01
WHAT WE DID
It’s time to ‘burn your money’
BrewDog have reached a natural ceiling, a point where growth amongst core audiences of ‘punks’ buying and drinking the brand was reaching saturation point. It was time for James Watt to finally and famously ‘burn his money’. Luckily, he found a communications agency who can burn cash with incredible effectiveness. The challenge was as much about building a brave approach for a business owner who doubted the efficacy of advertising as it was driving awareness and tickling the tastebuds of a broader lager loving population. Delivered with a tight budget, late to market, in the busiest month of the year for beer and lager advertising.
01
WHAT WE DID
It’s time to ‘burn your money’
BrewDog have reached a natural ceiling, a point where growth amongst core audiences of ‘punks’ buying and drinking the brand was reaching saturation point. It was time for James Watt to finally and famously ‘burn his money’. Luckily, he found a communications agency who can burn cash with incredible effectiveness. The challenge was as much about building a brave approach for a business owner who doubted the efficacy of advertising as it was driving awareness and tickling the tastebuds of a broader lager loving population. Delivered with a tight budget, late to market, in the busiest month of
the year for beer and lager advertising.
Using media to generate unfair share of attention
Applying traditional big budget FMCG growth strategies, for a client with less than their fair share of budget, would not have worked. We would have ended up on dayparted digital outdoor, and filling the internet with more ‘content’. Instead by understanding the market we were entering, what impact the creative could have if media matched the creative ambition, and executing with a simple strategy we knew that we could generate an unfair share of attention. The brilliant creative by Uncommon Studios needed us to plan for NOTICE not reach. We planned to shrink the fight to tip the odds in our favour by acting in contrast to how 99% of other beer and lager brands behave but completely in line with how consumers watch TV and talk about their favourite content – we gave them something to talk about.
A punchy plan
It started with the creative. We saw it and knew it was too good to not be famous. Our rallying cry became ‘it only takes one TV spot to make you famous’. So, we bought 10, to make
sure, and a few buses and 1 big banner in Manchester. We focused on building up to the second bank holiday in May as driving trial here can lead to our beer appearing in more baskets across the summer and beyond. We aligned our TV plan with twitter data to show us which shows drive the most conversation, debate, shares and energy: ‘context-spots’ where our brand would fit in and the audience was spot on (Game of Thrones & Last Leg) but also ‘anti-context-spots’ (Love Island & First Dates) where the audience was what we wanted but our creative would rub up against what was being shown. This approach paid-off with our appearance in popular and appropriate TV driving a groundswell of online reaction. Our OOH approach followed our strategy of getting the brand NOTICED, we took one banner in the centre of Manchester and 10 buses snaking through the advertising and media villages of London.
The (unexpected) Results
Our plan worked: awareness and consideration as tracked via BrandIndex quadrupled amongst women, and beer and lager drinker/buyers. Ad awareness overtook that of Carling and Fosters both of whom had multi-million-pound campaigns live at the same time as us. Every one of our spots drove a torrent of online love and abuse that we lapped up. In almost all circumstances we were the only advert spoken about in the breaks we appeared in, let alone the show itself. The transmission of our TV ads correlated with huge spikes in sales of BrewDog shares – every time a spot went out, £000s of shares were sold within minutes.