The Think Room

There wasn’t much shock in the advertising business this week when news hit that DDB and Bud Light had finally parted ways after 30 successful years together. The account had, after all, been thrown quite publicly into review months earlier, and the brand has cycled a series of campaigns in recent years as it tried to reverse tough sales trends amid a challenging economic climate. Throw in a new set of corporate masters after the 2008 merger that created Anheuser-Busch InBev (and the departure of most of the agency’s core client contacts shortly thereafter) and most observers figured a split was coming at some point. And come it did.

None of that changes the essential facts of a remarkable run: Bud Light went from startup to the largest beer brand in the U.S., and DDB was its primary agency every step of the way. Memorable TV spots like “Gimme a Light” and “Dude” are still good for YouTube chuckles, and a compelling case can be made for “Real Men of Genius” as the greatest radio campaign of all time (it is certainly the most awarded).

But what Bud Light and DDB learned, it seems, is that the tactics that serve an upstart well don’t necessarily make sense for a mature brand.

Putting a lampshade on your head will get you attention at a party, and everyone there will quickly know your name. But once you’re widely known, getting attention for attention’s sake stops working. It only took one Super Bowl for everyone to know GoDaddy, but 6 years later they mostly know it as a company that tells the same joke a little less funny each year.

To be sure, every company wrestles with transitioning from creating awareness to preserving and protecting an established brand. CareerBuilder famously ditched its famous office monkey ads at the first sign they were slipping with consumers, but purging the core message –“you work with a bunch of monkeys and need a new job”—proved to be a mistake. And a few years later, the monkeys were back.

A brand that managed the trick more adroitly: One of Bud Light’s competitors, Corona Extra, only recently began featuring non-beach scenes in its ads, but the spots smartly all wind up back on the shore anyhow. The brand managed to freshen up a successful strategy that was threatening to get stale without losing the qualities that made that strategy successful in the first place – no easy trick.