How did the inarticulate cheer in the Budweiser commercial become part of pop culture?
What's up? What's the score? Situation? What's going on? What's the deal? We can translate the question Whazzup?/Whassup?/Wassup? from Budweiser's highly successful campaign that ran from 1999 to 2002 in a thousand different ways, yet it only means one thing: You are in the inner circle if you ask this of someone else. You only talk like this to someone you know well, love, or consider a friend. But is this really a question? Not really.
We actually get the answer right at the beginning of the commercial from the main character: „Watchin’ the game, havin’ a Bud.”.
In this relaxed, game-watching, chatting situation, the people living in the house join in through landline(!) phones with the greeting formulated as a question: Whassup?
The friends left on the line ask each other the question again at the end of the spot, and the answer remains unchanged: Watchin’ the game, havin’ a Bud. And then the epic response follows: True!
The commercial was inspired by the short film titled True, directed by Charles Stone III, in which he and his friends appeared. The DDB agency also took notice of the short film that was running at film festivals. The creatives at DDB suggested to Budweiser's then-vice president, August Adolphus Busch IV, that they use the short film for their next campaign.
But how does Budweiser appear in the commercial?
The Budweiser beer only has a supporting role in the commercial: the guys drink it while watching the game. It's a natural part of relaxing. True.
The concept, in which the short film is reborn as a commercial, proved to be functional. It managed to connect the interaction between friends, the insider greeting ritual, the joy experienced together, friendship, and celebration to a popular product. The simple recipe brought enormous success.
The commercial ran in several versions, but the message remained the same throughout:
If we greet each other with an inarticulate Whassup?, then we are friends, having a good time, and of course, we are drinking Budweiser!
With this one word, we say nothing, yet we say everything.
According to the creator, the difficulty of the original production lay in how to present this „whassup-ing” that had gone awry among friends in a way that everyone understands what it really means.
The phenomenon spread like wildfire in pop culture. It reached us a few years later, with the spread of broadband internet and the dawn of YouTube. I had just started learning English, but whassup-ing was still present at home. As a teenager, it was the cool accompanying phrase for every secretly popped beer.
This inarticulate expression of joy also echoed in numerous films and series. We encounter it in the Friends, the Office (US) pilot, and in How I Met Your Mother. in the titled sitcom, or even in the 2018 Ant-Man and The Wasp titled Marvel film.
The short film that served as the basis for the advertisement was transformed into a campaign spot for Obama in 2008, but this had nothing to do with the beer brand.
In 2018, Budweiser, in co-production with Burger King, dusted off the advertisement and brought the campaign to Twitter.
In February 2020, Budweiser presented a modernized version featuring smart home devices „talking” to each other. All this also proves that the "whassup" phenomenon has not completely faded from public consciousness 20 years after its original appearance. True.
