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In the spring of 1999, Molson Brewery fired its advertising agency and ended a forty-year relationship. That fall, they then hired the multinational agency Bensimon Byrne and D'Arcy with a view to improving Molson's market position. This agency produced the I AM CANADIAN! beer commercial, the first of a new series of ads promoting Molson's top-selling brand. (1) Molson aired the ad during the NHL playoffs of 2000 and the response was overwhelming: within months, Molson moved up more than a full point in the stock market. In this paper, I offer a social semiotics analysis of this popular commercial, which was almost immediately dubbed Rant, using the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1959), Roman Jakobson (1959), and Roland Barthes (1967, 1973, 1977) as my theoretical framework. The project I report on here grows out of an ongoing study of popular Canadian cultural artifacts and practices. (2) In the first section, I offer an account of the discourses by which the meanings under consideration are constructed; in the last section, I offer a spectral analysis of the message itself, as Barthes (1977) puts it, with a view to explaining the artful organization of the words and images and sounds. My objective is to identify the rhetoric according to which all the signifying systems have been combined to produce the effect many viewers find so striking. The Beer Industry Commentators have argued that, since the 1980s, the beer industry across North America has been going through a sea change (see Sellers 1994). They claim that the consumption of domestic beer has been going down, whereas the consumption of imported and microbrewed beer has been going up. The market has fragmented considerably. These days, consumers can find many more brands in the store than they found ten years ago. Young men--so the argument goes--no longer follow traditional beer drinking patterns. As well, women drink more beer than they did in the past, but their tastes differ from men's tastes. Thus, the breweries have had to create products that compete with those produced by the little companies and introduce high-priced products that protect their established brands. The American Context Here, I offer an overview of the beer industry, as it operates in the United States and in Canada, with a view to establishing a context for appreciating the task of designing an advertisement like the one under consideration . I take my statistics from two web sites, Beer Expedition and The American Brewing Industry. In addition, I use three terms in comparing these situations: major brewery, which means a brewery that produces more than two million barrels annually; microbrewery, which means a brewery that produces less than fifteen thousand barrels annually; and brewpub, which means a restaurant-brewery that sells most of its beer on site. Commercial beer making in the United States dates from the late 1660s. The industry keeps expanding, depending upon market needs and social attitudes. Currently, the U.S. beer market ranks eleventh in the world. The per capita beer consumption in the United States has doubled since 1935. A state-by-state tally shows that New Hampshire ranks first; that Nevada, Wisconsin, and Texas rank second, third, and fourth; and that Utah ranks last. Per capita consumption went from 22.1 gallons in 1998 to 22.3 gallons in 1999. In addition to drinking a little more, consumers are also paying a higher price, as breweries have been raising prices or offering fewer rebates than they did in the past. Understandably, competition is fierce. No less than forty-three breweries operated during the year 1999, including Anheuser-Busch (the maker of Budweiser), which commanded 49.9 percent of the market; Miller (the maker of Miller Lite), which commanded 21.3 percent of the market; Coors (the maker of Coors Light), which commanded 11. …
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