As an avid drinker, quite possibly a future alcoholic (but probably not – I kind of have my shit together) and having spent a fair amount of my professional career in marketing, I’m always interested in how alcohol brands are trying to “hook the young people.” Some will use anevocative catchphrase or create a fictional Hemingway Montalban character to serve as their spokesman. Lately, my Hulu streams have been interrupted by commercials for a curious, new-ish beer from the genius scientists at a feisty little microbrew giant/evil beer conglomerate, MillerCoors. The beer is called Miller 64, because it has 64 calories per 12 oz bottle. The commercial features a catchy jingle that sounds like an old Irish sea shanty. Except it’s about dudes on diets, the subject of soooooooo many old Irish sea shanties.

You can check out a video of the commercial after the jump, but it’s a beer commercial. Even without seeing it, you’ve already seen it, because by age 25, you’ve already seen a million of them. Literally. The spot has oversaturated lifestyle shots of youngish, aspirational twentysomething guys and the pretty bikini models who hang out with them. However, the message of the ad is less, “drink this beer and your life will be awesome” and more “drink this beer because you’re getting old and fat and need to exercise more.” With lyrics like the following, they’re aiming clearly at the calorie counting and newly “gluten-intolerant”:

We run a mile before breakfast/ Sure I had a salad for lunch/ But a Miller 64 for dinner/ Oh yes, because I’ve worked off my paunch/

So, after seeing this ad enough times for the message to seep in, I finally paid a little bit of attention to it and said to myself, “Wait. What?”

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