Stick-On Love

The advertising and marketing industry today works hard to develop what it calls “stick-on emotions.” You might not know why you’re buying this deodorant, but buying it makes you feel good about yourself.

The Sunday worship service may seem like an odd venue for discussing beer commercials, but a TV ad for Heineken Premium Light beer has caught our attention. You may have seen it as well. It shows individuals bringing bottles of the beer to other individuals who are quite different from themselves in culture and in their walk of life. In each case, the person who receives the beer is motivated to carry a bottle of it on to someone else.

As the commercial rolls, a woman in an evening gown at a high-society party receives a bottle from two people who’d been in a hot tub in the desert. She, in turn, still in her gown, walks through a snow-covered clearing to the log home of a mountain man to hand him a bottle. He then walks across a field in India to give a beer to an Indian woman. The handing off of the beverage continues to a cowboy in a bar, a ballerina on stage, some men in a sauna, a skateboarder in a band and so on. And all this is happening to a throbbing song titled...