This Cinematic Hamm’s Beer Ad From The 1970s Proves They Don’t Make Commercials Like They Used To

They don’t make commercials like they used to.

And I’ll tell you what… none of us would be complaining about advertisements if they were all as beautiful and cinematic as this Hamm’s Beer ad from the 1970’s. Advertising agencies nowadays are overthinking it. If they really wanted to make a splash, they would model every commercial from this point on after this remarkable piece of media.

This Hamm’s Beer advertisement is up there with the iconic Old Country Buffett training video. I’d even put it in the same class as the Cerveza Cristal advertisements that used to be stitched into movies and other programming airing on television. It’s the rare moment in media where the piece of media interjecting into the main programming actually manages to surpass the thing people are tuning in to see.

Most of the ad is inexplicable, yet it somehow delivers the message loud and clear. A Grizzly-Adams-type driving a Jeep through a mountainous area with a bear – a real bear – sitting shotgun doesn’t exactly scream, “This is a beer ad.” But it somehow is quite possibly the best beer commercial the world has ever seen.

When you take the footage of the man driving through rocky streams and drinking with others at what appears to be a lumber yard (peep the pull tab) and pair it alongside this world-class jingle, it’s truly a work of art:

“If you’re looking for a beer,

that’s born wet and clear.

Born in the land of sky blue waters.

Then reach for a Hamm’s

Reach for a Hamm’s

The beer you’ve been looking for.”

Hamm’s is technically still in business, albeit now a sub brand of the MillerCoors company. In its heyday, the Theodore Hamm’s Brewing Company was the fifth largest brewery in the United States.

They’d probably be the number one brewery on the planet if they just would have aired this commercial over and over again for decades: