The drudgery and monotony of everyday adult life isn’t something that’s typically depicted in beer advertising, which tends to gravitate towards good-times-watching-the-game-with-friends type imagery.
But like their Gen X and Baby Boomer predecessors, millennials are now discovering that having young kids can transform beer from a feel-good party ingredient to a much-needed balm after a long hard day of “adulting.”
That’s the basis of Molson Coors Canada’s new “Cheers to Parenthood” campaign for its Coors Light brand. The print and out-of-home led campaign—which also includes digital and social, as well as a contesting component—is running nationally for eight weeks.
Developed by Rethink, it consists of a series of print and out-of-home ads that show millennial parents beaten down by the requirements of being a parent—from pushing overladen luggage carts at the airport, to picking up the cake and balloons for a kid’s birthday. It ain’t exactly all-nighters and carefree weekends anymore.
The media buy by Wavemaker is focused on media channels that can intercept parents during their day-to-day activities, such as entertainment venues, cinema, etc. Airport advertising was also used to target people flying in and out during March Break.
Print ads are also appearing in several daily newspapers across the country, including The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, The Edmonton Sun, and Vancouver Sun.
“As a brand, we believe that ‘chill’ is a choice, and we also know that choosing chill is a lot harder when you’re in one of the most demanding phases of your life,” said Leslie Malcolm, vice-president of marketing at Molson Coors Canada. “We wanted to use this campaign as a way to celebrate parents who still find a way to keep cool and find moments of refreshment in their day-to-day.”
The campaign is part of the beer brand’s “The Chill Choice” brand platform that launched earlier this year, an evolution of the “Made to Chill” platform that had been in place for several years before that.
Malcom said that the photographs by Ale Burset lend themselves perfectly to traditional media like out-of-home and print, particularly since the latter is “having a bit of a resurgence” among people who came of age in the digital era.
“There’s something really powerful about the photographs we captured, and the goal was to get the consumer to get everything we were trying to tell them with just one look,” she said. “The focus was on capturing the lived human experience that any parent or prospective parent can relate to, and print was really the standout medium for us.”
Malcolm said that the campaign goal is twofold: Get Canadian beer drinkers to see themselves in the ads, and have more of them reach for Coors Light when seeking out a “well-earned moment of chill.”
The campaign is also being supported by a social media contest running on the brand’s Instagram page urging people to tag a parent friend who deserves the “gift of chill” in the form of a $150 prepaid gift card the brand is calling “The New Parent” tab.
