![]() ![]() BEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….” motorcycle. or the “Rrrraaaaaaaaiiinnnnneeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrr…. to this day we STILL use jokes taken from those ads in our everyday dialog up here – “get it yourself, BOB!!!”. the humor and the jokes became the stuff of local legend and culture. i’m sure even a mere mention of what was in these ads will start a big list of comments by others about their favorites. everything from the start of claymation man, will vintnor, to the ORIGINAL ‘budweiser frogs’ (decades before bud copped the idea). these commercials were stunningly original and amazing. So what were these rainier ads like? i have a vhs tape of the whole series that i may someday post for you (smuggled out of heckler’s offices, so it’s high quality, too). they didn’t even change their recipe or packaging, either. rainier suddenly skyrocketed from under 10% of the market in sales – to over 65%!!! it took less than a year, too. olympia (then the regional beer leader with something like 35% market share) went out of business within a couple of years. we called it ‘pisswater’) sell so suddenly HUGE that it literally instantly wiped out the northwest market on local brews. they used surreal parody and stoner humor – SEMI ‘kid stuff.’ these commercials changed the face of beer advertising forever by using outrageous humor as the key element in television beer ads (low budget) to make rainier beer (a beer so lousy tasting that we would never touch it. Right about the time i got old enough to drink in taverns, the amazing rainier beer ad campaign (by heckler and associates in seattle) finally figured out how to sell beer to minors WITHOUT selling beer to minors. there were thousands.) well, all of them except ONE! that set him off on a quest for the missing puzzle cap – a quest that maybe he still pursues (staggering) to this day. he discovered he had the entire collection of puzzle caps (they were all numbered. when he finally topped it off (we drank a LOT of beer) he spent a nice drunken afternoon dumping them out on his living room floor and sorting through them. next thing you know we were snap-shooting caps around the room (i once saw a friend break a plate-glass window snap-shooting a puzzle cap.)Īnother friend of mine started saving all his bottle caps from the beer he drank in one of those old glass ‘water cooler’ jugs (the ‘biguns’). We used to sit around our party house and could always find a subject to talk about – “hey, what does this one mean?” then we’d all have a stab at it and take it from there. so, we all knew where the generic beer actually came from (the lucky brewery) – and it was even cheaper. you see, all the ‘generic beer’ bottle caps had the rebus puzzles, too. ![]() when they introduced ‘generic beer’ packaging back in the same period of time, it took off like mad. it immediately boosted lucky lager sales way up over the 25% market share with the young drinker. I don’t know who actually came up with this idea or who crated all of these amazing puzzles, but they were pure genius. the closest thing ad guys could come was semi-humorous cartoon mascots like the “hamm’s bear”. officially sanctioned beer advertising was serious business, only aimed at afterwork drinking (for blue collar worker brands) and weekends only drinking (for white collar worker brands). marketing beer to kids was maybe the largest beer drinking demographic at that point with all them boomer tykes too old for high school, but not old enough to legally go into a bar. so, selling beer to kids was serious biz (and also a big biz). ![]() in fact, it was still illegal to sell anything above 3.2 alcohol in grocery stores or places outside of a state controlled liquor store – and it was illegal to sell ANY alcohol on sundays. there were strict “blue laws” still in effect here in washington that made is specifically illegal to to do so. ![]() Back in those days, even attempting to market beer to minors (under 21 years of age in our state then) was seriously monitored. ![]()
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