It’s Beer Day in Britain and to celebrate, we’ve selected 5 of our favourite campaigns that have made us fall in love with the category. Take a look.
We’ve got to start with a disclaimer: we love beer. We’ve written at length about it. So, we’d never miss an opportunity to celebrate Britain’s official Beer Day by raising a glass to some of our favourite campaigns for the category! Whether you’re a beer drinker of not, you have to admit that some of the best advertising and marketing campaigns have bene created by beer brands and their agencies. From Budweiser’s Wassup love-it-or-hate-it earworm ad in 1999, to Guinness’s recent pandemic masterpiece, there are hundreds of ads that have made us smile, laugh, start memes, and of course, motivated us to crack open a cold one.
Here are five of our favourites:
1. Binge buster: The Beer Cap Project
The toasting factor: Uncapping a clever concept and collaboration to achieve success.
The goal: curb binge drinking among youngsters. The solution: Aguila beers took their logo off their bottlecaps and replaced it with fast food and transport brands (like UberEats, Papa Johns, Uber, KFC and more) so people could exchange the caps for free food, water, or rides home during party hours. It started in Columbia, but now it has gone global and other drinks brands have joined the campaign.
2. Language lessons: Corona Limonada
The toasting factor: Translating a pop-up activation into widespread awareness.
To launch their new hard seltzer drink, Corona collaborated with Duolingo to set up a voice-activated vending machine on the Las Vegas Strip. If customers correctly asked for a hard seltzer in Spanish (Limonada), they earned a free drink sample. Those who didn’t get it right got a free subscription to language educator app Duolingo’s premium service.
3. Digital rounds: CUB and Virtual Asset Tokens
The toasting factor: Raising funds to keep bars alive using digital tokens.
During lockdown in Australia, Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) and the Australian Hotels Association (AHA) created the ‘For the Love of Your Local’ initiative to support local pubs. The campaign encouraged people to buy two-for-one beer vouchers while the bars were closed, so they could redeem them when the restrictions lifted. However, they needed help with a redemption system. We provided a cutting-edge digital solution that used Virtual Atoms to safely connect 30,000 beer lovers with over 2,000 venues across Australia in a digital-first, user-friendly way.
4. Winning serve: Stella Artois Vantage Point
The toasting factor: Rallying up engagement through smarter activations.
As a sponsor of Wimbledon, Stella Artois wanted to leverage more engagement in a bespoke 360-degree campaign that included OOH, press ads, digital content, social, PR, and experiential. The solution: creating an exclusive experience that merged entertainment, foodie culture and a slick space. The hero event took over Flat Iron Square in London Bridge for the two weeks of Wimbledon, and it hosted top chefs and food trucks for beer pairings in a beautiful walled garden. The strawberry on top of the cream: the alternative (and funny) commentary by Goran Ivanisevic and Matt Richardson.
5. Outdoors genius: Carlsberg’s Probably the Best Poster in the World
The toasting factor: Pouring brand love through OOO.
The best ideas are the simplest ones. This huge poster on a wall at The Truman Brewery in Shoreditch has a beer tap and glasses, and it let the public pour themselves a Carlsberg, wait for it, for free. The brands generosity lasted a day, and it earned long queues of punters along with massive amounts of social media love and free PR.
Wrapping things up…
Ready to pour success into your next campaign? Awesome, so are we! Let’s meet for a real or virtual coffee. We’ll help you harness tactical marketing to unlock higher ROI, and we can also add some high-tech firepower through the latest in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Virtual Asset Tokens (VATs), Augmented Reality (AR) and more. Ready for a live sample? Hit us up for a FREE Masterclass.