Something must be done about this country’s southern border and US-Mexican relations. Heineken USA is taking a bold stance on immigration! As a product of it’s Born Bold ad campaign for Heineken USA, the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi have produced an answer to our plight. Heineken USA, makers of Tecate beer, believe they have an answer - A wall!
The 30 second ad opens to a desolate desert landscape, a wall spreads across the land dividing it in two as an eagle flies over head. The text on the screen types of U.S./Mexico as a voice over begins, “The time has come for a wall, a tremendous wall, the best wall.” Four men stand on each side of the wall. The feeling is ominous and we all know where this imagery and vocabulary is coming from.
Everyone is well aware that we are at the tail end of the 2016 election season. Arguably, a tailspin and it’s hyperbole is unavoidable. Saatchi & Saatchi were ingenious to use a theme, a package of propaganda that has been unavoidable to us for months now. Let’s face it, the wall is something that gets to every one of us. Either you support Trump’s wall and are emotionally emboldened by the thought of the hypothetical impenetrable force that would keep us safe mexican immigrants. Or, every time you hear about the tremendous and beautiful, amazing and great wall you vomit in your mouth a little bit before cycling through the five stages of grief.
The ad takes the first 14 seconds setting the stage and hooks us all. Then, a Tecate beer can slams down on the top of the wall which is clearly only 3’ tall and built for setting a cooler full of beer on. Now the eight men, four from Mexico and four from the U.S. are shaking hands, cracking open beers and enjoying a bipartisan brewhaha. Genius.
I watched the first presidential debate last Monday night with bated breath, so I know there were no commercial breaks - no room for this ad to find space amidst the debate. Where did they air it? Post debate on FOX News and (drum roll please…) Telemundo and Univision spanish-language channels. I loved this ad and even more appealing as saavy advertising, the spot they snagged to air it. I have never drank Tecate, I am an IPA drinking gay environmentalist, so I have never even noticed Tecate as a peruse the beer cooler and I certainly have the involuntary throat vomit when I hear people talk favorably over Trump’s wall. But this past Thursday while walking to the Co-op I noticed a discarded beer can along the berm of 3rd street, I never would have recognized or cared much about the brand of a discarded can, but it was Tecate. I now have brand recognition and appreciation. I must have told half a dozen close friends about the ad. The ad has now seen nearly 1.1 million views on Youtube and is seeing activity on twitter with its hashtag, #Tecatebeerwall. It was remarkable.
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