Heineken put out a new ad recently that shows people from different backgrounds and political beliefs coming together and talking with one another without realizing just how strikingly different their beliefs and opinions are. Later they’re shown video of one another espousing these beliefs — about feminism, trans people, and so forth. After, they’re told they can leave or sit down over a beer (a Heineken, of course) and talk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wYXw4K0A3g
This is being hailed as the “antidote” to the immensely awful Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad from a few weeks ago. I’m not so sure.
On the one hand, it’s very good. It certainly illustrates the problem with trying to discuss thorny issues on the internet, and how we become increasingly intolerant of one another’s views as we become more and more entrenched within our own online communities and echo chambers. Trump, Brexit, campus protests, war…all serve to make the “other” even more fearful and foreign, and so the problem becomes ever more intractable, more ingrained.
Online we can say whatever we want, and we can be sort of nasty or at least very strident when in a crowd of like minds. It’s much harder to do that when we’re face to face with someone who is the “other” we’ve been demonizing. The Heineken ad does a good job playing that out.
At one point in the ad, a man who was uncomfortable with trans people was genuinely surprised and mortified when he discovered that his interlocutor was a trans woman. He admits his views were shaped by what he had learned growing up, and seemed sincerely humbled by this new experience. An anti-feminist and a feminist are able to treat one another like human beings.
Certainly sitting down over a beer is a better way to have a conversation than shouting on Twitter or Facebook or in faceless, anonymous, consequence-free forums where trolls congregate and rage and outrage and misunderstanding blossom and fester.
On the other hand, it’s still a commercial for beer made by a $23 billion corporation. Heineken is using this (very effective) ad to sell beer first and to promote healthy dialogue second. So you might think, well at least they’re doing both! Perhaps, but it still feels like a form of exploitation, playing on our hopes rather than our fears, and offering us happy outcomes where all too often none truly exist. In many ways it’s every bit as cynical as the Pepsi ad or the ‘Fearless Girl’ facing down the bull on Wallstreet. That it’s effective and evocative hardly matters.
If this had been a public service announcement or some random YouTube video just encouraging us to Be Excellent to Each Other ®, I could get on board. But it’s an ad for shitty beer. So call it what it is: a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
