines.

I’m reasonably certain that the Obama administration would respond similarly, if asked politely. Think this through: When, inevitably, NBC is driven out of business through the Leno misstep, and forced to hand over the keys to the studio to Rupert Murdoch, what will follow? Roger Ailes will run the NBC News department, Glenn Beck will take over the Leno slot, and President Obama will see his war against Fox television being fought on two fronts. Who needs that? Better to simply provide a generous federal subsidy to the TV networks, same as to the banks and auto industry.

That would be my suggestion, which I offer not as a GE shareholder who may stand to turn a buck from a bail-out, but as a concerned television viewer and supporter of the President.

Oh, well. Why pretend? It’s my suggestion only because I want GE stock to remain in double digits, at least until such time as I can unload it. If you were seeking altruism, I’m afraid that you may have been inadvertently reading the wrong blog.

Starbucks and the death of hipster capitalism

Taster's choice? Hard to imagine

Howard Schultz, the visionary behind Starbucks, is worth $1.1 billion, which makes him one of the most successful businessmen of the Boomer cohort, and I’m saddened to read that he has completely lost his mind.

I began to question the lad’s commercial sense a year ago, when Schultz introduced instant oatmeal into his stores, and insisted it was a superior offering, absolutely the best oatmeal ever. I tried it. It was swill. At the time, you had to wonder the extent to which Schultz’s instincts would eventually decline, and I pondered the seemingly ludicrous notion that Starbucks might soon try to sell instant coffee to accompany the dreadful reconstituted oatmeal.

Well, as you’ve probably read, Schultz has gone and done that unlikely thing — but it’s even worse than that.

During the coming 72 hours, Starbucks will try to persuade you, by giving away samples of their new instant coffee, that the buck-a-cup synthetic is just as good as the three-dollar brewed coffee they’ve been pouring.

"You see? I told you it wasn't that bad..."

Toward what end? In the highly improbable case that the instant may not taste like something procured in bulk by the provisioning agents at the state Department of Corrections, Starbucks will have succeeded in conditioning their patrons to trade down, thus reducing their corporate revenues. Indeed, if discerning coffee-drinkers come to realize that the powdered substitute ain’t that bad, what is to prevent them from gravitating toward the neighborhood Wal-Mart, where the canny consumer can snare an entire month’s supply of the stuff, at the same price Schultz seeks for a single cup?

The question is moot, of course. Everyone knows that instant coffee is never going to be equivalent to the real stuff, in the same way that shaking a dose of generic “coffee whitener” on top of your joe is not the same as mixing in a daub of half-and-half. You can fib to yourself (or to your company’s directors), as Schultz has done, but it’s madness to think that you can pass the con along to your customers, and not suffer the consequence. There was a media buyer I used to visit, a fellow named Roy Chernoff, who used to offer up truly terrible instant coffee, out of an Old World impulse to be hospitable. I’d sip it politely and suffer silently, because Roy was a gentleman, and because I wanted very much for him to give me money. That was an altogether different set of circumstances from allowing Howard Schultz to think that I’m prepared to hand him cash to revisit my wretched-coffee-with-Roy moment. Heck with that.

What has gone wrong at Starbucks? It’s not simply that management seems anxious to diminish their brand by offering inferior new products. I’d say it’s more an issue of general entropy, the usual course of what happens when time passes by.

It isn’t Schultz’s fault that he’s become a stumble-bum overseeing an empire-in-retreat. It’s simply, sadly, that it isn’t 1984 any more, and the old acumen is likely to have suffered some wear-and-tear.

Ah, if we could all go back to the day when Howard and his buddies, all those baby boomer businessmen, used to be so adorable, as they opened their head shops and jeans stores and macrobiotic food kiosks and used record and comic book stores and leather outlets and stained-glass studios, sandblasting the walls and stripping the floors of the cheap retail space in the hip neighborhood, playing that same Moody Blues LP over and over again, filling the world’s nostrils with the stench of patchouli oil. They began as outsiders up against the forces of mainstream retailing, hipsters with a practical cut-throat streak.

Up here in Canada, once upon a time, the government even went so far as to tax funds from struggling wage-earners and redistribute them over to the little whipper-snappers who dreamed of opening up a funky candle store somewhere near the Farmer’s Market. And damned if the government didn’t want the money back — ever! It was free! Why? Just because it was so irresistable to encourage a rebellious, disaffected B.Comm.-grad who was starting a fresh new business venture in the cruel, cold world. Not very many of the hip capitalists endured for longer than a few months. As for the working-class families who financed these experiments, for their contributions they received the privilege of continuing to pay income tax until death. Hardly equitable, but that’s Canadian economics  for you.

“My dream is to bring lattes and chai tea to the masses,” is what Howard and all the other Howards might have inscribed in their high school yearbooks. (And if you’d told them then and there that they would survive only to become the kind of people who would just-add-water to packets of Nescafe and Quaker’s Oats, they probably would have threatened to idealistically pop you in the snoot.)

Things change — indeed they do — but I still can’t see this development at Starbucks as anything less than the curtain coming down on the age of the groovy entrepreneur. For Schultz won’t be content with merely trying to sell instant coffee. Watch for other, more absurd product introductions in the months to come: The world’s greatest instant chocolate pudding, accompanied with a superb spoonful of Dream Whip. The ultimate Spam sandwich on Wonder bread, topped with excellent mock-mayonnaise. A breakthrough in instant orange-y drinks, that you’ll swear is tastier than Tang, garnished with one pristine ice cube.

This isn’t what anyone would admiringly declare to be retro-chic. I fear it’s just time running out.