North Shore Rescue is taking Coors Light to task for an ad campaign they say encourages skiers and snowboarders to go out of bounds.
The 30-second beer ad began airing on TV this week.
“Coors Light asks, what will you brave when the mountains turn blue?” the voice-over in the ad booms. “Will you brave going out of bounds?”
The ad then depicts the skiers and snowboarders charging headlong past the out-of-bounds sign, through the glades to a waiting helicopter.
“To be honest, that is just shocking to me. I’m almost speechless. I cannot believe they are pushing people to go out of bounds, to think that it’s cool. It works against everything our education is trying to accomplish,” said Mike Danks, North Shore Rescue team leader. “I think once the public finds out about this, they’re not going to be happy – especially the ones of family members who have gone out of bounds and not returned.”
A 40-year-old Surrey man died in late January when he fell into the Montizambert drainage while snowboarding out of bounds at Cypress Mountain.
“We recovered his body the next day,” Danks said. "(The ad) empowers people to go out and possibly meet their maker, if you will, like the guy did on Cypress.”
West Vancouver resident Terry Platt saw the ad while watching CBC Monday night and wrote an email to Coors, asking them to pull the ad.
“Some of their commercials are pretty stupid, and that’s fine – scantily clad young people jumping into swimming pools and stuff but I’d like them to pull this ad,” she said, saying the advertisement irresponsibly glorifies behaviour that’s as dangerous as drinking and driving. “I find it offensive when you’ve got North Shore Rescue’s people risking their lives.”
More than pulling the ad, Platt is suggesting the company make a “great, big fat donation” to North Shore Rescue as an apology.
The next day, Platt got a call from an Coors staffer in Manitoba.
“He apologized to me for the ad and he said they did not wish to imply that people should do this behaviour. I said ‘Well, yes, but they are. They are doing this, or they will,” she said. “I said ‘I guess you don’t get many avalanches and snowboarder recoveries in Manitoba.”
The ad campaign for Molson Coors Canada was put together by Vancouver-based Rethink Canada and appears to be targeting millennial males ages 19 to 29. It’s part of a larger campaign aimed at generating hype for temperature-sensitive colour-changing cans the light beer is served in, according to Mary Charleson, Capilano University marketing instructor and independent consultant.
Though the TV spot shows a safe outcome for the backcountry adventurers, it’s likely the campaign’s creative team knew it would be controversial, Charleson said.
“It’s not like they’re in Toronto and they’re talking about skiing out of bounds being off the back of a hill in Barrie. Rethink, being in Vancouver, it’s no secret to them that when you talk ‘out of bounds,’ it’s a sensitive issue, especially on the North Shore Mountains,” Charleson said. “Is it encouraging risky behaviour? Yeah. I think that’s a fair judgment.”
But that might have been part of the overall strategy, Charleson said, noting that Rethink specializes in campaigns that create buzz, in person and on social media.
“Get people talking about it. Stir a bit of controversy. The media takes the bait,” she said. “They don’t have to go out and buy your traditional TV spots and print ads. They’re trying to play into that under-29 group that is on their devices and will share stuff.”
If the reaction is bad enough, the company may pull the ad and swap in another one intended to run later in the campaign, Charleson said.
“Rethink is a well-known, well-respected agency in the industry. They usually don’t do things ill-advised,” she said. “They’re not dumb. They are smart marketers.”
Neither Molson Coors Canada nor Rethink responded to requests for comment by North Shore News deadline Tuesday.
Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly named Anheuser-Busch as the parent company of Coors. This has been corrected.
