If We Made It
The Super Bowl is the biggest marketing event of the year for beer brands.
But Newcastle Brown Ale didn't have the millions needed to buy airtime.
And even if they did, a competitor's billion dollar exclusivity deal banned us from doing so.
So we decided to call bollocks on Super Bowl marketing hype altogether with a fully integrated campaign
about the epic Super Bowl ad we could have made if we had the money.
The campaign earned 1 billion media impressions, made every Super Bowl Top 10 list and lifted sales by 8%.
To poke fun at the protracted rollout of most Big Game campaigns, we kicked things off weeks before the game with the teaser... for our trailer.
We released a "Behind the Scenes" video with Anna Kendrick, the Oscar nominee who would've starred in our ad.
Then, we showed our storyboards to genuine focus groups and released this film of their genuinely confused reactions.
(Filming this was easily the most fun I've had in advertising. We laughed so hard, the two-way mirror started shaking.)
We tried to give every piece of the campaign our trademark "No Bollocks" honesty,
including this sponsored Gawker sponsored content.
Finally, after teasing our ad all week, we released the cheap storyboard we DID make for the pricey ad we didn't.
And our "cutting edge" app, the Beerplay Ad-caster, allowed people to watch our Super Bowl ad on TV.
Or rather, one of four TVs that possibly look like your TV.
On the night of the Super Bowl, we tweeted our own storyboard parodies of other brands' ads minutes after the real ads aired, showing other brands how we would've "fixed" each "big game ad" if we made it.
Here's our take on a Monster.com ad that featured a woman quitting her job on live TV.
Here's our version of GoDaddy's "Bodybuilders" ad. We even built inthetanningsalon.com.
Anyone who visited could tweet "I was intrigued at inthetanningsalon.com."
CD: Scott Bell
AD: Dan Kenneally
Cannes Lions
1 Gold, 4 Silver, 6 Bronze
One Show
2 Gold, 3 Silver, 2 Bronze
EFFIE Awards
3 Gold, 1 Silver
D&AD
Integrated Graphite, Earned Wood
Clio Awards
1 Gold, 1 Silver, 1 Bronze
ANDY Awards
Integrated Gold, Social Bronze
Facebook Studio Awards
Best in Show