As a craft beer fan watching the Super Bowl, you couldn’t have helped but notice all those big-budget Big Beer commercials that ran throughout the game. And if you’re like us (not that that’s a good thing), you might have found yourself reflecting on them, as well as what it would be like to see a craft beer commercial during the Super Bowl, or whether we should even want to…

One thing’s for sure, craft beer Super Bowl commercials would be a whole lot more artistic and definitely cooler than the crap that the big beer companies have been putting out over the years. Sure some of their commercials have been funny in a frat-boy kind of way. BUT THEY’RE ALL ABOUT DRINKING BEER… NOT ABOUT THE BEER THAT YOU’RE DRINKING!

We guess that’s what you do when you’ve not got a lot to talk about to begin with…Big Beer can talk about how their beers won’t make you gain weight, but all the perfectly sculpted LA blondes in the world can’t change how they taste. They can talk about how their new beers are both lower in calories and higher in alcohol and how they’re packaged in sleek blue bottles that look cool in the clubs. But god-forbid they speak to a beer’s style, flavor, or uniqueness. By the way, “cold” is not a flavor and can we move beyond “crisp” as a beer’s sole description?

Do we think that we’ll ever see a true craft beer Super Bowl commercial? Probably not and actually we hope that we don’t. It’s all about scale for both corporate and craft brewers. Big Beer is all about serving the masses and like Hollywood, they find “generic” a better bet than “distinctive” when the goal is to command a global marketplace. And unlike today’s craft brewers, who have prospered by taking chances, Big Beer is invested in the norm. They see little economic advantage in straying from a strategy that’s proven itself tremendously successful over the years – so they won’t.

The bottom line is that this is how Big Beer understands selling, and we are going to see these stupid Super Bowl commercials forever! And unlike America’s craft brewers, who’d prefer to put their profits back into their products, corporate beer will always spend big money attempting to capture the world’s attention with their flashy commercials.

Big Beer remains a prosperous and powerful force, but the landscape is changing. People might still enjoy their wild big-budget beer commercials while they’re hanging with friends at their Super Bowl parties, but more and more, they’re drinking craft beer as they watch them.

Big beer corporations will always own the national stage when it comes to events like the Super Bowl. They have the money to spend on huge media events such as these and it works for them. Craft brewers, on the other hand, don’t have that kind of cash and even if they did, we don’t think they’d be wasting it on cheesy Super Bowl commercials. Spending millions of dollars beating the public over the head is thankfully not part of craft beer’s DNA. In the craft beer community, when you brew brilliant beer, you don’t have to spend a fortune screaming to the world about it – your fans will do that for you!