A Copywriter's Hot Take on Typos

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My LinkedIn feed was absolutely on one talking about this recent Coors Light ad campaign.

If you can’t see it – refreshment is misspelled as refershment.

This ad made it to newspapers, social media, and even on a billboard in Times Square. Are you thinking what I’m thinking…?

I think this typo was intentional. GASP. 

You don’t have to work in the advertising industry to know that campaigns like this go through several reviews with a lot of eyes on them before ever going live. You really want to convince me that this spelling error made it past a team of copywriters, art directors, creative directors, head of marketing, and the legal team? Highly unlikely, honey. 

Their social media response tells me everything I need to know. “Case of the Mondays” as in, a case of beer? Pleeeasssse. This was strategically planned, and I’m sure the ad agency (mischief) who executed this campaign is beaming with pride over the response among the LinkedIn keyboard warriors.

Why would they intentionally release an ad that has a typo? Marketing, babes. It gets people (like me) talking. My hunch is that this has something to do with the Super Bowl coming up in just a few weeks. Ya know, one of the biggest nights in America for beer drinkers. 

I imagine the creative team – all men, probably – were tossing around ideas and one of them said, “What if we just, I don’t know, misspell one word????” You’d think the crowd would go mild. But here we are, this simple idea made it all the way to Times freakin’ Square.  

I’m not sure what the marketing strategy was behind this campaign.

If it was to stir up some noise about their brand, they can count it as a success. 

If it was to influence me to drink a Coors Light, they might have to dig a little deeper than an intentional typo. 

If it was to simply annoy a copywriter, another success in the books. 

One of the posts I saw on LinkedIn posed the question, “If they’d just run the typical ad saying “Mountain Cold Refreshment,” would anyone have cared?”

And the answer is no. We’ve all seen that ad and never looked twice. At least I haven’t.

Despite my hot take and strong opinions about the level of creativity, I do think this idea is a successful one. If anything, it has piqued my curiosity to see if they’ll have a Super Bowl commercial callback, because that would be a pro move I would cheer for. It still won’t make me drink their beer, but it would earn my creative respect. 

Xo, The Salesgirls