Just like our beer, we recorded an ‘uncomplicated’ take on Christmas for Carlton Dry in ‘It’s The Most Wonderful Time For A Beer’, which saw the release of our first ever hit song. The song was a spin-off of Andy Williams’ iconic Christmas classic, ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’, but its lyrics were completely rewritten to lament all things complicated come Christmas - from racist aunties to traffic jams in the carpark - positioning Carlton Dry as the perfect beer to uncomplicate it all.

Lyrics centred on Christmas complications, such as “There’ll be fights in the kitchen about politics and religion, oh god here comes your racist Aunty”.

The 2min 30sec song was released on Spotify, alongside full-length radio spots. This was all accompanied by a karaoke film (which was awarded the top-10 ads on YouTube Australia for 2019).

We knew we had to be strategic about our execution and media placements of the debut song release - so we decided to launch it primarily through Spotify, where it instantly infiltrated people’s Christmas playlists across Australia. We also delivered targeted outreach to radio hosts, resulted in the song being mentioned and played organically during a number of Drive and Morning shows, directing people to Spotify to hear the song in full. But we knew it couldn’t stop there, we also needed to give people a direct reason to buy a pack of Carlton Dry so we put codes on packs that could be scanned to stream our song on Spotify.

But there was more…we even turned our video buy into a karaoke film for the song, and manufactured slabs that sang the song when opened.

Christmas is not the most wonderful time of the year. It’s busy, it’s stressful, and it’s complicated. As a beer brand that prides itself on being uncomplicated, Carlton Dry decided to call BS on Christmas and all the complications that come with it.

To disrupt the typical flood of cheerful Christmas songs, we created our own brutally honest version of Andy Williams’ iconic “It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” - aptly titled “It’s The Most Wonderful Time For A Beer”.

We launched our campaign like you would a song, not like an ad campaign. As such, the media strategy had significant weight toward radio and Spotify. Working closely with radio stations, we negotiated innovative and unexpected 2:30 long radio ad spots to air our song in full.

We knew we had to be strategic about our execution and media placements of the debut song release - so we decided to launch it primarily through Spotify, where it instantly infiltrated people’s Christmas playlists across Australia. We also delivered targeted outreach to radio hosts, resulted in the song being mentioned and played organically during a number of Drive and Morning shows, directing people to Spotify to hear the song in full. But we knew it couldn’t stop there, we also needed to give people a direct reason to buy a pack of Carlton Dry so we put codes on packs that could be scanned to stream our song on Spotify.

But there was more…we even turned our video buy into a karaoke film for the song, and manufactured slabs that sang the song when opened.

he results speak for themselves spanning incredible reach, engagement and subsequent sales. ‘The Most Wonderful Time for a Beer’ managed 20,000 streams on Spotify in just four weeks, while the view through rate for the music video on YouTube was 47.11% - an engagement rate many brands would be envious of. But the outcome continued impress us and well and truly exceeded our expections. There was a 9% volume growth in Decemeber (compared to December 2018) and we managed a whopping $1.6m in earned media reach.

With 350,000 organic views our music video was also ranked in the top 10 Ads on YouTube Australia in 2019.

This is the kind of engagement money can’t buy.