Sometime in the 90s, some incredible genius in the Coors marketing department carried a life-size cardboard Elvira into Joe Coors’ office.
You know, Joe was the family patriarch and the man who wrote the big checks that started the Heritage Foundation.
The cutout was a woman holding a beer. Joe Coors studied it intently. Then, according to Elvira, he said, “I see demons there!”
Awkward.
It was a cardboard cutout selling light beer.
Joe Coors must have thought he was Snooki in her new show Snooki: The Paranormal Rookie.
Yes, this is real. And yes, I’ve watched the first episode, where she starts ghost hunting at the Tuckett Mansion in Hamilton, Ontario.
THERE WAS NO BEER IN HALLOWEEN
Let’s flash back. In the early 80s the Coors brand was getting its lunch eaten. Sure, Corrs was the third-biggest brewer in America, but it was late to light beer and was barely served in about 12 states. Miller and Anheuser-Busch owned the beer holidays on the calendar.
The brand was making standard beer spots. And lots of them. Some of them are absolutely incredible. Like this one where the 12-packs are little trucks.
One memorable one that some suggest predicted Biff from Back to the Future.
You’ll get this coming up, but this issue might be a secret Drink Cart Michael J. Fox issue.
Enter Gary Naifeh, an ex-Schlitz guy who had become brand director and was looking for any holiday that the number one and two beers hadn’t dominated yet.
Naturally, Naifeh who threw adult Halloween parties at his house thought other people might want to do that. It was a holiday just for kids, eating candy and carving or smashing pumpkins. This could be a beer holiday. What an absolute legend.
It did not get off to a great start.
In 1983, the brand launched BeerWolf.
A hairy werewolf selling light beer two years before Michael J. Fox brought Teen Wolf to our screens and our pop culture.
The funny thing about Fox was that his character, Alex P. Keaton was just the kind of Reagan-loving Republican that the Coors family loved. Except, he was doing Pepsi ads.
Meanwhile, BeerWolf was chatting up women in bathing suits while wearing a Coors Light bandana and holding a beer.
It should come as no surprise that Bill Coors loved it.
What’s super interesting is that the 1983 campaign, deemed a flop limped on for two years, is now getting a second life on the Coors website who are selling incredible BeerWolf hats for $35.
If your campaign failed so hard that people are still buying the hats, you’ve made it. Spoiler alert: They may be sold out.
What they really needed was a human face to own Halloween.
THE AD WAS ABOUT THE CARDBOARD
Cassandra Peterson was a struggling actress making a reported $300 a show hosting late-night horror movies on a local TV station in LA.
Her persona? Black beehive, black gown slit to the hip, neckline down to somewhere south of Ohio. Sorry, Buckeye nation. Teenage boys stayed up to watch the commercial breaks. By 1986 she was syndicated nationally.
Enter Foote, Cone & Belding in Chicago. They wrote the first spot. Elvira pushes a shopping cart full of wooden stakes and human bones and asks the undead stock boy where the Coors Light is.
He points to the Halloween display. Standing in it is a life-size cardboard Elvira. She does a double take at herself and says, “Whoa, it’s like déjà vu!” You can’t make this up.
That’s the whole ad. A commercial whose star is standing next to her own point-of-sale display. It’s kind of genius. A very real hidden rule of advertising right there.
If you’ve had the kind of week I’ve been having, this is the kind of moment that makes you fall in love with marketing all over again.
There was only one problem.
Yes, you just had to know that the Coors family had objections.
First, they believed that a vampire wasn’t an acceptable Christian concept.
Second, um, the cleavage.
So Peterson pulled her hair forward and taped it to her chest. For a beer ad. It’s her trademark, the way the S is Superman’s, and she covered it to get the deal through. That’s the kind of play you want to see with your talent. By most accounts that made her the first female celebrity to endorse a beer.
In her memoir, Elvira called the BeerWolf a cheesy hairball. Fair. I can only imagine what she called the Coors family.
Someone even had the idea to play with the line: “The Fright Beer Now”. I don’t have to tell you that riffing on Coors Light’s own “The Right Beer Now” is how you do this.
EVERYBODY STOLE HER
Coors reportedly printed 150,000 life-size Elvira standees. It couldn’t keep them in stores.
Customers took them.
Store staff took them home for their basements or sold them at flea markets. Coors switched to mini standees and posters because they were cheaper to replace when they walked out the door.
That fall the L.A. Times reported that the top costume in the city was Elvira, specifically of Coors beer commercial fame.
Naifeh says the grocery buyers at Kroger and Safeway knew exactly who Elvira was. And they liked sharing floor space with her.
Coors couldn’t outspend Milwaukee on TV.
But they could out-cardboard them.
THE BASEMENTS ARE NOW ON EBAY
Forty years later, that cardboard is still a hot commodity.
A 1991 Coors Light Elvira floor display, unused, recently listed for about $60.
An Elvira Coors Light plastic cup is still going for $8. Reproduction Elvira tabletop standees sell for $12, 26 of them have gone to very retro rec rooms.
My favorite listing is an “original Elvira Coors Light” Halloween table tent for $40. It’s glorious. If you search hard enough you can find the rare 1996 Pam Anderson version too.
CANS DOWN
Elvira was out for 1988. Coors replaced her with a fascinating Rocktoberfest campaign, with a poster that read “No More Oom Pah.”
The brief must have been something like: we’re the young beer and the tubas can go home.
After that came Leslie Nielsen hunting for missing beer.
Coors recast the crown every year: Pamela Anderson, Salma Hayek (who doesn’t need a giant 1999 beer banner), Heidi Klum, then the Coors Twins.
It all worked. Halloween became the second-biggest bar beer night in America.
“Coors owns Halloween,” a marketing director said. But the distributors begged for her back, and she returned from 1990 to 1995.
I guess nobody was stealing a Leslie Nielsen standee from a liquor store.
COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: BLACK VELVET
The Queen of Halloween gets a drink invented for a funeral.
The story goes that when Prince Albert died in 1861, all of London went into mourning. Queen Victoria wore black for the rest of her life.
A steward at the exclusive Brooks’s Club decided the Champagne should mourn too, so he cut it with Guinness. It’s probably too good to be entirely true. It’s also the only drink that looks a lot something Elvira would wear.
Black Velvet
4 oz Champagne
4 oz Guinness
Pour the sparkling wine into a flute, then slowly pour the Guinness over the back of a spoon so it floats on top. Don’t stir. Joe Coors and Doc Brown would not approve of that sort of thing.