Category: Beer Advertising

Coors Light Catch the Silver Bullet billboard 05/11

Coors Light Catch the Silver Bullet 0511

With frost-bursting forth, the surreal bullet-locomotive emerges from a tunnel between the mountains. This engine has an anterior aerodynamic feature that looks like a metal breast (that the Svedka female robot might envy) complete with an erect nipple light. What is one to make of this? Is the combination of symbols / depictions of anatomical features just the ingredients going into some mental soup of sexual excitement? Or is a more literal interpretatation called for? Is the meaning that oral sex performed on a penis is a substitute for sucking at the mother’s breast? And that — through the looking glass of the unconscious — a bottle of beer is the same thing.

This billboard is installed just outside of the Hoboken train station — a coincidence?

Blue Moon beer delivery truck

Blue Moon beer delivery truck graphic on the side
The impression of paint strokes in the graphic communicates the idea that this is an artisan, hand-made product. The orange slice silently suggests Corona, with Blue Moon as the better tasting beer. The bright orange circle with the lines radiating from the center also provides a hypnotic spiral, as does the small blue moon logo in the diamond up-ended square on the side of the truck.

Blue Moon beer delivery truck graphic
Blue Moon beer delivery truck graphic on the back of truck

Stella Artois Hoboken building sign

Stella Artois Hoboken building sign

This large beer sign is on the side of a building in Hoboken less than a block from the viaduct and not far from the Lincoln Tunnel. The graphic is visible from 14th Street and from nearby Park Avenue.

The image appears to be painted. If that is so, then — as most billboard production is now by printing — the picture is distinctive.

Stella Artois Hoboken sign small print

A peculiar feature of this ad is the relatively tiny lettering. Perhaps the “www” of the Web Site URL will serve as a cue, but why not just leave it out? Then, the remainder of the domain name could be made that much larger. And what is that smudge under the Web Site address? If you click on the image above, you’ll see that this sign gives new definition to the term “small print.” Do words that require binoculars to read carry any sort of legal weight?

Glass blowing torch

An inspiration for the dynamic portrayal of the flow of the beer from the tap and into the glass might be the action of a flame from a glass blower’s torch.