My Shout

It's time for British pubs to regain their star roles in TV ads for beer, says Peter Linacre

When I was a boy, a lifetime ago, my early memories of television advertising were punctuated with the great classic TV commercials of the '60s and '70s. Some of these were recently brought to life again when a good friend, an investor in Massive, and a legendary advertising man - Alfredo Marcantonio - came to give our senior team a run through of some of the great and classic TV beer adverts of this era.

'Marc' was also famously involved in the Hamlet adverts, but his focus on this occasion were the ads of Heineken, Guinness, John Smiths, Courage, Whitbread Trophy Bitter and Tankard, Red Barrel, Skol, Double Diamond, Carling and even Hofmeister (what a brand that was!). He did not write all of these - Marc was and is a copywriter - but a number of his friends from 'ad land' had given him access to some long forgotten footage.

These commercials are not only beautifully crafted and wonderfully nostalgic - they also had a feature, which it strikes me, no longer exists at all. Many of them positioned their promotion of the particular beer brands... in the pub. Ordinary people - blokes, posh people, working people, couples, single women, men in groups, women in groups, men and women in groups, all having fun in and around the pub. They all looked comfortable and happy. The image beaming out to millions of British consumers was 'come and drink our brands in your great pubs'.

There have been recent calls by our leading trade press for us in the industry to 'celebrate the pub' at a time when we feel we are constantly in the public glare and almost always these days being portrayed in a bad light.

I will not rehearse the litany of 'evils' here - we know them off by heart. There have been suggestions that we should contribute to a nationwide PR campaign to bolster the image of pubs and that there should be a gathering of senior industry figures to promote the pub.

Perhaps as part of that process we could encourage the owners of the brands that we sell all day and every day to re-position at least some of their advertising fire power back towards the great British pub. We should receive at least some encouragement. Every beer producer I know complains that selling his or her products to the supermarket chains is a nightmare - low margins, loss leaders, no control etc. So why is beer advertising aimed primarily at people who are most likely to buy beer from supermarkets at these give-away prices? It just seems daft to me. If the great beer brand owners can be persuaded - I can thoroughly recommend Marc; those ads of his were fantastic. And maybe we can begin to recreate a warm glow towards our great British pubs.