Carlton does not keep a copy on its own channel, so both links are archive reuploads and could vanish. If the first one is gone, "Carlton Draught Big Ad" finds a dozen more. Turn the sound up for this one. The joke is entirely in the lyrics.
Beer advertising has one gear, and it is EPIC. Sweeping helicopter shots. Hundreds of extras. Choral music. Men striding toward some unnamed destiny that turns out to be a cold lager. Every brand in the category was making the same film, and had been for years, at enormous expense, all of them apparently convinced that theirs was the one that felt genuinely stirring rather than faintly ridiculous.
The audience had worked out the formula a long time before the advertisers did. Australians in particular could smell the pomposity from a very long way off. So the category had arrived at a place where everyone was spending enormous money on a convention that the viewer had already stopped taking seriously.
Which leaves one move nobody had made. Not doing a smaller ad. Not doing a funny ad instead. Doing the epic ad, at full scale and full cost, while saying out loud, in the choral music, exactly what it is.
An enormous choral epic whose lyrics, sung to "O Fortuna", describe the ad you are currently watching.
Two vast armies of cloaked men charge across the hills at each other, and as the camera pulls back you see what they actually form: a giant man raising a giant beer to his lips. The choir is not singing about destiny or brotherhood or the land. It is singing a running commentary on the production budget.
The whole thing rests on total commitment to the bit. If the ad had cheated the scale, used obvious models, or winked with a jokey performance, it would have been a student parody. So they built it properly: real crowds, real hillsides, Andrew Lesnie as director of photography, and Animal Logic doing the visual effects to multiply the armies into something genuinely vast. Every craft decision was made as though the sincerity were real, and only the lyrics know it is a joke.
Then they did something in 2005 that now looks routine and at the time was not. They put it online ahead of the television premiere and let it travel. YouTube was six months old. "Viral" was barely a marketing word yet. Within a day it had been downloaded 162,000 times, and inside a fortnight it had been watched more than a million times across 132 countries, largely by people emailing it to each other because it was funny, not because a media plan had put it in front of them.
The unusual coda: it worked so well online that Carlton reduced the television budget, because the spot was at risk of being overexposed before the paid campaign had properly run.
The stupid: spend a category-leading budget on a lavish, thousands-strong, effects-heavy epic, and then use the soundtrack, the one element you fought hardest for, to tell everyone that this is an expensive ad and that is the only thing it is. Undercut your own spectacle in your own commercial. Hand the audience the cynical joke about beer advertising before they can make it themselves, having first paid full price for the thing being mocked.
The smart: the joke only exists if the money is real, so the spend is not wasted on the gag, it is the setup for it. And self-awareness was already Carlton's brand voice, so this is not a stunt bolted onto a stranger, it is the brand at full volume. Best of all, it makes every rival's straight-faced epic unwatchable. Once you have seen Big Ad, the next brand's earnest choir sounds like it is being mocked by a soundtrack that is not even there. That is the real land grab: not attention, but the permanent spoiling of the category's default film.
The steal: if your category has a convention everyone has stopped believing, do not abandon it and do not fix it. Perform it perfectly and narrate it. Saying the quiet part out loud is cheaper than escaping the cliche and it takes the cliche away from everybody else.
We like it because the craft is completely straight-faced. There is not a single moment where the film nudges you. The direction, the photography and the effects are all working at full sincerity, and the entire comic load is carried by the lyrics. That is a very hard thing to hold your nerve on, because every instinct in a review says make the joke bigger, make sure they get it. Somebody protected the sincerity, and the sincerity is what makes it funny.
It also passes the test we care about most: it dies when you describe it. "A choir sings about how big the ad is" is a shrug in a meeting. The thing only exists once it has been made at the scale it is describing. That is a craft-powered idea, and those are the ones that are hardest to sell and hardest to kill.
Straight talk. The audience and awards numbers here are solid and well documented. The sales numbers are not: no public, methodologically clean figure for what Big Ad did to Carlton Draught volume has ever been published, and we are not going to invent one. What is documented, and is a genuine business fact rather than a bragging metric, is that the online spread was strong enough that Carlton cut its own television budget to avoid overexposure. That is an unusual problem to have.
Client: Carlton Draught, Carlton and United Breweries
Agency: George Patterson Partners (Young and Rubicam), Melbourne
Creative director: James McGrath
Copywriter: Ant Keogh · Art director: Grant Rutherford
Agency producer: Pip Heming
Director: Paul Middleditch, Plaza Films
Director of photography: Andrew Lesnie
Music: Cezary Skubiszewski, after Carl Orff's "O Fortuna"
Visual effects: Animal Logic
Two things worth noticing in that list. Andrew Lesnie had shot The Lord of the Rings, which is exactly the visual language being sent up, so the parody is being lit by the man who helped invent the thing it is parodying. And Rutherford has said the idea arrived on the train home from work, somewhere around Elsternwick, which is a useful corrective to the idea that ideas of this size come from process.
Wikipedia, credits, download figures and awards
The Drum, World's Best Ads Ever
Campaign Brief, twenty years on
The Brag, interview with the man behind the jingle
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: