In a Beck’s Beer TV commercial now running, a man walks in on his girlfriend having a fight with his unruly dog. The girlfriend angrily demands, “Either she goes, or I go.” Should the man give up his pet because his girlfriend doesn’t like it, or should he break up with his girlfriend over a dog? I’d keep the dog, but I have a better question: What the heck does this have to do with beer?

If you watch a lot of beer commercials (I do – don’t ask why), you’ll start to notice a pattern: They rarely, if ever, have anything to do with the product being advertised. Sure, they say the name of some drink, but you could always substitute the name of any other brand.

Now, being under 21, I don’t drink beer (and if I did, I wouldn’t be fool enough to admit it in the newspaper), but I find it interesting to consider the situation alcohol advertisers are in. The first question they have to ask themselves is why people buy their products. Easy – people drink because they want to feel the effects of alcohol, from feeling slightly relaxed to being so smashed they can’t tell the difference between Dick Cheney and Mister Rogers.

The problem is that if they don’t want to go the way of Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man, advertisers have to seem like they care about the public’s health. That’s why beer commercials end with reminders to “Please drink responsibly.” It’s also the reason the people in those commercials never drink from their cans, bottles, glasses or mugs, and never actually act drunk.

So alcohol companies could try advertising based on a secondary factor: taste. Unfortunately, beer’s flavor ranges from “tolerable” to “urine-flavored,” depending on the temperature of the drink and the intoxication of the drinker. Selling beer for its great taste doesn’t go very far.

And anyway, commercials use sight and sound; how can you use those senses to transmit a taste?

This leaves liquor advertisers unable to give anyone a good reason to buy their products. They can’t portray the effects of alcohol in a positive light, and apart from a weak “This brand tastes good because we said so,” they can’t prove their booze is different from any other booze.

Right now, the Kenmore T station’s walls are plastered with posters advertising Miller Lite. They show baseball images, with a beer bottle superimposed over the display. What message does this broadcast? “You like baseball. We like baseball. This is the beer for you.” Not bad, considering Kenmore is the station serving Fenway Park. Of course, baseball has nothing to do with Miller Lite in particular; Budweiser has its own sign right in the stadium.

At the end of the day, alcohol ads are totally interchangeable and really quite useless. Because you know from the start they can’t talk about getting drunk, and they can’t reliably tell you about their taste, there’s no reason for them to even exist – much less for anybody to pay attention to them.

Aaron Segal, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at [email protected].