OK, I can kind of understand the general thrust of Canadian Club’s new ad campaign, with the tagline “Damn right your Dad drank it.”

I imagine that if you are in the business of trying to sell rye whiskey (No, not scotch, the other whiskey. No, that’s bourbon, we mean the other other whiskey.) you hear a lot in focus groups about how it’s an old fogey drink. And so one sympathizes with the effort to turn a positive into a negative — trying to cash in the general “mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again” nostalgia sometimes experienced by dudes entering what another beverage marketing firm would like us all to refer to as our “Carlsberg Years.”

I mean, didn’t our forefathers know how to use tools and fire guns and fistfight bears and all that other badass shit? That’s cool, right? And hell, the kind of guy likely to go in for the wood-panelled rec room vibe in the photos might find himself — fresh home from having his chest waxed and in the midst of plucking stray eyebrow hairs — looking in the mirror and sympathizing with the whole “Dad was not a meterosexual” message. I see the thinking. (You know I’m not immune to that crap.)

But how to understand the fact that not one but two of these ads evoke the image of “your dad” getting laid?

The first, reproduced above, points out that “Your Mom Wasn’t Your Dad’s First” and shows some theoretical Dad in 1970s period backdrops airing out his chest hair and getting his stud on with a variety of girls. The second one, which I started seeing around in magazine ads this month, carries the headline “Your Dad Had Groupies,” featuring your old man as the frontman in what appears to be a Zeppelin cover band and putting forward the proposition that he spent some time backstage shagging fan girls. Hey! Maybe that’s even how you came to be!

This is just bizarre. For as long as there have been people, they have been trying desperately to avoid acknowledging that their own parents have functioning genitalia. Walking in on your parents having sex is a well known source of trauma. I’ve never encountered awakening to the possibility that your father is a sex machine as any kind of male right of passage. I did once hear a comedian (could it have been Eric Tunney?) do a bit in which he claimed not to understand guys who claimed they liked having their Dad as a buddy — the punchline, which got laughs because it expressed a universal source of nausea — asked us to picture this just-one-of-the-boys Dad telling stories about the hot MILF he banged last night.

I can imagine two scenarios in which ads like this come to be:

1) “If we call up the image of your Dad doing the nasty, then you will become dizzy and want to puke. Which is the same reaction you had when you stole a bottle of rye from your uncle’s liquor cabinet and drank it all before the Halloween dance in grade nine. It’s reinforcing the brand’s identification with discomfort and gagging!”

2) The person who wrote the ads is a Dad of a certain age who is struggling — possibly after a second divorce — with the midlife realization that the young women of his kids’ generation, whom he is now sexually interested in, think of him as an asexual and unthreatening old relic, and is using the ad campaign in an attempt to encourage awareness that geezers are horny too, and always were. Or something.

Or perhaps they just think that after being confronted with the proposition that Dad was keeping the Barry White records in heavy rotation before (one hopes) he met Mom, people will need a drink. In any case, weird.

Tags: advertisement, alcohol

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Posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 1:09 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.