What the hell does Dilly, Dilly actually mean?
By Josh Hill
It’s okay if you don’t know what ‘Dilly, Dilly’ means, but it’s time to catch up with the latest ad fad before it dies out.
Anyone above the age of 25 will probably remember the last big Budweiser ad campaign based around the Super Bowl. The early 2000s saw the birth of the ‘Wazzzup’ ads, which featured a bunch of guys just saying ‘Wazzzup’ to one another.
It was annoying, it was stupid, it was catchy as hell. It wasn’t that saying ‘Wazzup’ was any sort of groundbreaking addition to the lexicon, rather it was repetitive enough to get stuck in our heads. Hearing it said over and over again for weeks on end eventually bore the saying so deep into our subconscious that it was a thing.
If you either aren’t old enough to remember this or have blocked it from your memory, here is the ad:
That repetitiveness has paid off again for Bud Light in a big way with the ‘Dilly, Dilly’ ads. They’ve been playing all year long during games and thanks to hearing it for months on end, it’s had that perfect Pavlovian effect that ad agencies pine for when thinking of a campaign.
Dilly, Dilly doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s just a meaningless saying that is meant to be chanted in the pub by a bunch of drunk frat boys. This is the ‘Wazzup’ of this generation of Super Bowl ads, and there’s really nothing more to it.
You’ll hear it endlessly, but don’t feel bad if you’re lost when trying to figure out what it means.