Let’s be clear about something—clear as the effervescent brew in that champagne-shaped bottle: Being asked to create ads for Miller High Life was incrediblyexciting. And? A bit daunting.  Introduced in 1903, the beer and its advertising have been iconic in the marketing world for half a century. It was great advertising that transformed early perceptions of High Life from “luxury-brand” to Everyman’s beer in the ‘70s, while keeping that audacious “Champagne of Beers” tagline intact. The ads let America know it was “Miller Time” with one of the catchiest jingles ever made.

So now it was our turn. Giving people a new reason to whistle, “If You’ve Got the Time, We’ve Got the Beer,” Miller Brewing Company’s creative agency Quaker City Mercantile asked us to create a series of dynamic ads celebrating the High Life.

Combining  live-action footage of the beer bottles with energetic computer graphics, the finished spots pull viewers in. Optically playful backgrounds in gold, red and cream patterns shift with the animated type. In one of the spots, we come in close to Miller’s Girl in the Moon extending the signature “X” that frames her to the background graphics.  We highlight the beer’s crispness and ease of drinkability with bold type and blocks of color, move to images of the beer in a logo-d  glass, add close-ups of the embossed “1903” on the bottle, and finish with a hero shot of the full bottle and a “Welcome to the High Life.” Other versions of the commercial use the same design concepts, but with different patterns, type sequencing and details, such as a spinning bottle top, multiples of the bottle, and views of the front label.