Client: Lion Nathan
Title: ‘In The Spirit Of Good Taste’
Agency: BMF; website by Holler; music by Tonefarmer

Over schooners of the stuff, my mate Glen once told me that Hahn Super Dry is Lion Nathan’s attempt to copy Asahi Super Dry. This has always struck me as totally plausible. Not just because they are both called “Super Dry” and have silver labels featuring angular calligraphy. And not just because Asahi is imported by Foster’s. No, like a beer-swilling Fox Mulder, I wanted to believe, since Asahi is one of my favourite beers yet Hahn Super Dry is rather less expensive.

This weird conviction of mine that it’s somehow a ‘premium’ beer is why I find it odd to hear Super Dry being positioned as a “low carb” beer, which seems like the kiss of death if you want people to regard your beer as delicious. But anyway, a new campaign by BMF is set to position Super Dry as the benchmark of excellent taste – literally and figuratively.

As Mumbrella reports, Lion Nathan says: “The campaign is based on the insight that how people define themselves is a constant work in progress: trying different things, clothes, perspectives – and even people – on for size. In this flirtation with different things, some work out, some don’t, but at some point, everyone needs to let some things go to move forward – and these decisions form the judgment of personal taste.”

But the TVC is pretty much about a dude embarrassing himself in front of his girlfriend’s family with his trashy phone ringtone.

Cute, but I really wasn’t that jazzed by this. The scenario is pretty clichéd (the impressing-the-posh-parents scenario reminds me a little of that “Not bad for canned soup, eh?” ad from years ago), and the mum’s outburst kind of came from nowhere. Whoever says, “In the spirit of good taste…”? It’s just stupid.

Also, it just doesn’t make sense for a supposedly well-bred matron to be shouting and brandishing a beer bottle at dinner – there are glasses of wine on the table, so it’s possibly not even her beer she’s brandishing. She’s holding it so awkwardly, too, as though she never usually drinks beer.

Hahn vs Asahi: both super dry, but only one is for tits-and-ass men.

I would have given this a miserly five out of ten. However, the ad is totally saved by the dude’s ridiculous ringtone. I laughed out loud the first time I heard it. I bet they laughed out loud in the BMF offices the first time they heard it, too. It’s a genius mashup of the stupidest parts of Fatman Scoop, 2 Live Crew, Lil Jon and DJ Assault. And it’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in an ad since the ‘Warm Tinny’ TVC for Campbells Chunky soup.

The ringtone was created by boutique New York soundtracking studio Tonefarmer, whose work adds a whimsical touch to funny ads, and who have done a fair amount of work for international clients. Perhaps BMF went that far afield because they felt an American studio would produce a sleazier, more authentic-sounding hip-hop track.

While the campaign website is fairly dull, with the usual guff about the beer’s crisp freshness and plenty of social networking sharing widgets to make the TVC ‘go viral’, you can also download the ringtone itself – and that’s where the campaign gets interesting. Enter your name and mobile number – here’s the link they text you – and you, too, can become a tits-and-ass man.

It might seem completely counterproductive – if you want to present your beer as tasteful, why circulate the ringtone that your ad presented as utterly lacking in taste? But this ‘Tits And Ass Man’ ringtone is totally the hero of the campaign. It’s so awesome. So pure in its masculine appreciation of breasts and buttocks.

I realise I am squarely in this ringtone’s target audience – my phone plays ‘Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)’ by C+C Music Factory precisely because I thought it would be funny when my phone rang in an important business meeting. But I really believe we might start hearing this ringtone from actual people’s phones, and then it will begin to create an imagined community of men who won’t be cowed by the withering gaze of their girlfriends’ bourgie relatives. These Hahn men will embrace the spirit of poor taste. They will be tits-and-ass men.

If BMF know what’s good for them, they’ll have a full-length music video for ‘Tits And Ass Man’ playing on TV soon.