Big Ad
A cloaked choir, forming a giant man, drinking a giant beer.
The insight
Every beer ad reaches for the same overblown grandeur — sweeping landscapes, epic music, men being heroic about lager. Audiences have seen the trick a thousand times. So the most disarming, most honest move left is to just… admit it. To make an enormous, expensive, epic ad that openly cops to being an enormous, expensive, epic ad.
The idea
A vast choir of cloaked men marches across the landscape, arranging themselves into a giant man raising a giant beer to his lips — all sung, to Carl Orff's thundering "O Fortuna," with lyrics that narrate the ad itself: "It's a big ad… very big ad… we spent a lot of money…" It's a genuine spectacle and a send-up of spectacle, at the same time.
How it works
The joke and the craft are the same thing: to mock a big ad convincingly, you have to actually make a big ad, so you get the full epic payoff and the wink in one. It's completely on-brand for a beer whose famous line is the deadpan "made from beer." The creators wrote the "It's a big ad" lyric on the train home from work. Two weeks before it aired on TV it leaked online — 162,000 downloads in 24 hours, a million viewers across 132 countries within a fortnight, back in 2005.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: spend a fortune on a giant, bombastic epic ad whose own lyrics openly admit you're spending a fortune on a giant, bombastic epic ad.
Smart: the self-awareness is exactly Carlton's deadpan voice, and by parodying the genre you get to have the spectacle and be in on the joke — so it plays as clever, not empty.
Why we love it
It has its cake and eats it: a real epic, and a piss-take of epics, in the same 60 seconds. Confidence this total — laughing at the very thing you're nailing — is the rarest move in the book.
The numbers
Awards
Cannes Gold Lion, 2006 — and 30+ awards worldwide
Who made it
Client: Carlton Draught (Foster's)
Agency: George Patterson Y&R, Melbourne
Music: Carl Orff, "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana (with new lyrics)
Premiered: Australian TV, 7 August 2005
Sources: Wikipedia · The Brag · Good Ads Matter
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