Miller Lite logo |
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| Manufacturer | Miller Brewing Company |
|---|---|
| Introduced | 1973 |
| Alcohol by volume | 4.2%[1] |
| Style | Pale lager |
Miller Lite is a 4.2% abv pale lager brand sold by MillerCoors of Chicago, Illinois, United States.[1] Sibling beers include Miller Genuine Draft and Miller High Life.
Contents |
Essentially the first mainstream light beer, Miller Lite has a colorful history . After its first inception as "Gablinger's Diet Beer," which was created in 1967 by Joseph L. Owades, a biochemist working for New York's Rheingold Brewery,[2] the recipe was given (by the inventor of the light beer process) to one of Miller's competing breweries, Chicago's Meister Brau, which came out with the Meister Brau "Lite" brand in the late 1960s. When Miller acquired Meister Brau's labels the recipe was reformulated and relaunched as "Lite Beer from Miller" (which was its official name until the mid 80s) in the test markets of Springfield, IL, Knoxville, TN and San Diego, CA in 1973, and heavily marketed using masculine pro sports players and other macho figures of the day in an effort to sell to the key beer-drinking male demographic. Miller's approach worked where the two previous light beers had failed, and Miller's early production totals of 12.8 million barrels quickly increased to 24.2 million barrels by 1977 as Miller rose to 2nd place in the American brewing marketplace. Other brewers responded, especially Anheuser-Busch with its heavily advertised Bud Light in 1982, which eventually overtook Lite in 1994. In 1992 light beer became the biggest domestic beer in America.
In 2008, Miller Brewing Company test-marketed three craft beers – an amber, a blonde ale, and a wheat – under the Miller Lite brand, marketed as Miller Lite Brewers Collection.[3]
Miller Lite at one point contained several ingredients not normally found in beer, including manufactured chemical additives. The Center for Science in the Public Interest reported in 1982 that Miller Lite contained propylene glycol alginate (a seaweed extract), water, barley malt, corn syrup, chemically modified hops extracts, yeast, amyloglucosidase, carbon dioxide, papain enzyme, liquid sugar, potassium metabisulfite, and Emka malt (a food coloring).[4]
Per 12 ounce serving, Miller Lite contains:
Miller Lite won the World Beer Cup's gold medal for Best American-Style Light Lager in 1996, 1998, 2002, and 2006. It also won the Great American Beer Festival's silver medal in 2003 in the same category.[5]
At the 2010 Great American Beer Festival, Miller Lite won the gold medal for Best American Style Lager or Light Lager, beating out Miller Genuine Draft, which received the Bronze.
Miller Lite's long-running "Great Taste...Less Filling!" advertising campaign was ranked by Advertising Age magazine as the 8th-best advertising campaign in history. The campaign was developed by the advertising agency McCann-Erickson Worldwide.[6] In the prime of the campaign, television commercials typically portrayed a Miller Lite drinker noting its great taste followed by another who observed that it was less filling. This usually led to a parody of Wild West saloon fights in which every patron got involved in the dispute for no real reason, though in this case it was always a shouting match, and blows were never thrown. The commercials were closed with a voiceover from actor Eddie Barth, who read the slogan, "Lite Beer from Miller; everything you've always wanted in a beer...and less".[7]
To attract 'Joe Sixpack' to a lite beer, these commercials started to feature both elite ex-athletes such as Ray Nitschke, Ben Davidson, and Bubba Smith, but also oddball cultural figures such as Mickey Spillane, and most notably Rodney Dangerfield. As the series of commercials went on, it started featuring athletes and celebrities, who were not necessarily champions. Some commercials from this era include:
The number of athletes and celebrities that did these ads grew to such a number, and the popular nature of the ads, led to yearly ads featuring all of the stars, generally in some sort of competition between the 'Less Fillings' and the 'Taste Greats'. Generally the ads usually ended up having Rodney Dangerfield being somehow the goat of the losing team.
As part of this campaign, Miller Brewing ran a series of highly distinctive[says who?] television commercials in the winter of 1993–1994 showing several fictitious "extreme sports" such as "Wiener Dog Drag Racing" (which featured two wiener dogs racing each other at a drag racing strip), "Sumo High Dive" (which depicted a Japanese sumo wrestler diving off a platform) and "The Miss Perfect Face-Off" (which featured beauty pageant contestants playing ice hockey). The tag line that followed was, "If you can combine great taste with less filling, you can combine anything."
In 1996, Miller Lite ran the "Life Is Good" campaign, which showed Miller Lite drinkers' aspirational transition to more fun via a Miller Lite bottle tap, like "Beach Rewind", where three men on a beach admired three beautiful women walking by, and could rewind, and enjoy, the scene repeatedly. The campaign was developed by Leo Burnett Company, and received the American Marketing Association EFFIE award for outstanding advertising effectiveness. The campaign included celebrities such as Larry Bird, Keith Jackson, and Richard Karn.[8]
Beginning January 12, 1997, a series of surreal Miller Lite ads, purportedly made by a man named "Dick", began to air. They were hallmarked as such either at the beginning or the end of the commercial. The campaign was developed by Minneapolis-based ad agency Fallon. The series of "Dick" commercials was directed by Gerald Casale of the new wave band Devo. Such commercials include one where a middle-aged man sees the message "twist to open" on a Miller Lite bottle cap, and he proceeds to do the Twist.[9]
In 2002, "Catfight", another high-profile commercial in the long-running "Great Taste...Less Filling" campaign, was denounced by critics as depicting women as sexual objects.[10] The commercial featured two extraordinarily beautiful women, a blonde and a brunette, discussing the classic "Great Taste/Less Filling" debate, except they both ended up stripped, soaked, beaten and covered in mud. An uncensored version of the commercial ended in the muddy beauties sharing a passionate kiss. The girls received much publicity from the commercial, and later starred in a few related commercials, videos and events.
In 2006, Miller Lite had an advertising campaign called Man Laws featuring celebrities that include actor Burt Reynolds, professional wrestler Triple H, comedian Eddie Griffin, and former American football player Jerome Bettis. The celebrities and other actors were in a "Men of the Square Table", a group meeting where they discuss different situations that should be included in the "Man Laws". The ads were developed by the ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky/Miami, and were directed by comedy film director Peter Farrelly.[11]
In the sport of NASCAR, Miller began advertising their Miller Genuine Draft beer on the #27 Pontiac of Rusty Wallace (later #2). Wallace switched to a Ford in 1994, and Miller switched their sponsorship to Miller Lite a couple years later in 1997. That sponsorship continues to this day, now on the #2 Dodge, driven by Brad Keselowski, after Wallace retired in 2005, and when Kurt Busch, who formerly drove the #2, drives for a new team for Penske Racing for 2011.
Other promotion in motor sports included the sponsoring of Don Prudhomme's Larry Dixon-driven NHRA top fuel dragster from 1997–2007. Prior to that, Dixon was sponsored by Miller Genuine Draft.
In June 2010, commercials premiered featuring actresses Lindsey McKeon and Nadine Heimann as bartenders.
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