John Madden was a master of many trades. His accomplishments spanned decades. His voice, his name, his coaching — all have affected countless lives across a wide spectrum of backgrounds and personalities. He was a gloriously successful NFL head coach. He was a trusted fountain of knowledge and levity whose contributions to the announcing booth would have come off as corny or shameless if he didn’t have the resume to back them up.
He was part of a team of visionaries that changed how we view sports video games. He was the man who introduced a regional Thanksgiving delicacy of three birds crammed inside each other to a national audience. And he was a driving force that helped changed the landscape of American beermaking.
Miller Lite came into existence in 1973 with a problem; it had to sell a lower calorie beer with a less robust taste to a drinking public that was mostly male and had been conditioned by years of advertising that heavier brews were the payoff to a hard day’s work. Their answer was a lineup of former sports stars, trading off the manliness and recognizability of long careers to build cache for a beverage that was, unmistakably and quite literally, a pale imitation of the beers that came before it.
The brand’s first pitchman was former New York Jet Matt Snell. From there, athletes like Bubba Smith, Joe Frazier, and Mickey Mantle. But those guys were supermen compared to the group of average Joes Miller was courting with an easily-derided beer. They needed a figure who oozed respectability while still being entirely relatable to normal Americans.
Enter John Madden, out of the coaching game and looking for the next step in his career. By 1980 his budding commentary career had him calling lower level games to regional broadcasts. Miller Lite put him back on a national stage:
Madden signed on with Miller Lite that winter and remains one of the brand’s most recognizable spokespeople even though he hasn’t appeared in a new ad in more than 25 years. He was exactly what the company was looking for; a credible and recognizable voice willing to make fun of himself in the kind of aw-shucks manner that raised both his profile and the product he was pitching.
It’s a deal that almost never happened. Here’s what he told BroBible’s Brandon Wenerd back in 2016, the same year Lite brought back his 1980 debut to advertise that year’s introduction of throwback Steinie bottles:
“I said ‘I was the head coach for the Oakland Raiders for 10 years… I played and coached in regular season games, playoff games, championship games, Super Bowl games, Pro Bowl games — the biggest games in the world. How can more people know me?’”
“He said, ‘just believe me, they will.’”
Madden’s familiar voice pauses before a moment of revelation.
“And they did! I went from John Madden, the coach, to John Madden, the Miller Lite guy who breaks through the wall. It was so big that I didn’t believe them. And then after I got in the commercial, you just become part of the team. It was an amazing experience.
“It was a bridge to this life from coaching. And then the commercials got me into television as an analyst. And then of course I did that the rest of my career until I retired,”
Madden wasn’t the only legendary coach to star in those commercials — Boston legend Red Auerbach and a host of Celtics legends filmed an ad that came out the same week in December 1980 — but he was the most memorable. Soon, the burly ball coach was breaking through walls like a beige Kool-Aid man capable of pointing out Tampa Two coverage.
Madden’s status as light beer pitchman extraordinaire was matched only by Bob Uecker — another famous broadcaster known for his self-deprecating everyman status. Light beers rose in status until they matched, then exceeded, their full-bodied counterparts across the country’s biggest brewers. Miller Lite made its Milwaukee-based company the No. 2 brewer in the United States.
These ads, backed by a massive budget and a heavy-handed sprinkling across major sports broadcasts for decades, worked exactly as the executives who dreamed them up had hoped. Today, the top three highest-selling beers — and four of the top five — are light beers. Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light sold more than 53 million barrels of beer between them in 2019 alone. The spots once dedicated to a guy like Madden extolling the fact light beer tasted mostly like beer evolved into light beer proclaiming superiority over the rest in a battle for massive market shares.
In the end, the saga played out the way most things do with Madden. He came in, took a product that already existed, and pushed it to new heights.
Madden didn’t create light beer, but he legitimized it. He wasn’t the first sports celebrity to make a beer ad, but he made the genre his own. And like the Raiders or sports video games or the commentary booth, he left an oversized imprint on the way Americans consume the product he was hawking. Madden wasn’t a salesman, but he was always selling.
Even, it seems, at 80 years old and long after he’d filmed his last spot for Miller Lite.
“It was big,” Madden told Wenerd five years ago. “A game changer for me, it was a game changer for drinkers. I mean, light beer– this was 40 years ago. People didn’t know about light beer. That was the whole thing. It’s less filling, tastes great.”
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