First came Bud Light’s ‘Vikings/Attic Launcher/Figure Skating’ campaign from Palmer Jarvis DDB creative team David Chiavegato and Rich Pryce-Jones, which won the 2001 best in show Bessie. Then came a 2002 best of series writing nod for Chiavegato for the Bud Light spot ‘Sin and Sentimentality.’

This year it’s Chiavagato again winning in the best of series category as writer of the hilarious ‘Ulterior Emotions,’ again for Bud Light, which the team created as their swansong just before departing PJDDB to launch Grip Limited last year.

The mock CD, a collection of cheesy ballads and love songs with titles such as It Takes A Special Kind Of Woman To Make Sandwiches For The Guys, Our Relationship Is Getting Stronger With Every Golf Game That I Play and, our personal favorite, You’re Beautiful (Can I Go Up North This Weekend?).

Right on.

The spot, part of the long-running Bud Light Institute campaign, certainly has resonated over the past year on the awards circuit, collecting prizes including a Silver Lion at Cannes last June along with Marketing silver and a handful of Bessies that also include top prize for best in show, single, plus honors for director Martin Granger.

But more important to Chiavegato is the spot’s cultural resonance. Not since ‘The Rant’ for Molson Canadian has a single spot grooved into the public consciousness the way ‘Ulterior Emotions’ has.

‘The ultimate for me is if it not only wins awards but if it actually does something that’s really good in the marketplace and gets into sort of the popular culture and friends and family start noticing it,’ he says.

The spot has done that.

But the question remains, what is it about this one spot that struck such a distinctive chord with the public?

‘Because it’s true,’ Chiavegato says, only half joking.

‘No. It goes back to the old insight that sometimes guys have to be a little crafty in order to get out and spend more time with their friends. It goes back to Jackie Gleason and the Honeymooners in trying to concoct plans in order to get out and go bowling. In this, it was more of an elaborate plan to create this fake romantic album with completely another motive attached to it. So I think people can kind of relate to that.

‘But at the same time, the songs are so silly that no one could actually take it seriously.’

Chiavegato, a former brand manager at Unilever, was first teamed with Pryce-Jones in 1998 when he joined PJ after leaving Toronto-based J. Walter Thompson. It was there in 2000 that the team conceived of the Bud Light Institute, a brand devise, Chiavegato says, that creatives can take in any number of different directions, starting with the zany notion that guys can hire Vikings to break up annoying family reunions all the way to the 48-hour ‘chick flick’ of ‘Sin and Sentimentality.’

Currently, Chiavegato and Pryce-Jones, still together at Grip, have been trying to work their magic with another beer brand, Kokanee, and create another template that they can use as a launch pad for their unconventional creativity.

But Chiavegato says the expectations for awards hauls mirroring their experiences with Bud Light, are considerably lower. That’s because the typical Kokanee target consumer is a twentysomething snowboarder whose humor is much more off the wall. As a result, the Kokanee spots, which feature a forest ranger on the lookout for the sasquatch who stole his beer, lack the traditional payoffs that are more likely to appeal to awards judges.

‘You know, if we had more of a traditional payoff-type ending, we might have a greater chance of winning awards, but you have to sometimes think, maybe it’s worth it to take a bit of a chance and do something different that may not necessarily appeal to awards judges but may appeal to the [target consumer].’

Then again, when they launched the Bud Light Institute a few years back, the same could have been said for those spots as well. But somehow the judges found those anyway.

It may just be a matter of time.