Nothing beats sharing happiness. Free booze is definitely one way to deliver that happiness. Check out this billboard from Carlsberg. As simple as one could imagine, it literally offers the public free booze! Bring your own and have it filled to the max! Certainly not the most exciting idea in certain restrictive countries, but for those that worked, the value of excitement is truly unimaginable. Its gonna get busy on the streets for sure!
Payphone
People need to understand that for something really groundbreaking, it is not just injecting pure creativity, there is an imperative need for unconventional content. Heineken’s social experiment, ‘Routine Interruptions’ placed thousands of people in a dilemma, in a decision making scenario. And I like decision making scenarios. You get people all cold feet and under stress while they attempt to make a really scary decision. In this case, the answer to an ultimate night out is simply picking up the phone, mustering up the courage to do exactly what the caller says. People get really scared when they don’t know what unfolds and this level of suspense is what builds the plot for this campaign. Excellent work there, Heineken.
Are you watching the world cup?
Everyone’s has their eyes glued onto the world cup right now. Whats unfortunate is that the timings where it is aired is during the day and most people are actually slogging away at work. To make work entertaining, Heineken USA had a brilliant idea. They are proposing American bosses to select one of the games and actually permit their employees to enjoy those matches during work! Check out #BrazilianNoShow challenge. Nuno Teles, CMO of Heinken USA describes that taking part in the challenge might win you an ice cold chilling Heineken.
Every soldier deserves a hero’s welcome
More Budweiser stuffs. 6 million hits and running. I guess the idea of being there for you at the most intimate moments seem all too tempting for any big brand to leverage on. However, in doing so, evading the commercial element of it would seem highly impossible. Here we see a hero returning back to his hometown. He receives a great surprise from everyone back home. While the experience is usually ephemeral, Budweiser attempts to transform this occasion to a joyous one with a huge party installed for LT. Chuck Nadd. “Every soldier deserves a hero’s welcome”. Despite not eluding the fact that it is still a commercial selling beer, the softer side of the story brings us to a level where we question if advertising has an unconventional approach with lesser surfeit of hard selling details. Instead, it might just be more effective where emotions are involved.
“Let her go.”
A simple idea can spun into numerous creative denominations. Just like how a short and concise message, “Best Buddies”, could leave us in awe. Budweiser’s latest commercial, #BestBuds features a romantic friendship between two lovely animals. We see a little cute puppy getting adopted and how the puppy bids goodbye to the horse in the barn. Again and again, the dog comes back to the horse. Finally, it ends with a really nice heartwarming scene. I shall leave you with suspense, go watch this video.
Friday beer time
All of us look forward to friday. Nothing beats gulping ice cold beer down the pipe after a frantic week at work. What’s interesting is that I have came out with the idea of a ‘half-time’ beer for a lager client before, and how it would turn consumers into their brands in the different pubs and now, there is a friday beer. Generally, people tend to get influence into doing things when they get it into their system in a rather sub conscious manner. Here is a good example of how UK’s Deskbeers is leveraging on this psychological theory through their offering of local craft beer to offices on every Friday afternoon. They support local brewers by providing companies with great quality drinks and delivering them straight to the door step. The employees get a taste of a new beer every week. It could be ale, lager, stout or even the traditional bitter beer. Making the working environment a little bit more relax, this could actually be a great idea to get the bottles reaching out to the masses.
Heineken and it’s success
I have worked with several lager labels and time and again I was given a task that would pit against the brilliant branding efforts of Heineken. The truth is, many beer labels aspired and have taken Heineken’s branding innovations as a benchmark to challenge for. But in reality, Heineken has proven itself to be one that is not only very innovative, very alternative, very adroit, but very consumer driven. The key to it’s success is that it seldom pulls off it’s stunts based upon the traditional approach of passive brand persuasion. I would like to emphasis once again, that they take their consumers VERY seriously. Here are a few of the branding innovations Heineken adopted over the course of their campaign periods. Lately, their campaign, ‘Your Future Bottle Challenge’, would leverage on crowd-sourced content form fans all over the world to create the winning design for their future bottle. And the results of the winning design would be a fresh print on a limited edition packaging featured in 2014 to give the classic logo a new look. See? Once again, they placed their fans BEFORE everything else. Atop of all these, another winning formula to note is that the brand itself has a lot of collaborations with companies out there which allow their consumers to either benefit in terms of convenience or appeal to them in terms of visual aesthetics. I strongly believe to place your voice in the hearts of your consumers while constantly working with new partners to create innovative work is something that should be inherent in almost any successful brand strategy. Lastly, it is imperative to be innovative, constantly challenging what you have done before and making groundbreaking work through innovation and creativity.
Fire at the old well
One of the proven methods of advertising is to position a product desirability above everything else. Such a practice most often or not, leads to dramatic outcomes taken by the cast in the commercial to create an amusing and hilarious scenario. DB Export Gold recently launch a commercial by Colenso BBDO, with a man who consistently vanishes in a jiffy with the same excuse: “Theres fire at the old well!” We see a dog rushing up to him at every scenario and the calling was so great he had to remove himself from whichever situation he is in. At first, it might seem like he is really going off urgently, but the truth is revealed at the end of the commercial. He is seen dashing for that golden bottle of beer. I kinda love the suspense building part. Interesting way to position the desire element.
Uncompromising Quality
If you were to look back at the creative work that beer companies have done, you would be quite surprised that a lot of them pretty much have the appetite for rather interesting work. As creatives, we tend to jump with glee every time we get to work on such great accounts. Carlsberg has done up a commercial with a very single minded proposition: “Uncompromising Quality”, and I think this is such a marvelous headline. They bring the message across effectively by making sense of their heritage through this commercial. We see founder of Carlsberg, J.C. Jacobsen and his stringent quality control in his quest to brew the best beer in the world. The commercial gave the audience the impression of a man who is constantly in search of the most perfect solution. Nice commercial.
Take your time.
If you have seen enough of beer ads, you would have realize the abomination of these ads are the creation of bad scripts, dull storyline and the portrayal of lame male masculinity. While all these still holds true, there are exceptions. Amstel Lager created this TV spot that features quite an inspiring story of a chef on his stride to becoming a great chef. We see the huddles he overcame, the nights he had to burn and the long painful learning process which he endure through. The enervating transformation from a dishwasher to a chef illustrates the perpetual attitude of the male lead. Throughout the video, we see scenes where Amstel Lager is well celebrated. At the end of the commercial, the copy runs across: “Take your time. Slow brewed. Extra matured.” The commercial brings forth the message the importance of quality preceding quantity.
Zack Chia 