{"id":297958,"date":"2019-01-29T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-29T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/?p=297958"},"modified":"2019-01-29T21:43:37","modified_gmt":"2019-01-30T02:43:37","slug":"michelob-ad-uses-radio-techniques-ive-used-for-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2019\/01\/29\/michelob-ad-uses-radio-techniques-ive-used-for-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Michelob Ad Uses Radio Techniques I\u2019ve Used for Years!"},"content":{"rendered":"

RUSH:\u00a0 I have always told people, always said that if you want to get a fairly good idea of where our society is, what our values are, what interests us as a nation within various demographic groups, keep a sharp eye on advertising.\u00a0 Advertising has one purpose: separate people from their money.\u00a0 Well, as I said, there are (sigh) a couple of ancillary purposes.\u00a0 A billboard advertising campaign may not actually have the objective of separating you from money.\u00a0 A billboard campaign is more validation.<\/p>\n

\"\"So if you\u2019re driving along and you see a billboard for a product you use — a big, gigantic billboard for a TV show you watch or something — you\u2019re supposed to react, “Yeah, yeah! That\u2019s big. That\u2019s important.” It validates the fact that you buy the product or watch it.\u00a0 But a billboard is not probably gonna convert anybody from one product to another.\u00a0 There\u2019s all forms of advertising.\u00a0 Some people do advertising just to have the brand or the message reach as many eyeballs or ears as possible, and continue to run that kind of ad for brand awareness.<\/p>\n

But most advertising is designed to separate people from their money (by the way, have audio sound bite No. 1 standing by), and in order to separate people from their money, you have to make them want to engage, buy, use the product or service that you\u2019re advertising.\u00a0 And to do that, you have to know who you\u2019re pitching!\u00a0 You have to know their values.\u00a0 You have to know what\u2019s important to them.\u00a0 You have to know what their triggers are.\u00a0 All of these things. It\u2019s why good advertising agencies are few and far between.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s why the good ones are used by so many different companies, corporations, and so forth.\u00a0 Now, beer is an interesting product to advertise.\u00a0 If you pay attention to beer advertising, you will note that it is all geared, with rare exceptions… There are exceptions to everything. It\u2019s all geared to young people.\u00a0 You don\u2019t find Anheuser-Busch or Miller or any of the others advertising to 55-year-old guys. They\u2019ve made up their mind.\u00a0 They\u2019ve got their favorite beer.\u00a0 They made their mind up on it long ago.<\/p>\n

They stick with it, and they don\u2019t really experiment much.\u00a0 The only time they might try something new is if what they want isn\u2019t available.\u00a0 But young people\u2019s minds are not made up yet.\u00a0 In terms of beer advertising, alcohol consumption in America has actually been on a cycle, and we are just coming out of a down cycle on alcohol consumption.\u00a0 There\u2019s no expressly known reason for it.\u00a0 It\u2019s just there are cycles.\u00a0 You know, iPhones sell big for a number of years and then level off as the market becomes saturated.<\/p>\n

All products have cycles, and the toughest products to advertise are those that you buy it and it lasts for years.\u00a0 Those people have a huge challenge.\u00a0 It\u2019s one of the things that\u2019s happening to the smartphone industry.\u00a0 It used to be that people would upgrade every year, every two years, when they had contracts with the cellular company so that they really weren\u2019t paying the full price of the phone at once.\u00a0 But then people discovered that the phones are so good, they last and last and last — and then you just if you just put a new battery in a 2 or 3-year-old phone it acts like brand-new.<\/p>\n

So people are not buying phones nearly as much.\u00a0 They\u2019re holding onto them longer.\u00a0 So it changes the way they have to be advertised and pitched.\u00a0 Beer is… There are probably even worse examples. Imagine people that sell furniture.\u00a0 I mean, how many times do you upgrade your couch?\u00a0 How many times you change your mattress?\u00a0 I mean, there\u2019s all sorts of things. Advertising is a fascinating thing, and communists hate it.\u00a0 Communists, socialists hate advertising because they hate consumerism.\u00a0 They hate people having the money to make financial choices.<\/p>\n

They think consumerism, materialism is disgusting and degrading, and they discourage it, and that\u2019s why a lot of young people you\u2019ll run into, Millennials, say, “I don\u2019t want to buy a car.\u00a0 I\u2019ll get an Uber.\u00a0 I\u2019ll get a scooter.”\u00a0 But eventually everybody grows up at some point whatever age and wants a car.\u00a0 Well, back to beer advertising.\u00a0 People are… They go back and forth from drinking adult beverages — distilled spirits — to beer.\u00a0 Sometimes there isn\u2019t much overlap.\u00a0 So the beer people coming out of a down cycle have to come up with something new.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Do you know how many beer commercials, for example, are made also featuring food?\u00a0 It is a big, fat zero.\u00a0 One of the light beers about 15 years ago did a whole campaign, drinking beer with rich Italian food — sausages and pasta and meatballs.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t work.\u00a0 Now, you may know of a local beer commercial where they sell the product in commercials featuring food, but generally food is not part of beer commercials.\u00a0 When beer commercials are shot in bars, at most you\u2019ll have a bowl of peanuts or something on the bar, but that will be the extent.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a product with no other distractions that are available.\u00a0 But beer is beer.\u00a0 I mean, how do you convince people that your beer is the best, and is more fashionable, and is the coolest and is the newest?\u00a0 Well, there\u2019s a Super Bowl ad coming for a new beer from Michelob, and guess what?\u00a0 Michelob\u2019s new beer is “organic.”\u00a0 What does that tell people?\u00a0 It tells Millennials that it\u2019s really, really fresh and it\u2019s really, really good for you and it really, really has no pesticides, and it really, really has no gunk or anything.<\/p>\n

Michelob\u2019s Ultra organic beer commercial is something unlike any beer commercial has ever been.\u00a0 It has a trick in it.\u00a0 Have you ever heard ASMR?\u00a0 Back in the sixties and seventies, advertising was thought to have subliminal messaging.\u00a0 A frame or two that the human eye couldn\u2019t see.\u00a0 They would put food in a beer commercial, but you wouldn\u2019t see it.\u00a0 Well, your eye would, but your brain wouldn\u2019t recognize it because the frame of food in the entire framing of the video was not enough.<\/p>\n

There wasn\u2019t enough… It wasn\u2019t a long enough shot for your brain to register, but your eye would, and it would send the signal that you\u2019re hungry!\u00a0 So they would put a plate of pasta or whatever — potato chips — in a beer commercial to make you hungry, to make you thirsty and then have you focus on the product.\u00a0 The subliminal stuff was thought to be very, very bad.\u00a0 It was thought to be mind games.\u00a0 It was thought to be dishonest.<\/p>\n

Well, in the Michelob ad there is something new, a new technique called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.\u00a0 Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response techniques are things like whispering, or you grab a bottle of Michelob Pure Gold, and you tap the bottle on the microphone (tapping) while people can see you do this. (tapping) You just tap the bottle like (tapping) all the techniques are audio.<\/p>\n

(whispering) Whisper.\u00a0 The entire commercial is whispered by an actress named Zoe Kravitz. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response\u00a0 is a growing trend.\u00a0 It\u2019s being used on YouTube now, and some of the most popular YouTube videos are said to be completely saturated with ASMR techniques.\u00a0 What ASMR does is relax the viewer, de-stress the viewers.\u00a0 Some people even report feeling a “tingling in their scalps and spines” while watching television commercials featuring these techniques.<\/p>\n

So Michelob Ultra organic beer will be making its Super Bowl debut with a commercial that features Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response and Zoe Kravitz.\u00a0 “U.S. alcohol consumption keeps falling.\u00a0 Americans are turning away from beer,” because Trump voters like beer, it is said.\u00a0 “Since its launch last February, Pure Gold has already succeeded at getting customers to choose beer over wine and spirits.”<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s the commercial. Now, what\u2019s fascinating about this to me is that every one of these techniques, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, they\u2019re all audio. Ninety-five percent of them are audio. Yeah, you can see her tap the beer bottle on the microphone, but it\u2019s the audio that\u2019s produced. It\u2019s her whispering that creates the tingling in the scalp, in some cases the tingling in the spine, the relaxing sense of \u2013 let me cut to the chase.<\/p>\n

These are techniques that I as a highly specialized instinctively talented broadcast specialist have been using for years. And now these people in television advertising think they\u2019re onto something hot here with what they\u2019re calling Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.<\/p>\n

Here is the commercial. Let me set it up for you. Zoe Kravitz is the actress in it. It opens with three seconds of a series of sped-up images of nature: a sunrise over water, a beach, a forest, an island, birds flying around, a waterfall, and then mountains and valleys.<\/p>\n