ON THE FURTHER PAUCITY OF IDEAS OF BUDWEISER CREATIVE: So we've all seen the Miller Light ads with the referees throwing flags at people for drinking crappy beer and other social faux pas. The first ad of this type--I think--is the guy and the girl on the beach. The guy initially gets flagged for drinking sub-par beer. Then the ref has to move in for "further review" because the girl is so much hotter than the guy and the infraction is "disproportionately hot girlfriend" or somesuch. The ending is perfect: the girl is suddenly fascinated by the ref's whistle; she blows it; the girl and the ref start giggling; as the commerical ends the guy chimes in with an incredibly fake laugh. It's a cute idea executed well.

There are more ads of this type but you get the drift. One is at a campfire and the guy gets flagged for guitar-playing hippie lameness--"tent invitation DECLINED." One (possibly the most recent) has a hapless Bud delivery guy screeching petulantly, "You can't flag the King!" Which may have touched off the latest round of retaliatory Bud ads.

You see--the retaliatory Buds ads star the Miller Light refs. Except--and you'll NEVER see this coming--the refs are just out to steal Bud Light! That's so classic. When the Miller Light refs are flagging people and taking away their Bud Light, the refs just want the Bud Light, is what Bud wants you to believe.

The lack of ideas on Bud's part is obvious: beaten to the punch yet again by Miller Creative, they resort to these rebuttal ads, like they did with the President of Beers campaign. Without funny animals to sell beer, Bud Creative is completely lost. What's that Lee Atwater-Karl Rove thing? If you're playing defense, you're losing? Bud is clealy losing.

Now--again--the difference between the Bud and Miller products isn't a substantial difference like that between--say--Coke and Pepsi. It's more like the difference between the urine samples of monozygotic twins: both are awful but not readily distinguishable from each other. You just have these two really old brands with large amounts of advertising dollars behind them.

I still haven't been able to see in their entirety the new Miller ads with the people lined up at Bud headquarters addressing the building with megaphones. But Miller has clearly moved on, at least, and Bud is still playing defense. So Advantage: Miller. Still.