A beer commercial teaches us about church.

I think the next big trend in writing and communication is going to be honesty. It's weird to label the truth as a trend, but we haven't had much of it lately.

Advertisers like to sell us the ideal, who we could be or what we could do if we only purchased their product. Which makes complete sense. I don't want to buy a Mac laptop because of the specifics of the circuitry so much as I want to buy it because I think it will make me cooler or make me a more interesting writer. I buy it as a ticket into a lifestyle, not just because I want a new product.

But honesty is coming back and as a church, it behooves us to heed the signs heralding its return. Not that we have been dishonest in how we communicate to our communities. I just think we need to pay attention because when you invite someone to church you shouldn't focus on all the other churches they could go to instead of yours, you should think about everything else on the planet they could do on a Sunday morning instead of come see you.

For instance, if 80% of the people in your town don't attend church because they go to a park where their kids can play and enjoy friends, it might be good to focus on your programs for children. If 40% of the teens in your town bail on youth group because they like going to the movies, it might be time to think about incorporating film as a medium into how you communicate. The point is that other people spend billions of dollars researching, studying and mastering how to talk with the very same people you are trying to talk to. Let's learn from what they learned.

To that point, the strongest commercial on television right now is the Dos Equis beer campaign. It's a series of spots that focus on "The most interesting man in the world," a bearded, borderline mythological man that happens to drink Dos Equis. (I posted a video clip example below.)

Big deal, there are a million beer commercials in the world. But this one has some very subtle, but very important differences that really speak to our culture's return to honesty.

1. The feats of the man are wildly over the top.
In the past, advertisers didn't always show you an activity that was so big and grand you'd never be able to do it. They showed you a guy kayaking with a Lenny Kravitz song in the background thanks to his Nissan SUV. "Hey," I thought, "I might be able to do that too if I got an SUV." The aspiration was high, but not impossible to reach. But in this commercial, the feats of the most interesting man in the world are clearly a spoof. One of them is that "his blood smells like cologne" and another that "his organ donation card also lists his beard." Those are silly, but I feel like I am on the inside of the joke. They use humor to say, "There have been some ridiculous beer commercials in the past, haven't there?"

2. I don't always drink beer.
Years ago, there was an unwritten rule that you never showed a spilled beer in a commercial. It was too insulting to the product. But in this commercial Dos Equis throws a wrench into the whole "respect the product above all else" machine. Can you remember the last time someone in a sneaker commercial said, "I don't always wear sneakers" or someone in a car commercial said, "I don't always drive cars?" But that is what he says here. The character closes the commercial by admitting there are lots of drinks in the world and sometimes he drinks those instead. This might not seem like much, but in the highly fake world of beer advertising this is a stunning statement of honesty.

Furthermore, Dos Equis does a brilliant job of juxtaposing the fakeness of the first half of the commercial with the realness of the last half. The parody of the man donating his beard as an organ only serves to amplify the truth and simplicity of him admitting he doesn't always drink beer. I am sure we will talk more about this down the road, but for churches, this is a great example of how to balance humor with truth in a message.

3. I prefer Dos Equis
As this point, I want to side hug this guy. Seriously. He doesn't do the typical commercial thing which is to say, "I love this product! I live for this product!" Not at all, he says "I prefer it." That's such a real thing to say. You get the sense that he is admitting, "sometimes I have other beers. Sometimes I drink wine instead. That's OK." I like this because often, the church is accused of being fake. Of being too happy or too sunshine rainbowy. I have written about that a number of times. But here, in a beer commercial of all places, we see a fairly honest confession of reality. I'd love to have a friend that was pressuring me to attend church say, "Sometimes I don't want to go on Sunday morning. I mean I wake up and just want to stay in bed. But most of the time, when I get there and experience the music and the message and everything else, I really enjoy it. I think you would too."

The truth is that Dos Equis wants you to buy more Dos Equis. That is the nature of advertising, that is how that machine works. But the church is different. We can actually be the ones to usher honesty back into communication. In a world where the average person sees up to 5,000 marketing messages a day, we can be different. We can be honest and funny and real. We can balance humor with truth in fresh ways.

And I don't think it's wrong to be reminded of the need to do that by a beer commercial.