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 them from going near or even using the words "Super Bowl".

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 racked up over 1 billion media impressions, made every Top Ten Super Bowl Ad list and increased sales by 8%.

To poke fun at the protracted rollout of most Big Game campaigns, we kicked things off ten days before the game with the teaser... for our trailer.

We released a "Behind the Scenes" video with Anna Kendrick, 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, and possibly the hardest I've ever laughed.)

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 expensive 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.