Travel the world with Bent Rej: “If Carlsberg did road trips…”
As we continue our retrospective documentation of the life and works of Bent Rej, we focus today on the Danish photographer’s longstanding and lucrative collaboration with Carlsberg. Throughout his 20s, Rej worked as a photojournalist for various magazine publications between Denmark and Britain. Although he owed his eminence to a transient spell on the road with The Rolling Stones and his subsequent shoots with The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Who, Frank Zappa and more, Rej spent most of his career working on commercial campaigns.
After his disillusionment from the 1960s rock scene, which was in no small part fuelled by Brian Jones’ dangerous drug-related antics, Rej branched out into fashion and commercial work. In the late 1970s, he was contracted by Fiat to capture shots of various models – or pin-ups – for the car manufacturer’s saucy annual calendar.
In 1973, Carlsberg, Denmark’s largest multinational brewer, launched its famous tagline, “Probably the best lager in the world.” The comically ambiguous line was conceived by the KMP advertising agency executive Tony Bodinetz. The night before a pitch, Bodinetz drafted some scripts to present to Carlsberg’s UK marketing team and ran the initial idea, “The best lager in the world,” by his business partner David McLaren.
McLaren prudently stated concerns related to false advertising. After sleeping on it, Bodinetz added the word ‘Probably’ to the line to conciliate his partner and, in the process, stumbled upon one of the most iconic marketing campaigns of all time. Needless to say, Carlsberg were enamoured with the line. In 1983, they commissioned Orson Welles to deliver a voiceover for a television advert, immortalising the line in pop culture history.
The shrewd line anchored its success counterintuitively in the ironic acceptance that it’s most definitely not the best lager in the world. The budget pilsner is of notably weak proofing; while it’s undoubtedly scarce among the fridge stock of the connoisseur, it’s eternally quaffable when served ice cold: the perfect companion to the budget barbecue.
The marketing campaign helped bring Carlsberg to the world, and by the early 1980s, Carlsberg enjoyed gainful business in most corners of the world. In 1988, Rej was commissioned by Carlsberg to use his photographic talent to consolidate the brewer’s global dominion.
Over two decades, Rej published more than 60 images as he traced the bold green Carlsberg lorry at multiple locations worldwide. As you can see in the collection of photographs below, Rej visited picturesque sites across all major continents, from the remote slopes of the Matterhorn to the Great Wall of China.
In 2011, the “Probably the best lager in the world” tagline was replaced in most regions by “That calls for a Carlsberg,” as executives sought to switch things up on the billboards. Thankfully, “probably” the best advertising slogan in the world lives on in Rej’s breathtaking archives.
