Miller Brewing Company

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Miller Brewing Company

MILLER HIGH LIFE MAN CAMPAIGN
MILLER LITE'S MILLER TIME CAMPAIGN

3939 W Highland Blvd.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53208-2688
USA
Telephone: (414) 931-2000
Fax: (414) 931-3735
Web site: www.millerbrewing.com

MILLER HIGH LIFE MAN CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

NOTE: Also see essay for SABMiller.

The Miller Brewing Company, a subsidiary of cigarette maker Philip Morris, was the second largest beer maker in the United States behind Anheuser-Busch. The Milwaukee-based company brewed about 44 million barrels of beer a year and controlled approximately 20 percent of U.S. sales. Popular Miller Brewing brands included Miller Genuine Draft, Miller High Life, and Icehouse, as well as Red Dog, Meister Brau, Milwaukee's Best, and the nonalcoholic brew Sharp's. Miller Brewing owned eight breweries in seven states, including California, Texas, and its home state of Wisconsin.

In 1998, in an effort to revive interest in its flagging High Life brand (once the company's flagship brew but now its third biggest selling brand behind Miller Lite and Miller Genuine Draft), Miller introduced High Life's first national ads in seven years. The ad campaign, "Miller High Life Man," was created by ad agency Weiden & Kennedy, based in Portland, Oregon, and launched on April 12 during professional basketball and baseball telecasts. The tongue-in-cheek commercials, aimed at young male beer drinkers, offered bombastic salutes to duct tape, donuts, diner food, and America's debt to the French for having invented mayonnaise. Miller Brewing Company spent an estimated $5-10 million on the campaign. The well-received television ads were reinforced by new packaging featuring sleek, tall bottles and incorporating the long-retired "Girl on the Moon" symbol and the brand's erstwhile catchphrase "The Champagne of Beers."

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Brewed since the beginning of the twentieth century, Miller High Life was the foundation brand for the Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing Company, which emerged as the industry's principal challenger to Anheuser-Busch. Beginning in 1906 High Life was touted in ads as the "Champagne of Bottled Beer," in an attempt to appeal to more affluent and status-conscious consumers. By the time the Philip Morris Company acquired Miller in 1969, however, the tag line had contributed to a widespread perception of High Life as a rich man's brew. One typical print ad from then-agency Mathisson & Company of Milwaukee, featured a needlepoint rendition of the bottle with the tag line "Home Is Where the Miller Is."

The brewing giant's new owners immediately ordered a change in direction. The ad slogan was shortened to "Champagne of Beers," and the decision was made to position High Life as a working man's brew. McCann-Erickson, a New York-based agency, was enlisted to create new ads for the brand. Their campaign, using the tag line "Miller Time," helped quadruple sales of High Life between 1970 and 1978. At 21.7 million barrels annually, it ranked just behind Anheuser-Busch' s flagship brew, Budweiser.

In 1979 Miller shipped nearly 24 million barrels of Miller High Life to distributors. That proved to be the high water mark for the brand, however. A precipitous sales decline ensued, attributable to several factors. The rising popularity of imported beer, together with the emergence of the "light" category (a trail blazed by Miller itself with its revolutionary Miller Lite brand) helped erode sales of High Life during the 1980s. Budweiser found it could gain market share by imitating High Life's strategy of pitching the brand as the workers' reward. The 1985 introduction of Miller Genuine Draft also cut significantly into High Life's business.

In 1988, in an attempt to revive High Life's sales performance, Miller changed its packaging, abandoned the "Champagne of Beers" slogan, and developed new ad campaigns. Its last national ad push for the brand came in 1991 and employed the tag line "Buy that Man a Miller." Sales continued to decline, however, and in 1993 the brewer cut the brand's price and slashed its marketing budget. Once a major force in the premium category, where it competed with the likes of Budweiser and Coors, High Life now occupied a lower-priced segment dominated by brands like Busch.

By 1996 High Life shipments had sunk below 5 million barrels. The following year, extensive tactical discounting by the brewer helped spur sales 6.8 percent to 4.7 million barrels, making it the eighth largest selling beer in the country. The surprising reversal of fortunes prompted Miller to embark on a major new marketing push for 1998. Nostalgia-driven campaigns reviving the "Miller Time" tag line had already been created for Miller Lite and Miller Genuine Draft, so a back-to-basics approach was adopted for High Life as well.

While Miller executives did not expect High Life to reclaim its former prominence, it was expected to play an important role in making Miller competitive against lower-priced rivals. "[Miller High Life] has a loyal base of consumers, and we want to articulate what it stands for to people who don't know," said Bruce Winterton, Miller's brand manager for High Life and Miller Genuine Draft, in announcing the new campaign.

TARGET MARKET

Miller High Life's "High Life Man" ads were targeted primarily at males aged 21 to 27. Historically the United States's most prolific beer drinkers, this group represented both a demographic challenge and an opportunity for America's brewers. While their numbers declined by about 3 million between 1990 and 1998, experts expected the population of "entry-level drinkers," as they were known, to begin growing around the year 2000 and to increase 14 percent over the first five years of the new millennium.

Studies showed these youthful beer drinkers to be both highly brand conscious and notoriously lacking in brand loyalty, making them an attractive challenge for advertising professionals. "Studies have indicated that is where we have the greatest opportunity to influence brand choices," commented Jeff Waalkes, Miller Brewing sales communications manager. "Although the over-30 market comprises a large segment by volume, the fact is that brand choice is pretty well set by the time a person turns 30. Rather than attempting to get such consumers to switch at that point, we believe it's more effective to try to make Miller their first choice at an earlier period."

People in their twenties were also known to be very ad-resistant, making them a hard group to reach with traditional sales approaches. "They look at advertising and marketing as almost a spectator sport," said Steven Grasse, chief executive of Gyro Worldwide, a Philadelphia advertising agency that specialized in marketing to people ages 18 to 30. "This is a savvy audience," noted Mike Johnson, brand director for Miller Lite. "They started shopping earlier; they've had candy marketed to them; they've had Channel One in their classrooms. They've been there; they've done that; they've bought the T-shirt."

To reach these jaded young consumers, beer companies often tried out offbeat marketing and promotion ideas. Miller's strategy was to have constantly changing television ads, to promote the theme of "fun, fresh, unexpected, entertaining." Other companies relied on the kind of "twisted childish humor" that these consumers grew up on. According to Janine Misdom, a partner at Sputnik, a New York marketing firm, males under the age of 30 responded most favorably to the Budweiser commercials in which a talking lizard hatches a murder plot against a group of frogs. "It's funny, it's a little bit nostalgic, and there is a little bit of the bad-boy thing," Misdom said. "They've all grown up on this offbeat humor."

COMPETITION

The beer industry remained highly competitive in 1998, with little change from the previous year in terms of market position among the major brewers. Anheuser-Busch set the pace overall in 1997, with 47.5 percent of the U.S. beer market, the same figure as 1996, according to the Maxwell Consumer Report published by analyst Jack Maxwell of Davenport & Company. Its flagship brand Budweiser was off 2 percent, which in the sluggish premium segment represented "the best performance by the brand in six years," according to Anheuser-Busch officials. Miller Brewing ended the year with a total market share of 21.4 percent. Shipments were up in double-digits for Foster's, Icehouse, and Red Dog, while Miller High Life and Milwaukee's Best also showed strong increases. Bringing up the rear of the market were Coors Brewing, at 10.9 percent, and Stroh Brewery (including former Heileman products) at 7.4 percent.

After being outspent by Miller Brewing Company in 1997, Anheuser-Busch announced plans to invest more than $300 million in brand ads in both 1998 and 1999. True to its word, the St. Louis-based brewer increased ad spending 54.7 percent to $187.2 million during the first six months of 1998, according to Competitive Media Reporting. Much of the new spending went to the Budweiser and Bud Light brands, while Anheuser-Busch retrenched in the specialty, ice, and dry beer segments. In early 1998 Anheuser-Busch also announced plans to launch a new, contemporary campaign directed at adult drinkers. The spots featured humans, rather than the brewer's popular animated lizards and frogs. While the reptiles remained a part of the company's creative mix, ads with people allowed Anheuser-Busch to portray consumers having a good time with beer, according to Bob Lachky, vice president of brand management for Anheuser-Busch.

MARKETING STRATEGY

Miller High Life's "High Life Man" ad campaign was designed to remain faithful to the blue-collar roots of the brand, even as its humorous style attracted younger beer drinkers. The ads, directed by Errol Morris of @radical. media, all featured a shadowy figure known as "High Life Man," whose activities are commented upon by an unseen narrator. "We are trying to emphasize the simplicity, pride, and common sense that are valued by Miller High Life drinkers of all ages," said Winterton. "The High Life guy wants to eat what he wants, fix things himself, and do his own thing."

The "High Life Man" campaign blended populist themes from the 1970s "Miller Time" spots with the ironic humor popular in the 1990s. In one new commercial, "Duct Tape," a Miller High Life drinker demonstrates the power of the versatile adhesive as he places a swatch of duct tape on the door of an old refrigerator filled with bottles of High Life. "The High Life man knows that if the Pharaohs had duct tape, the Sphinx would still have a nose," a voice-over intoned.

In another ad, "Boat," a man leans on a rake as he watches his hapless neighbor attempt to back a car with a boat trailer into his driveway. "Time was a man knew how to command his own vehicle," says the narrator. "Just how far are we willing to fall? Better reacquaint yourself with the High Life, soldier, before someone tries to take away your Miller Time."

In a third ad, "Burger," viewers look on as several greasy hunks of ground beef are fried on a diner stove. "Something's not quite right," however, the voice-over informs us. Then the waitress tops a burger off with a generous dollop of butter, which elicits a pleased response: "There, now that's a sandwich … That's living the High Life. That's Miller Time." Another ad, "Deviled Egg," shows a disheveled man alone in his kitchen after a party, pondering the advisability of eating the last deviled egg left on the party platter. "Mmmm, that last egg's looking real good," says the unseen narrator. "You've had quite a few though. Maybe you shouldn't." Ultimately, however, the man decides to go for it. The narrator approves. "See there," he says. "When you have the High Life, you can live it both ways."

One ad in the campaign, "Doughnut," shows a close-up of grease on a mechanic's hand, as he flicks around a powdered doughnut. The narrator says it's not a problem if the man can't wash his hands properly, since the grease provides a "semiprotective barrier between your fingerprint and your nutrition." Grease, the voice-over concludes, is nothing but added flavor "to a High Life man."

TURNING BACK THE CLOCK

The Miller Brewing Company was not the only marketer looking to boost its profits by reviving a once popular brand. In fact, it was one of many companies following a growing nostalgia trend in 1998. German automaker Volkswagen, for example, hoped to tap into baby-boomer nostalgia by rolling out a redesigned version of its Beetle, a cheap compact car favored by college-age drivers in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Pepsi-Cola Company reformulated its orange Slice brand, redesigned its container, and launched commercials designed to revive interest among teens and young adults. Like High Life, Slice, introduced amid much fanfare in the mid-1980s, had not been advertised nationally in a decade.

Why revive a fading brand rather than create a new one? Because "we know something about those old brands," said Ned Levine, a marketing consultant based in Providence, Rhode Island. "You have people out there who think of something when they think of Miller High Life. If you can take the evocative nostalgic elements out of one of those brands, it's more efficient than starting from zero."

OUTCOME

Reaction to Miller's "High Life Man" ad campaign was largely positive, although there were a few brickbats. One beer industry rival dismissed the High Life effort, calling it "too little too late" and claiming that the new ads made fun of High Life drinkers "rather than giving them joy." Perhaps echoing this sentiment, almost a quarter of respondents polled by USA Today disliked the campaign, a high disapproval rate given that the average in all USA Today polls for respondents who disliked a campaign was 13 percent. Of some consolation to High Life's marketing team was the fact that men liked the new ads more than women did. Eighteen percent of men said they liked the "High Life Man" campaign "a lot," while only 8 percent of women did.

Most advertising critics, by contrast, found the ads witty and inventive. "The direction … is priceless," raved the reviewer for Advertising Age magazine. "Even the subtle nuance of the off-kilter logos at the end of each spot makes the work feel at once old-fashioned yet completely contemporary." "The spots seem real," added the critics at Adweek Western Advertising News. "They feel like beer tastes. If you like beer, that's a good thing."

Wieden & Kennedy's "Miller High Life Man" campaign won a number of advertising industry awards, including three Addy Awards. At the annual One Show Awards, the agency picked up two gold, two silver, and one bronze medals. "Mayonnaise" won the Gold Pencil in the 20-second or less, single ad category and "Sally," another spot in the campaign, took the Silver Pencil in that category. The campaign's "Sally," "Donut," and "Fridge" took the Gold Pencil in the varying lengths campaign category, while "Boat," "Mayonnaise" and "Router" earned the Silver Pencil in that category. In addition, Wieden & Kennedy took the Bronze Pencil in the 30-second campaign category for "Boat," "Duct Tape" and "Deviled Egg."

MILLER LITE'S MILLER TIME CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

On January 12, 1997, during championship games of the American and National Football Conferences and on the Fox Network's The X-Files, the Miller Brewing Company introduced Dick as its new spokesperson for Miller Lite. The series of four commercials all began in the same way, with a campy 1950s beer can logo bearing the slogan "Miller Time," a familiar tag line that had not been used since the mid-1980s, followed by a picture of Dick, apparently straight out of his 1975 high school yearbook, complete with long hair and sideburns. Each spot ended with a coda to the "Miller Time" logo, Dick's signature of approval and his statement "Thank you for your time," a la Bartles and Jaymes. In between the logos Dick told viewers, "Anything can happen."

The four scenarios lived up to this promise. In "Adios, Amigos," several cowboys stood at the bar of a saloon and drained their bottles of Miller Lite, after which they filed into the bathroom, sadly serenading their beers with the title song. In "Magician" the title character played a shell game with mice and Miller Lite, making one disappear and the other appear in its place, except that the mice ended up under the armpits of his blond assistant. "Man in the Field" showed the upper half of a walking man, his bowler hat bobbing above a field of wheat, but when he stepped past the end of a row, his naked bottom half was revealed. (Dick maintained modesty with a strategically positioned bottle cap.) "Product Tester" followed the adventures of Dick's friend Jimmy, who could not seem to let go of his bottle of Miller Lite as he tested it by tossing it off high buildings and throwing it down staircases. More scenarios in the $140 million campaign followed throughout 1997.

The initial critical response to the ads tended to be negative. Bob Garfield panned the ads in Advertising Age, calling them "a smug, masturbatory sort of advertising." Rance Crain, the magazine's editor, proclaimed, "Miller Lite's new agency, Fallon McElligott, has invoked the" Miller Time" heritage—which is nothing less than sacrilege—but has come up with ads so horrendously bad that I'm ready to revoke their 1996 Ad Agency of the Year award." Not all of the publication's readers shared this response, however. One reader wrote in to say that the ads amused him, as did the critical reaction.

Miller, of course, was more concerned with the reaction of its target audience. In the decade since the "Miller Lite All Stars" had last argued the "Great Taste/Less Filling" debate, Miller Lite's market share had fallen, and Anheuser-Busch's Bud Light, the main competition, had replaced Miller Lite as the best-selling light beer. To turn the situation around, Miller Lite reduced the age at the upper end of its target market, from 30- to 38-year olds, while simultaneously adopting a more hip tone that would resonate with a younger audience. According to Mike Johnson, Miller Lite's brand director, the basic element of the new strategy was to "create a lot of talk with contemporary adult beer drinkers." Even negative reactions to the advertisements worked in favor of this goal, for people talked more about Miller Lite. People not only talked, however; they also began to buy more Miller Lite.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In 1975 Miller Brewing introduced a new concept when it established the low-calorie, or "light," beer category, brewed to appeal to the taste buds as well as the paunches of beer drinkers. During the previous year filming had begun on commercials for the new "Miller Lite All Stars" campaign, created by the Chicago advertising agency Leo Burnett USA. The ads featured former athletes and coaches arguing whether it was better that the new beer "Tastes Great" or was "Less Filling." The "Tastes Great/Less Filling" tag line tattooed itself on the psyche of American popular culture through a sustained advertising campaign that ran until the cost of hiring ex-athletes became prohibitively expensive. The campaign eventually became a victim of its own success, explained Gina Shaffer, Miller's marketing communications manager, for as other advertisers followed the precedent set by Miller Lite, it drove the value of appearances by ex-athletes through the roof.

After Miller abandoned this tag line, it decided to revive "Miller Time," which had once been the slogan of its flagship brand, Miller High Life, and which had become a cultural icon. Although Miller had laid the slogan to rest in 1985, "Miller Time" maintained its currency in American culture. Jack MacDonough, Miller's chairman and CEO, spoke about the resurrection of the slogan: "We [hadn't] been talking Miller Time for the last fifteen years … But this society did. It's never gone away. In the sports pages, somebody named Miller [basketball player Reggie Miller] would do well and they'd say it was 'Miller Time' last night. The phrase continued in the popular culture, which is why it was so much fun to pick it up again."

While Miller executives made the task sound easy, executives at Fallon McElligott, the Minneapolis advertising agency that had wooed the Miller account away from Leo Burnett, approached the job with a more realistic perspective. Mary Van Note, Fallon McElligott's group planning director, recalled that "fear struck [her] heart" when she first heard of the assignment. "It's one thing to discuss how to jumpstart a brand," she said, "it's quite another to turn around one of the biggest beers in America." Such a transformation required innovation, risk, and self-confidence, all trademarks of Fallon McElligott.

TARGET MARKET

Miller wanted to redefine Miller Lite by narrowing the age span of the target audience. The lower end would remain at 21, the legal drinking age, but at the upper end the campaign would focus on those age 30, rather than extending to 38, which had been the strategy for many years. Beer drinkers typically establish their brand preference in their 20s and maintain steadfast allegiance into their 30s and beyond, thus making it very difficult for advertising to effect a switch. Fallon McElligott thus formulated the Dick campaign to appeal to those under 30 without alienating older beer drinkers.

The campaign used the character of Dick to reach Generation Xers through various media, including commercials aired during The X Files, promotional tie-ins with MTV's Singled Out, contests to win a behind-the-scenes look at the shooting of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue along with print ads in the magazine, and even a Miller Lite World Wide Web page, where computer users could play "Dick-tac-toe." Miller Lite had traditionally geared its advertising toward sports, and the new campaign continued to do so as a way of maintaining its over-30 base while simultaneously reaching its younger target market.

As was typical of Fallon McElligott's self-reflexive tendencies, this age division became the topic of a commercial in which Dick solicited the opinions of Miller plant workers about his ad campaign. In one commercial father and son Jimmy and Clint Nelson disagreed over Dick's campaign. Predictably, Jimmy, who had worked at Miller's Fort Worth plant for 18 years, did not like the bizarre commercials, while Clint, his bearded, longhaired, tie-dyed son, did. Critics labeled this tactic a postmodern spoof on advertising, but Fallon McElligott copywriter Linus Karlsson called it honest. "It's not spoofy … It's straightforward. This is Dick; this is what he does."

Leslie Savan of the Village Voice doubted such a simplistic formulation. Rather, she claimed, the slick postmodernism of the ads veiled their objectionable content. Savan pointed out that Dick's friend Jimmy in the "Product Tester" spot happened to be black, concluding that "commercials designed to appeal to white guys who drink beer by using a black man doing slapstick and looking stupid are in dangerous territory," bordering on blaxploitation. Miller seemed to be in safer territory when it appealed to diversity directly. It hired the Dallas-based firms Lucero Bentz and Square One to create a Spanish-language spot on the soccer rivalry between Spain and Argentina and hired Frazier Smith, a New York agency specializing in urban advertising, for a pair of rap commercials featuring Ice-T and Dr. Dre.

Miller's Shaffer defended Fallon McElligott's tactics. "We don't expect people to like every ad," Shaffer said. "You can't be meaningful to everyone at once. It's the recall. People can repeat to us, frame by frame, what the commercial is about." In order for recall to translate into retail, however, the consumer must remember the brand as well as the message. Ken Gutwillig, manager of the Press Box Sports Emporium in Tampa, said that customers found the ads "clever and interesting." But he reported that less than a third of them remembered that the commercials advertised Miller Lite.

COMPETITION

Until Bud Light introduced competition in 1982, Miller Lite dominated the low-calorie beer market it had created. In the 1990s, however, the market shares of Miller Lite and Bud Light practically flip-flopped. Miller Lite began the decade controlling 33 percent of the light-beer market, compared with Bud Light's 19 percent. By 1997, however, Miller Lite's share of the light-beer market had fallen to 22 percent, while Bud Light's had risen to 30 percent. "In the flattest of beer decades, Bud Light has been such an exception to the no-growth rule that you wonder whether it's actually a beer," stated Greg Prince in Beverage World. "For five consecutive years, the brand has added volume on an annual double-digit basis. That figure has actually increased from 1994 (10 percent) to '95 (11.5 percent) to '96 (13.9 percent)."

Bud Light overtook Miller Lite in 1995 on the strength of a series of successful ad campaigns that dated to the late 1980s when Spuds Mackenzie, the cool dog with the black eye, became a cultural phenomenon. Bud Light carried this momentum into the 1990s with the catchphrases "Yes I am" and "I love you, man." According to Bob Scarpelli of DDB Needham Chicago, Budweiser's advertising agency, these phrases "established the brand as hip, and that translates into sales." Bud Light's success stemmed largely from its strategy of targeting 21- to 30-year-old men, many of whom saw themselves mirrored in Mr. Insincerity, a character who at any opportunity that might reward him with a Bud Light would utter, "I love you, man."

In 1997 Bud Light competed against "Miller Lite's Miller Time" campaign with a new campaign—"What Do We Have Here?"—in which Bud Light drinkers discovered seemingly endless supplies of their favorite beer. The competition played itself out not only in advertising but also in ad budgets. According to Competitive Media Reporting, which tracked ad expenditures, Miller Lite outspent Bud Light by $54 million to $31 million in the first half of 1997. Notwithstanding this advantage, Miller's Johnson maintained that "the concept is outthinking, not outspending, the competition."

MARKETING STRATEGY

Fallon McElligott's real challenge in taking on the Miller Lite account was to create a strategy for making an old brand seem new. Breweries, including Miller, had spent the previous few years introducing new products, but the failure of these new items to expand the market forced a retreat to core brands. To change the perception of a product without changing the product required sleight of hand. The creative staff at Fallon McElligott dreamed up Dick to solve this problem, with the solution amounting to the simplest of ideas—advertise the advertising. Nike had already diverted attention from its products to its message, and now Fallon McElligott took the technique a further step, circling back to draw attention to the advertising itself.

Adweek pointed out the risk of this tactic: "With armpit mice and urinating cowboys, Miller Lite advertising displayed signs of going off the deep end. What some viewed as strategic bravery, others saw as advertising suicide. What you've got is a fairly desperate client and an agency that thinks it can do no wrong. That is a recipe for either brilliance or disaster." As with all advertising, Fallon McElligott's campaign, since it could not control the audience's perception, involved a calculated risk. Through calculation, however, the agency attempted to mitigate the degree of risk. "Nothing we do is reckless," said Rob White, Fallon McElligott's director of account planning. "We know exactly what we are doing. Everything is carefully researched."

In the process of exhuming its "Miller Time" slogan, Miller decided to apply the tag line of its Miller High Life brand to its other core brands, Miller Genuine Draft and Miller Lite. The concept of "Miller Time" was also revised to fit the times. Formerly, Miller High Life advertising had defined "Miller Time" for its audience as an afterwork panacea. Miller Lite advertising allowed consumers to define "Miller Time" themselves. "Miller Time" was no longer defined by the positions of the hands on a clock, for Dick redefined "Miller Time" to describe any attitude that lent itself to the enjoyment of Miller Lite.

OUTCOME

Dick continued to create controversy, but he also continued to boost beer sales, prompting Miller to extend its "Miller Time" campaign into 1998. (In mid-1997, however, it quietly dropped Dick as its spokesperson.) The campaign won the inauspicious distinction of being named the "Most Self-Conscious Attempt to be Postmodern" in Entertainment Weekly's yearly survey of advertising. Fallon McElligott swept the awards at the competition sponsored by the Advertising Federation of Minnesota and Minnesota Art Directors/Copywriters Club, including the best of show honors for the "Product Tester" spot.

In terms of sales the numbers went up slowly but steadily for Miller Lite throughout 1997. A Nielsen Scan Track following retail sales of light beer reported an increase of 0.8 percent for Miller Lite during January 1997, while Bud Light fell by 0.1 percent. From January to June Miller Lite's supermarket sales rose 12 percent. Statistics at the end of the year showed that these trends had continued, with Beverage Marketing Corporation reporting a 1.7 percent increase in domestic shipments of Miller Lite, a healthy increase considering the competitive climate of the brewing industry.

THE REAL DICK

Dick was, of course, a fictional character, but the man pictured in the "Miller Lite's Miller Time" advertisements really did exist. In fact, he tended bar in Seattle and played guitar in a garage band. When asked, Gina Shaffer, Miller's marketing communications manager, would not reveal the true identity of Dick—"He wants a personal life"—but she did reveal that the photo was not a 1970s vintage shot but rather a current portrait—"That's how he looks."

The increases in sales did not come without a price. According to Competitive Media Reporting, Miller Lite increased its first-quarter advertising budget by $16.2 million, from $22.5 million in 1996 to $38.7 million in 1997. On the whole, however, Miller Brewing still managed to raise its volume, share, and profits in 1997, a year noted for price wars. Miller's MacDonough attributed much of the company's success in 1997 to the "Miller Time" campaigns, despite, or perhaps because of, the controversy surrounding them: "We had taken a number of calculated risks in changing our advertising and our advertising agencies and changing our strategy from introducing new products every year to let's grow what we already have to rearranging what brands we're supporting…. You would think that with all those calculated risks we would have something that didn't work. What was unusual is everything worked better than we expected. We like that."