I came across this again the other day and it still cracks me up. The Bud Light “Real Men of Genius / Real American Heroes” campaign was so good! It was one of the few promotional campaigns that I continued to look forward to. I don’t drink their beer much (I think I’ve had less than ten Budweiser products total in my life which is too many), but I have long been a fan of their marketing. If you’re looking for the motherload with all of them listed, you can waste a couple of hours while laughing your butt off here on The Original Real Men of Genius Site.
The *ahem* always authoritative source Wikipedia states that:
“Real Men of Genius is a series of one-minute-long American radio advertisements for Belgian brewer InBev’s Bud Light beer created by Bob Winter, a copywriter at DDB Chicago. The ad campaign, which began in 1999 under the title Real American Heroes (changed after the September 11, 2001 attacks), has featured over 100 installments and has become the most award-winning radio campaign in the history of advertising.”
I don’t doubt all the awards, they almost always made me laugh. In fact, it was the only radio ad that I ever turned UP if that says anything.
Blah blah blah, enough talk. Here is Mr. Fancy Coffee Shop Coffee Pourer
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Posted 1 month, 1 week ago at 9:46 pm. Add a comment
This past Monday, I accepted my first coffee related position not related to Coffee With A. Duck and I have to tell you, I’m pretty geeked about it! Kansas City Baptist Temple (my home church) will be opening a new children’s building as an addition to the existing building. It is going to be huge! After all of the children vacate the current building, it will open up more room for more adult classes and new ministry fellowships. Within that expansion will be a state of the art espresso bar. Up to this point, I have had quite a bit of involvement in the planning of this café, but only from a consultant’s standpoint. After the café was operational, the assumption was that a manager would be hired and that my job would be largely over. Not anymore. My real work will be just beginning.
One of my biggest pet peeves, particularly in business, is when people slap the “Christian” tag on their concept, service or product and then just expect the Christian or even the larger faith community to support them just for hanging their shingle out. Unfortunately for these places, many times you can expect some of the worst product or service quality on the market. With exceedingly rare exception, “Christian coffeehouses” are at the top of my list in terms be being repeat offenders. Some of the worst coffee swill I have ever had has come from Christian coffeehouses. If they don’t go out of business right away, they tend to cling to life forever because a couple of churches would rather meet there than open a coffee bar in their own place. Probably a good move for the churches, but it prolongs the inevitable death the café with the shoddy quality, simultaneously dragging both the name of God and the name of Specialty Coffee through the mud. For reference, check out the text in this pic I found from some lame quiz thing someone invited me to take on Facebook called “Which coffee-brewing thingamajiggy are you?” Lame quiz, I don’t recommend it, but this part caught my eye. Note the reference to crap coffee and church ladies at the end. Thanks to the basis for my pet peeve, we collectively earned that one and yes, coffee at church is usually the worst of the worst of the worst! Blech!
I bill myself officially as a consultant / barista trainer but over the past couple of years, I have not concentrated on this business with nearly the same vigor as I had my previous coffee positions as either a café owner or operations executive. Hence, things have been a little slow; after all, you get out what you put in. I don’t apologize for this change of focus, we either follow the Lord’s direction and promptings or we don’t. In the Christian faith, you either mold your life around the Bible and allow the Big Man to make his internal changes to your life and your heart or, as is far more popular today, you mold your Bible around your life and make it say what YOU think it ought to say so that no real internal change is required. Only one of those things get to be the constant and the other moves all the time. In changing my overall focus, I got to go on a sabbatical from coffee. Oh, I poked my head in here and there but pretty much, I was off the list. Thus, Coffee With A. Duck has always been in a state of inconstant flux in terms of a solid direction. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with it but I was pretty sure that God did not grant me the successes and exposure that he had for no reason. So what am I doing here? You train people you say? What like at your house? Sounds pretty professional…not.
Let’s merge these two paragraphs together and start getting to the good stuff. This café (named Pórtico, which is Spanish for “Porch”) will only be open initially a couple of weeknights and obviously on Sunday during service times. Effectively, it will just be sitting there during the workweek doing nothing unless the church is having one of their large events which is maybe three weeks out of the year like the upcoming 2010 Summit in March. Now I’m not going to start leaking what equipment Pórtico will have, but in the spirit of having a Christian coffeehouse that doesn’t suck and given my background and a sufficient budget to work with, you know it’s going to be cutting edge, that’s all I’m saying. Better yet, once we know that the café is either profitable or at least strongly trending that way, the church has graciously agreed to allow me to occasionally rent this facility from them to hold training classes there. AWESOME! I get to build my business, the church gets a little extra jack, everyone is happy. Win-wins are everyone’s favorite.
If you didn’t know, since the week after my sabbatical started, I have been in a kind of in-house Bible institute that is very, very good. The initial goal 25 years or so ago was to give the local church body a way to really train up their men and ground them in the Bible and equip them to serve in whatever ministry God called them into. Today, the specifics of the school have changed, but the overall goal is the same. 
One of the major themes of the Bible is the overall mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ. You can’t get away from it. If you can only think of a few constantly recurring mega-themes, making disciples is definitely on the short list. My idea then, to sum everything together, is to follow a type of Business as Missions model and have a business that offers basic and advanced coffee training and is set up in such a way that promotes the Gospel. Uhhh…but they aren’t hiring you to teach them the Bible or about Jesus, they’re hiring you to teach them coffee! Right you are. The coffee stuff will cost you, but the Gospel is always free.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last say, 5 years, you have probably at least heard of Dave Ramsey who has taught millions of people (my wife and I included) how to not only get out of debt to begin with, but more importantly, alter your behavior and buying habits to STAY out of debt. Fabulous stuff, I 100% recommend it. Well, if you go through his material, it drips with biblical truth, BUT the people who either A) have never heard of or read the Bible and B) go to church and do all the external stuff but don’t actually pick their copy up and read it once in awhile, don’t have hardly any idea! For sure, there are a few times that he drops something overt like citing Proverbs 22:7 (The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.) and labels it for what it is, but by and large, the truth is just woven into his material and presented so well that unless you know…you don’t know! I think Dave Ramsey is great, but I have to tell you, he’s not that creative! He took a cash envelope system from 100 years ago and another book from even longer ago that told him how to live and drew up a business plan on a coffee table using nothing but other people’s materials! I’m not mad at the guy, I’m jealous! How great is that? I don’t need to be the next Dave Ramsey in terms of success, but I do plan to submit myself to the same idea that he does of having the ultimate goal of as a Christian, using your business to change lives. Mmmkay, but how do you weave truth into a coffee class? It’s going to take some time for sure, but not as much as you might think. Here’s a peek at one parallel that I’m working on now.
Coffee Truth – Your drinks can have Triple Rosettas on them with some extra etching bling, but no one will care if when they close their eyes and take a sip, they start to gag.
Biblical truth – No one cares how religious or spiritual you appear externally if internally you’re a mess [Matthew 23:25-26, Mark 7:1-13]
The mechanics of how exactly to bring that truth in is still to be determined, but the process has begun to be drafted. That part HAS to start, and I have reason to believe that I am not the only high profile person in the industry to think so. For a long time, the Gospel has not been readily able to be observed within the coffee industry but suddenly there seems to be almost an air of urgency to at least address the issue. I could go on, but I’ll end it here. I will come back pretty quick and address this issue of an urgency to inject the Gospel into the coffee industry and how it affects us as individuals, but also as players in something bigger. It’s so much more important than the lip service that we give it and the last two days, I have gotten huge reminders about it and can’t get it out of my head without writing it out, so I will.
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Posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago at 11:53 pm. 2 comments
